I'm not a Mom, but a "Grandmother" who is taking care of my son's children while he works. I watch two of his six children who are still toddlers, the others either go to school or are cared for elsewhere. I have my concerns about the two that I watch. The 3-yr old is definitely presenting some autistic possibilities, i.e. cannot formulate a sentence or carry on a simple conversation, has trouble communicating, is obsessed with counting items, etc., the one I'm now concerned about is 2-yrs old and has a "FOOD" issue. Neither of my children did this, so it is not something I'm familiar with. Unlike you, I do not find "humor" in this. As described in the initial post, the child will take food in, chew it, then just sit there, or run around with food in their mouth, until they start drooling all over the place. Problem is, this child will not "spit it out" when asked to. If you try to force the food out of his mouth, he clamps down and will not let you scrape the food out of his mouth, usually. However, today, I did manage to accomplish this. I could not even believe how much food this child had packed in his mouth. Oh goodness! He held this food in his mouth for over 45 minutes before I forced him to dump it out. The problem at my son's house is, he's never forced the kids to continue to "sit" at the table until they are finished with their food. Many times, they are allowed to leave the table and go play, or watch TV and come back to eat. I disapprove of this behavior, but they are not my children, so I am forced to allow them to do as my son says. So now I have a drooling 2-yr old running around with his mouth packed with food. Offering a drink does not help. He will stand there and hold his drink cup and look at you like you're stupid; all the while, drool just pours out of his mouth. To me, this is really gross. I'm fairly upset with this, only because I do not understand it. I've never seen this with any child before. I'm trying to find answers because when I tried to bring up the issues about the 3-yr old being unable to articulate speech, I was highly chastised for trying to "interfere" in the upbringing of his children. So I don't dare bring up this issue. I just need to find a way to deal with it. Thanks for any input.