While there are only a small handful of studies out there about how to truely get kids to eat and fix picky eating habits, we do know certain things that do not work:
– Forcing, pushing, even just “encouraging” our kiddos to eat certain foods actually makes our children percieve those foods as less desireable and causes them to consume less of them
-Same findings in this study, although, try as I might I can’t find the actual study- just a few blogs and online journals talking about the study. Here is one of them.
– Giving rewards for trying new foods (such as tv time or dessert) also causes our children to see the new food as less desireable.
So if we can’t talk about these new foods and gently encourage our kids (ok, probably we aren’t always being exactly gentle about it anyways and we’re often far more than encouraging when we want them to try a bite of something healthy or new or even worse- something you just know they would love if they would just take a bite of it!) well, then what can we do????
For starters, take the battle away from the table. One of your best weapons–ok, now I’m just being dramatic– one of your best tools is found on your child’s book shelves. Children’s books are super helpful with teaching leasons, encourging desired behavior, and opening a discussion with your child. This is not groundbreaking stuff here. Stories have been used for years to help with maners, potty training, preparing for a new sibling, and even for talking about healthy eating. Books are fun and the focus is off of your child and on an imaginary character. It also provides a subtle social pressure without need for a real life friend to model the behavior you want: “Charlie and Lola ate a carrot, I wonder if you can too?” Addtionally, it increases your child’s exposure to that food so it’s not so new (and we know neophobia is a common issue around food- especially in toddlers).
If you’re not sure where to start, here is a list of books from the blog Delightful Children’s Books (which is great, by the way): 10 Children’s Books about Food. There are a bunch of great books listed and to add to that, I also like The Very Hungry Caterpillar (for young ones), Blueberries for Sal, and Stone Soup.
A nice use of these stories is to pick one you like, read it with your child a few times (at bedtime or wheneven you typically read books) then suggest an activity some other time that incorporates the food that was the focus in your book. I.e. If you read Stone Soup, make a soup with your child and really let her help prepare it (maybe not chopping with knives but they can probably successfully wash veggies, pour broth into a pot, add pre-measured spices, and stir it all up before you put it on the stove, etc.) Talk about the story, your own experiences, what you think it might taste like, who you may share it with. When it is ready, let your child help serve it if you think this can be done safely. Let your child brag about making it with you to whoever is around to listen. Even better, take some picutres of you guys making it, serving it, and tasting it, for showing to friends or printing to make your own “book.” In this scenario, not only does the reading help to encourage trying new foods, but research has also shown that kids who help in the kitchen are more likely to eat the items they helped prepare! Win-win!
Let me know if you have any favorite kids books about food. I’m always looking for good ones.
Monthly Archives: April 2013
10 Tips for Transitioning from Bottle to Cup
Here are the 10 Tips for Transitioning from Bottles to Cup:
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4. Consider trialling a few different types of cups. Lidded cups are awesome, of course, to prevent spills but that doesn’t automatically mean a sippy cup. You can try straw cups or sports tops too, even at 6-7 months. I prefer these to a standard “sippy” cup because sippy cups are a short-lived solution–a stepping stone–until you move on to an adult type cup (standard cup, a straw cup, or a sports bottle.) If you’re brave, forgo the lids right from the beginning in favor of an open cup or even a nosey cup (also called cutout cup, which has a cutout so your babe doesn’t have to tilt his head back to take a drink.) Either way, with a few different options, you should hit on at least one that your child has more aptitude for or more interest in.
5. Don’t push it. Have the cup of choice out at meals and let her play with it and drink as she wants. Let her reach for it and initiate. Once she does, feel free to help her manage it.
6. Try offering both water and milk (or formula) in the cup of choice so your child get used to the idea that many different drinks can be in a cup.
