I have been reading Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating to help my big kid with his eating issues. I love this book. It is so clearly respectful to the child and emphasizes all the reasons why it is important to lessen pressure around meal times and to trust that the child will explore new foods on their own timeline. I also live in the real world and understand that maintaining that trust is hard when you are facing a challenging eater, but the book helps me to at least wrap my mind around this philosophy so that I can really give it a shot. The thing I like the most about the book is that it makes me feel like the authors really see my child. I know that they are writing about a general category of kids, but the descriptions they use feel so vivid to our family's experience, that they might as well be sitting in my dining room.
Feeding therapy is going surprisingly well, actually. We are only five weeks in, and miraculously, every week my son has gained and kept up with one new food item! (Each week, we try about three new foods during the 45-minute feeding therapy session, so he is still rejecting plenty of foods. I feel that the feeding therapy was a very good decision on our part, and it has already moved us in the right direction, but it is clearly still necessary for him to continue the professional help.) I don't take this progress for granted, because I have read threads on different forums about picky eaters either trying a new food during the therapy session and then not keeping the food up at home, or picky eaters not trying any food at all per suggestions. One thing that has been very powerful for us in the therapy process is introducing new foods that are related to existing favorites. For example, last week we tried to introduce guacamole, immediately after my son ate some avocados. (If you are wondering why guacamole would be challenging for a child who eats avocados, this is what I am saying -- you and I are living two separate parenting realities. This is why I feel so supported and seen by this book, as a parent struggling with this issue.) My son ended up eating the entire serving of guacamole that day, even though initially he would not even touch it with his fingers. In the book I am reading, they describe this as a "bridging" strategy for connecting what the child already eats with what you would like them to eat. (They also offer other bridging strategies.) I used to think that you can just keep putting any food item in front of a child, and offer it enough times until they eventually try it. Now, I understand that for my son, at least, that strategy is very unlikely to work. He needs to be offered tiny little steps from where he is, to go all the way to the new food. It takes a lot of patience and forethought, but it seems to make a difference. For example, my son has been successfully eating small pieces of new (unfamiliar) cheeses tucked inside a tiny Cheezit cracker sandwich (2 crackers holding a piece of cheese in the middle), as a treat at the end of every lunch meal that I serve at home. He likes these fun / funny Cheezit "sandwiches," because he likes the cracker and he thinks that this way, he can't really taste the cheese. But, after eating the Cheezit sandwich for a few days in a row, I was able to convince him to open up the sandwich to eat the cheese on top of a single cracker (like an "open-faced sandwich"). This way, over time, I can change it up to put the cheese on more bland crackers, and -- tada! -- he will just be eating regular crackers with those new cheese varieties at that point. These are many tiny bridges, intentionally connecting where he started and where he needs to go as an eater. It sounds a little exhausting, perhaps, to think ahead this way, but trust me, it is way less exhausting than trying to deal with the emotional rollercoaster of a child who skips meals because they feel overwhelmed by everything on the table. I also feel incredibly grateful that we decided to get feeding help when we did, because I don't have actual caloric concerns at the moment for L, and I don't believe we have permanently damaged his relationship to food. I think ideally, we would have found feeding help even sooner, before L fell into the rhythm of being served a separate meal from us. But, when I read through the book Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating, I was affirmed that we did not do too many things to cause further food-related anxiety. (We only bargained with him minimally, and we never tried things like sticker charts or bribing with desserts.) We did start to go down the route of inviting conflict during meal times about two months ago, but stopped things from spiraling downhill when we sought help from a feeding specialist, and for that, I am so grateful. Related to this, I have been thinking about the parallels between family dinners and watching my child on the playground. I accompanied my other child (my toddler) to the playground today, and frankly felt a little disappointed, because most of the time at the playground, she was carrying two tiny pieces of fruit from a tree back and forth between two places on the playground. She only used the playground equipment minimally, which made me feel a bit like, "Okay, we could have just gone outside of our house, if she was going to just do this, instead of walking 20 minutes to get here?" Although I gently suggested a couple of times for her to play on the slide or the swing, I did not insist on her playing with anything. I did not tell her, "This is a waste of my time," or confront her with, "Why are you not interested in the equipment today? What's wrong with them?" If I did do that, I think it would have been very inappropriate. But, why do we feel like we should do that at meal time? In fact, we feel like it's our job to get our kids to eat "enough", and that if our kids decide to ignore meats for 6 months, that there is a real problem to fix, maybe through coercion. Maybe we feel like they need to eat because we spent so much time cooking the food, and what's wrong with this food anyway? --Today, on the playground, I was reflecting about how kids will be kids; thinking about the connection between trusting them to have autonomy on the playground and trusting them to make their decisions at the dinner table, helps me to refocus on why Division of Responsibility makes sense. I always think about how we, as people, have a hard time learning abstract things in a vacuum. It's hard to really teach a child about growth mindset, when they are not actively working through a challenge. It's hard to teach a child about compassion for others, if they rarely encounter people who are differently-abled or who are in a different socioeconomic situation. Likewise, I try to look at situations like the one we are in -- where we are trying to work with our son through something that is really tough for him -- and consider what insights we are gaining as parents, as we work through this challenge together. (I am pondering this from a parenting perspective, because I think it's a bit more obvious what my child is gaining from this? He is slowly gaining more confidence with food, which must indirectly impact other aspects of his confidence and self-perception.) I am still thinking about this, but I know that what we gain as parents has something to do with deeper trust, joy, empathy, and patience. Viewing through that lens, we are maybe exactly where we need to be in our journey to grow as parents.
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About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
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