10 Tips to Help Picky Eaters Accept New Foods: Part 2

In last week’s blog (Part 1), I shared the sensory steps that kids often go through when learning to accept a new food. Your child may not be ready to chew and swallow a new food; however, he/she may be comfortable looking, squishing, smelling, or kissing the food. In time, he/she will work toward food acceptance, at his/her own pace.

Parents and kids both have jobs at mealtimes:

Ellyn Satter is a renowned Registered Dietician who termed the “Division of Responsibility” or Golden Rule in feeding: Adults decide what food is served, when it is served, and where. The child decides how much to eat, and whether to eat at all.  I highly recommend her website (link in references below) and resources. I often share Ellyn’s golden rule as a handout with the families I work with and I ask them to post-in on their fridge as a daily reminder: 

10 Tips to Help Parents with their Feeding Job:

1. Family Meals

• Family meals offer social and communication time
• Learning opportunities about family foods and positive role-modeling

2. Regular Meal-Snack-Meal-Snack-Meal Schedule

• Allow 3-4 hours between meals for appetite development
• Avoid grazing throughout the day will help with growth 
• Monitor the length of meals (20-30 minutes for meals and 10-15 minutes for snacks)

3. Liquid Intake

• Limit juice intake to 4-6 ounces per day to allow appetite for food
• For children over age 1, limit milk to 2-cups (approximately 16 ounces) per day.
• Offer milk after meals vs. before meals.

4. Food exploration/play and repeated exposure to new foods

• Play with food! Have fun with food!
• Present new foods for learning during mealtimes once the food has become more familiar. New foods could be presented on a separate or divided plate at mealtimes until your child is comfortable with the foods on his/her plate
• Follow the 75-25 rule (75% of the plate familiar foods: 25% of the plate new foods)

5. Food chaining = making very small (teeny tiny) changes to existing food preferences

• Start small (the changes should not be noticed by your child)
• Hold any changes for 1-2 weeks then gradually increase
• Make one change at a time

6. Respect your child’s feeding and hunger cues

• It's normal for your child’s caloric intake to vary from meal to meal.
• It’s important to let children learn to follow their own hunger/satiety cues.
• As adults, we don’t eat the same amount every day and every meal. This applies to children too.

7. Feeling Safe and Building Trust

• Ongoing mealtime power struggles can actually contribute to picky eating and food refusal. Pressuring kids to eat is often unintentional, but it can lead to reducing a child’s likelihood to eat
• Successful mealtimes are built on trust
• Avoid tricking, pushing, or forcing at mealtimes
• Allow your child to get the food out of her mouth or off of her plate (e.g., using an “all-done bowl”)

8. Involvement in mealtime process

• Encourage your child to help set the table or serve foods to others
• Cook together or ask you child to help with food preparation (e.g., stirring, sprinkling, chopping, serving food to others)
• Allow your child to have some control by offering a choice between 2 acceptable foods

9. Novelty

• Offer foods in courses to maintain interest in the meal vs all foods at once
• Look for fun feeding utensils/plates
• Fun food presentation on the plate (e.g., clown face, train, etc.)

10. Use of appropriate distractions

• Try to incorporate food or mealtime-related distractions (e.g., their own bowl and spoon)
• YOU can be a fun distraction! Talk about something at mealtimes other than the food and eating (e.g., going to the park, Peppa Pig, a friend from school).

If you’re feeling too stressed, try to walk away and take a break. Research shows that pressuring, forcing, and bribing kids to eat does not work. Seek help from a professional if you are facing feeding challenges. Things can significantly improve with intervention.

References:

The Ellyn Satter Institute: https://www.ellynsatterinstitute.org/