7. If you’re trying a sippy cup:
8. If you’re trying a straw cup:
9. Once he gets the hang of a certain cup, start increasing the amount of milk he takes from this cup or even offer a full feed once per day in that cup. You can hold your baby as you would if you were going to give a botle, or if he doesn’t seem to mind, let him sit up and drink. Meanwhile, reduce the bottle feeds by 1 feed per week. (If your child is a rock star, you can go at a faster pace than this, but this gives plenty of time to adjust.) If you your baby is under 12 months and you are breastfeeding, wean out one breastfeed per week but pump to give that milk in a cup, or just stick to water in cup, milk from breast until your’re ready to wean. If your baby is over a year and you’re ready to wean, wean out one breastfeed per week and replace with whichever milk you are using (cow, sheep, rice, almond, etc.)
10. As you get down to only 1 or 2 bottles of milk, if your baby/toddler is still super attached to the bottle of milk, consider adding small amounts of water to the milk that’s in the bottle, little by little to make it less desirable. Concurrently, give her the regular milk only in a cup. This should be enough encouragement to get her to make the switch.
Baby Led Weaning In Action!
Celebrate Nursing in Public!
I wanted to share this link to a great article about nursing practices in Mongolia. I loved this article written by a woman who raised her son in Mongolia, on breastfeeding practices there. It is interesting, very funny, and a bit shocking. But overall it’s just fabulous and it makes me proud to be a breastfeeding supporter and current nursing mama.
From the time Calum was four months old until he was three years old, wherever I went, I heard the same thing over and over again: “Breastfeeding is the best thing for your baby, the best thing for you.” The constant approval made me feel that I was doing something important that mattered to everyone- exactly the kind of public applause every new mother needs.
7 Tips to Improve Meals Out with Your Baby
Here are my tips for eating out with your baby (6-12 month old.) Some of this may seem obvious to you impressive parents out there. But, some of us are a little slower on the draw. For us newbies, and for those who agree that brain power is hard to come by first thing in the morning before we’ve had our coffees- here are my insights. Will these work for every person, every time. Nope. If your baby has an ear infection or is crazy tired, or just having a super fussy day, maybe just skip the meal out today. But these tips are a pretty sure bet in most circumstances with a healthy baby
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3. Wear a teething necklace. A necklace also serves as an easy toy in a pinch and this one in particular, I love:
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6. Order something that your baby can self-feed. This is probably the most important tip. I can’t stress this one enough. This frees you up in a few ways- allows you to not have to pack and bring extra food for your baby, engages your baby and keeps them distracted and quiet at the table, helps them to stay seated in their highchair while the food is being served, and allows you and your partner to enjoy your own meal without having to directly feed your child. So, instead of bringing separate food for your child or ordering them a separate meal, just share. Pretty much every child is more motivated to eat what you are eating and will want what you have anyways. Just about every restaurant has something on the menu that you and your baby will both enjoy, just keep your child’s skills and interests in mind as you order. This can be purees if you’re giving purees (you just have to be ok with giving up the spoon to let your child “feed” herself) but I think works even better with table foods, which can safely be done as early as 6 months old. For example, my husband and I both ordered our favorite meals (his: eggs benedict with roasted potatoes and mine: french toast with citrus banana caramel topping- yum!!) Lucy is 7 months old and she has no teeth. She’s just learning how to chew and mostly she mouths things and sucks on them. I gave her strips of my french toast, cut up bits of banana, and large pieces of roasted potato. She LOVED the strips of french toast I gave her and spent at least 10 minutes picking them up, sucking them, mashing them, and exploring them. If I was concerned she couldn’t handle the texture, or large chunks, I could have given mashed up bananas but this approach works best when she can pick up an item herself and attempt to self-feed. We also gave her a few of the larger pieces of roasted potatoes, which she could grab and hold to suck and munch on. Again, this is key. Pieces that she can hold and munch or suck on kept her busy for the entire duration of the meal, which allowed us to chat, eat, and generally enjoy ourselves without having to have one parent feed while the other scarfs, then switch off and have one parent hold/walk/distract while the other scarfs. It was awesome to have all three of us enjoying our meal at the same time. By the time my husband and I were done with our meals, Lucy was just starting to get tired of going after pieces of food so we all wrapped up around the same time.
