Ask An Expert: How To Give Your Picky Eater More Healthy Foods
Eating healthily is becoming easier, as companies work tirelessly to produce nutritious alternatives to the greasy, sugary food that has America hooked. But no matter how many health foods pop up on the shelves, there will always be holdout consumers who are unwilling to make compromises on taste with the foods they insist on eating. If one of those holdouts is your own child, the struggle becomes all the more intense and frustrating for both parent and child.So how do you get your picky eater to pick better eats? We asked a Baltimore expert to help us make the choice.
Lucas Seipp-Williams & Richele Henry
Baltimore Health Coach
2906 Echodale Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21214
(443) 418-9534
www.baltimorehealthcoach.com
As a husband and wife team, Lucas Seipp-Williams and Richele Henry have supported hundreds of families to upgrade their nutrition and feeding habits. They met in nutrition school and have been practicing as Certified Health Coaches here in Baltimore for the past eight years. Lucas and Richele didn't discover these best practices on their own. They learned them from child nutrition leaders Ellyn Satter, author of "Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family," and Dr. Antonia Demas, PhD Creator of the Food is Elementary program and Director of Food Studies Institute. They highly recommend that every parent check out the research-based, tried-and-true methodologies of these two experts. If you want your child to happily eat more healthy foods, apply the following tips (along with a little patience, compassion and understanding) and you will get your wish.
Take The Pressure Off
Using pressure or force of any kind is ultimately counter-productive. Pressure feeding invites resistance and a power struggle while creating a negative association with food and feeding times. You might feel a sense of urgency, but don't force the issue. Keep in mind that a child might need to experience a new food (seeing, feeling, smelling, tasting) many times before she decides she likes it. Keep in mind that, although your child might be afraid of new foods, she wants to be like you and wants your approval. If you give her time and space, she will follow your lead. Assure your child that she will never be forced to eat anything or punished if she doesn't eat something. Make food a fun and pressure-free exploration. Your child will relax and become curious about new foods.
Enforce The "No Yuck" Rule
In exchange for the "pressure-free promise," request that your child agree to the "no yuck" rule. The "no yuck" rule means we agree to never making negative comments or gestures about foods. Explain to your child that food likes and dislikes are subjective and subject to change. Point out examples of foods the child once avoided but now enjoys. Model the "no yuck" rule and enforce it strictly. Teach your child neutral descriptive words to use instead of "yuck," such as bitter, sour, tart, salty, spicy, sweet, mushy, dry, etc. This empowers your child to share her honest opinion in a mature and accurate way that leaves the door open for a shift in preference. If a group of children are faced with a new food and one child says "Yum!," that leaves an impression on the others. If there is an absence of negative comments, the positive impressions are more likely to be passed from child to child.
Hands On
Once you have your child's trust and you have a neutral/positive setting for food exploration (free of power struggles and negative theatrics), get your child's hands on some healthy foods. Hands-on food experiences could be handling groceries, helping to prepare dinner, a cooking lesson, playing catch with veggies or creating edible art projects with ingredients. The more pressure-free touches the child gets, the less scary the food becomes.
Related: Five Healthy Foods For Your Brain
Multi-Sensory
During hands-on experiences with food, invite your child to use all her senses to investigate and experience. Find fun, pressure-free ways to encourage this, like putting foods in a paper bag and having the child guess what they are by touch or by smell. Continue to nurture your child's food vocabulary. Consider presenting foods from different cultures, along with stories about those cultures. History, mythology, language and cultural studies are all excellent mediums for engaging your child about whole foods.
Be The Change!
One of the most powerful ways to support your child to develop healthy eating habits is to be their best role model. Kids will most likely eat how you eat, rather than how you tell them to eat. How is your nutrition? Are you consistently eating healthy foods, the foods you want your kids to eat? When parents take on optimizing their nutrition, the whole family benefits!
Joel Furches is a freelance writer and researcher for The Examiner and Logos Software, and also manages his own catalog of writing on Hub Pages. Joel is on the board of directors for Ratio Christi. He has a bachelors in Psychology and a Masters in Education.
