The BEST advice on ‘picky eating’

Last week, I wrote about the five things most likely to drive the parent of a child with eating issues around the proverbial bend. If you haven’t already seen my list, take a deep breath, and click here. In the name of redressing the balance, here are my five favourite pieces of great advice, as shared by members of the facebook group Parenting Picky Eaters, which I run with feeding specialist, Simone Emery.

Trust your child

This is huge. I could write an entire book on trust alone. It may feel that you need to intervene; to direct your child’s eating and make sure that they have had what you consider to be ‘enough’, but the root to a happier relationship with food is to let your child make their own eating decisions. I’m not talking about cake for breakfast (although sometimes…why not?) but about trusting your child to eat as much or as little of the foods you have decided to serve at that meal or snack. This is in line with an approach to feeding called the Division of Responsibility, often abbreviated to DoR. You can read more about it at the Ellyn Satter Institute website.

Pay attention to their overall health rather than the quality or content of what they are eating

I am a huge believer in parental gut instinct. You know your child better than anyone and if you have a sense that they are not thriving, listen to this! Equally, if you have observed that they look well, they are sleeping well, their mood is generally fine and they have plenty of energy, listen to this too. It is very tempting to get bogged down in the details of their diet – the difference between what you wish they would eat and what they do eat. But if you assess their health based on diet alone, you may be missing the big picture. Of course, if you are worried about your child’s nutritional status, weight and growth, getting this checked by a professional is very important. Not least because if they are actually fine, you can relax.

Everyone sit down for dinner together

Sometimes, limited eating itself can be a barrier to family meals. It might feel like there is just no way your child will ever eat the foods you want to be eating, so you have an adult dinner when they are in bed. Try a self-service model where there is a range of foods on the table including the foods you want to eat and a couple of your child’s accepted foods. This is often called ‘family style’ serving. Not only will this approach lower anxiety, your child will get to learn from seeing you eating a varied diet, even if they are not ready to.

Focus on self-care

Feeling good about how you parent in relation to food is super important. It is also really hard. Try to move away from self-blame (it’s not your fault) and recognise the small steps. As the parent who contributed this advice pointed out, caring for a child with eating issues is stressful. Make sure you look after yourself – plan in some down time wherever possible, and remind yourself (and your partner if you have one) that you are doing a great job.

Prioritise the long term goals

I love this one. Prioritise your child’s long term relationship with food, not what they eat at that meal or that snack. This shift in mindset will free you from a need to pressure your child to eat. It will allow you to build that trust that I talked about. The short term ‘win’, where you coerce your child to take a bite to please you… to earn dessert… to be allowed to go out and play… is the enemy of progress when it comes to ‘picky eating’.

 

I’ve shared lots of links to other article in this post. Did you find these useful? I blog every week about helping children learn to eat a more varied diet. To make sure you never miss an article, I’d love to invite you to join my mailing list. At the moment, I’m giving away my ‘first step’ tool to everyone who signs up, as a bit of a welcome to my community. The tool is a one-page pdf which will help you figure out where to begin when it comes to helping your ‘picky eater’.