Food Is for Fun Until Age 1!
So what does motivate babies to eat and what do we do with our babies between now and a year to encourage strong eating habits? For starters, we model. We let our babies watch us eat and we eat as large a variety of foods as we can to show them that food is safe and delicious and wonderful. Babies want whatever we have. They want to do whatever we are doing, so modeling the behavior and skills you want them to have is key to setting up life-long positive eating habits. At the same time, we safely and slowly help them work on improving their oral motor skills and adjust to new oral sensory experiences by giving them real food- bites of the same foods we eat (see Baby Led Weaning for more in depth info on what this looks like). Yes, there are some foods that we eat that our baby can’t/shouldn’t have (ie- honey, raw nuts, super salty foods). But on the whole from 6 months on, our babies can usually have al least a part of almost everything we eat. (Having chicken and roasted veggies? Your baby can munch on small pieces of chicken or hold and gnaw on most roasted veggies). Yes, you will need to provide very close supervision- but who let’s their 6 month old eat without supervison? And, yes, giving them some of your food can be really tough to watch because most babies can’t really chew and swallow very much (if any at all) of the foods we normally eat. It can feel like it’s not working because they didn’t really swallow anything! But then we remember that they are getting everything they need from our milk and formula and we recall that “food is for fun until age one!” and it helps us relax. When we relax, it’s easier to see that, in fact our baby learned way more about food and eating when given regular food. They are doing exactly what they should be doing- mouthing, tasting, exploring, moving their muscles, and learning from each mouthful…but not necessarily swallowing. And when we relax, they do too. Then they can enjoy the exploration and that’s the best way for them to learn.
The Problem with Purees
The oral motor/oral exploration problem with purees: Around 6 months, babies are used to using a sucking pattern to eat. They are used to liquids and they cup their tongue and then move it forward and backward, not so much side to side. Purees fit perfectly within that model of oral motor patterns…but they do not challenge those patterns to progress very much at all. That is a problem, because our babies are already very good at those patterns and we want them to get better at more mature patterns (tongue lateralization, rotary chewing, bolus formation). At 6-8 months, babies have very nice protection against choking (very anterior gag reflex, tongue protrusion movements, small tight spaces that make it very difficult for chunks of food to move backwards, etc.) so it’s a great time to help them practice and learn more mature oral motor patterns. At 6-8 months, babies also have immature fine motor skills that make it more challenging to put small choking hazards in their mouth. When we give purees for a few months, we do not encourage new patterns, and instead we let our babies grow out of the phase when they have nice protection against choking, then we challenge them to work on more difficult foods. This is completly backwards to me. This poor building of oral motor patterns I believe is a huge part of later picky eating. I can’t tell you how often I see toddlers who are very picky eaters, who, when I look closer at their oral motor skills, are not able to manage resistive and mixed textures with well coordinated oral motor patterns. So they just don’t! It’s very smart of them, really. They know those foods do not feel safe (raw or even partially cooked veggies for example can be very resistive and fiborous, which makes them difficult to swallow safely unless you have solid oral motor skills.) Parents just assume that because their child is now 2 or 3 and they can chew things like chips, that their child has strong oral motor skills. But this just isn’t the case (chips are pretty easy to chew and break down) and their child is being picky about which foods he or she will eat in part because of that lack of coordinated motor skills. Getting in there early to teach the foundational skills of eating solids will help your child feel safe with eating a variety of foods. Eating purees will not help with this. Delaying true “solids” past 8 months will only make it more difficult for your child to learn these skills.
