This week we had a teleclass* about living with picky eaters and some easy solutions to get them to drop the picky and just become eaters. The class was lead by Dina Rose,** a food sociologist and mom. If you missed the class, please feel free to listen in again here.
Here are some of the highlights from the class:
- The most important thing you can do to raise a healthy eater is to make the mind shift from nutrition to habits. It’s counterintuitive, but true. Nutrition is about food; habits are about behavior. If you want to change the way your child eats, you have to change the way you interact with your child around food. Identify the long term eating habits you want you child to foster and feed her to achieve them.
- Start a conversation with your child about eating. Don’t assume you know why your child is resistant to eating right. Some kids are picky because they like routine, some because they’re seeking control, and some are picky because they once ate something that was so gross they wanted to heave. Make it your mission to find out what is driving your child It’s only when you’re armed with this information that you’ll be able to pick an appropriate strategy for change. Then, when you’ve decided on a course of action, practice transparent parenting: tell your child exactly what you are going to do differently and what you hope the outcome will be.
- Create a SAFE Eating Zone. Look for all the ways in which your child feels pressure around eating and eliminate them. Pressure comes in many guises, but the most common way kids experience pressure is around portion size. Serve the smallest portion you can imagine and then invite your child to ask for more. When it comes to introducing new foods, reduce pressure by asking your child to taste, not to eat, the new food. Make sure the taste you provide is tiny (smaller than a pea) and after your child has tasted the new food, ask him to tell you what he thought. Don’t ask your child to eat any more of the new food. If he wants to eat it, he will ask for it.
- Build a foundation for new food acceptance using foods your child already enjoys. Consciously rotate through the foods you feed your child so he gets used to the idea of eating different foods on different days. Only put foods in the rotation that your child already likes and accepts. This isn’t the time to change what your child eats. It’s the time to change how your child eats.
- Train your child’s taste buds towards fresh foods. It’s not surprising that many kids reject fruits and vegetables—the typical “child-friendly” diet points their taste buds towards junk. Evaluate what your child eats most often from the perspective of taste and texture and then reduce how frequently she eats foods laden with sugar, salt and fat. Taste preferences are really a matter of math: the kinds of foods your child is exposed to the most are the kinds of foods she’ll like the most. It’s circular logic, but doesn’t it make sense?
- Move beyond “But…”. Every parent has something—an unwillingness to let her child experience hunger, a fear of conflict, the desire to “love” with food—that impacts how she feeds her children. Figure out what’s holding you back, and then move beyond it by picking a strategy for change that you can live with.
* babybites webinars and tele-classes are super easy to access – all you need is a computer for the webinars, and a phone for a teleclass! Watch or listen to them alone or together with your husband, partner, girlfriends, nanny, grandparents, etc. No limit to how many people can join you! So sit back, take a load off, grab that cup of coffee, and LEARN!
** Dina Rose, PhD is a food sociologist and mom. Her work has been featured on websites such as Babble.com, ZisBoomBah.com Work It Mom.com, and Great Parenting Practices.com and Dina has appeared on Good Parenting Radio, Baby and Toddler Instructions Radio, WFSB Better Connecticut, NBC Connecticut News Today, and inTreasure Coast Parenting, New Jersey Family Magazine, The Globe and Mail and The Hoboken Reporter.
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