I saw this book Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating: A Step-by-Step Guide for Overcoming Selective Eating, Food Aversion, and Feeding Disorders for the first time on Amazon.com a few weeks ago. It's a new book, out this spring, and I really had high hopes for it. You know how it goes: the higher your expectations, the more disappointed you will be.
Sure enough, I was disappointed. It really didn't have anything new that I haven't already read many years ago when I read How to Get Your Kid to Eat: But Not Too Much by Ellyn Satter. I read it when my oldest (now 25) was a few years old and it was helpful to me as I raised my children. It is a really good book and it reinforced ideas I already had. My mother had instilled good eating habits into me that I just passed on to my children. We ate at regular times (she always cooked breakfast and dinner and made our lunches for school), she wouldn't let us ruin our appetites with a snack right before, and she did not cater to our likes and dislikes. If we didn't like what we were having, we would just have to wait until the next meal. And there wasn't much snack food sitting around to fill us up if we bypassed dinner. That is the basic message of these books: Don't let your child, even your extreme picky eater, do whatever they want in order to get the food they want.
There are some concessions--serve a "safe" food at every meal, or in other words, a food that your picky eater feels comfortable eating. Also, don't pressure your child to eat. Their job is to decide how much and which foods while you decide what to serve and when to serve it. Mealtime should be enjoyable for everyone and pressuring your child to eat will not be enjoyable. Make dessert part of the meal so it's not the reward. Don't label "good" foods and "bad" foods. It's okay to use ketchup and other condiments to help your child eat. Eventually as you stop the pressure and model eating for enjoyment, your picky eater will come around.
These are definitely good messages to hear and share with parents. But we already do that (for the most part) at our house! I have detailed some of the problems my youngest two girls have with eating on this blog. It can be frustrating that Mindy is still at the very bottom of the growth curve and that Camille still has a feeding tube. So I was hopeful that maybe this book would have some new ideas for me--especially with a subtitle like Overcoming Selective Eating, Food Aversion and Feeding Disorders. Sadly, no. So we'll just keep on doing what we're doing and hopefully we will get there eventually.
Sure enough, I was disappointed. It really didn't have anything new that I haven't already read many years ago when I read How to Get Your Kid to Eat: But Not Too Much by Ellyn Satter. I read it when my oldest (now 25) was a few years old and it was helpful to me as I raised my children. It is a really good book and it reinforced ideas I already had. My mother had instilled good eating habits into me that I just passed on to my children. We ate at regular times (she always cooked breakfast and dinner and made our lunches for school), she wouldn't let us ruin our appetites with a snack right before, and she did not cater to our likes and dislikes. If we didn't like what we were having, we would just have to wait until the next meal. And there wasn't much snack food sitting around to fill us up if we bypassed dinner. That is the basic message of these books: Don't let your child, even your extreme picky eater, do whatever they want in order to get the food they want.
There are some concessions--serve a "safe" food at every meal, or in other words, a food that your picky eater feels comfortable eating. Also, don't pressure your child to eat. Their job is to decide how much and which foods while you decide what to serve and when to serve it. Mealtime should be enjoyable for everyone and pressuring your child to eat will not be enjoyable. Make dessert part of the meal so it's not the reward. Don't label "good" foods and "bad" foods. It's okay to use ketchup and other condiments to help your child eat. Eventually as you stop the pressure and model eating for enjoyment, your picky eater will come around.
These are definitely good messages to hear and share with parents. But we already do that (for the most part) at our house! I have detailed some of the problems my youngest two girls have with eating on this blog. It can be frustrating that Mindy is still at the very bottom of the growth curve and that Camille still has a feeding tube. So I was hopeful that maybe this book would have some new ideas for me--especially with a subtitle like Overcoming Selective Eating, Food Aversion and Feeding Disorders. Sadly, no. So we'll just keep on doing what we're doing and hopefully we will get there eventually.
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