The progression problem with purees: Lastly, when you are giving only purees from 6-8 months, how and when to do you advance to more solid foods? I see situations all the time where parents have no idea how to get out of the puree pattern and are scared to progress so they just don’t until the child is a year or beyond. Or they start true “solids” around 8 months but they have no idea what to give so they over challenge. When you only give purees you have no idea what your baby’s oral motor patterns look like and you really don’t get any good feedback about what solid foods would be good to advance towards. You also don’t really know which foods your child likes- we so seldom eat just one food at a time (ie- we don’t often eat just kidney beans, we eat chilli, or broccoli as part of a casserole, not just plain broccoli) and parents have no clue which combinations of foods their kids will accept or like after several months of just purees. Additionally, by 8 months a fine pincer grasp has developed (or is emerging) and your child can easily pick up choking-hazard-sized pieces and quickly put them in his mouth. He is also much faster than a 6 month old at grabbing large amounts of food and shoveling it into his mouth and since he hasn’t been practicing for the last 2 months, his mouth will be less likely to have the motor patterns ready to protect his airway from choking. 6 month olds defintely grab handfuls and over-stuff their mouths, don’t get me wrong. But again, they are a bit slower at it, a bit less coordinated and less able to pick up small choking-hazard-sized peices, which gives you more time to help or stop them when you start at 6 months vs 8 months. It also helps them learn early on not to do this, so that by the time they are a bit older and you are giving more resistive foods in larger quantities, they have the ability to manage them safetly.
First Foods
People keep asking me what I’m going to give Birdie for her first foods. This seems like a loaded question to me- I get the feeling people want me to answer either “rice cereal” or “apple sauce” or maybe even “avocado.” I just keep thinking, “I have no idea what I’ll be having for lunch or dinner the day that Birdie chooses to reach out and grab some foods off the table” and “I don’t really know which of those first foods I give her that she’ll actually swallow.”
I’m a big believer in the phrase “food is for fun until age one” and utilizing the oral motor skills that are inherent to a 6 months old (tongue thrust, phasic bite, tongue lateralization) to taste and explore solid foods without actually swallowing them. When you give purees, the goal is generally to get them swallowed, vs just letting your baby taste and explore, then spit out. That can be very difficult on babies at first (though of course some do phenomenally with this from the get go!) But since time allows the gut to keep maturing and also allows practice to build well coordinated oral motor skills, I like the idea of letting her mouth foods before asking her to swallow them in any quantity.
So I will most likely stick with foods that are easily held and easily mouthed: long “sticks” of food or big pieces of mashable foods. She can taste, suck, and gnaw on them until she eventually drops them, pushes them back out or even gag them out of her mouth. I will definitely edit what I let her put in her mouth- avoiding things that are true choking hazards (small, hard, round food items) as well as things that are heavily salted or sugary, but I don’t plan on choosing a specific food right now. I think I will just pull whatever is most appropriate from my plate and give her the chance to pick it up and feed herself if she can. At the suggestion of a nutritionist I met, I might try to steer her towards green and yellow veggies, the seasonal ones I get in my CSA delivery and am preparing anyways for my husband and I, because green and yellow veggies do not spike your blood sugar and are low on the glycemic index. Maybe green beans or roasted squash? But possibly not- maybe lentils or humus? Maybe scrambled eggs? Possibly a carrot stick or zucchini slice that she can mouth? (I don’t have any history of allergies, nor does my husband and since Birdie will be 6 months, I am not terribly worried about allergic reactions.) We’ll see if my mind changes over the next few weeks.
What were your baby’s “first foods?” Any thoughts on purees vs “table foods” as your baby’s firsts? This is my nephew enjoying some of his firsts: spinach and crackers. This boy can eat!
Introducing Solids: Waiting until 6 Months
My little lady is 5 months old this week and I’ve been thinking of her readiness to begin eating solid foods. At this point I am still exclusively breastfeeding, as per the AAP recommendation and despite some advice (some from friends and some from medical personnel) that solids should be introduced at 4 months or even earlier. When I look at the research, the benefits of waiting to introduce solids until around 6 months is compelling. I like the idea of my Birdie having a decreased risk of obesity later in life (and her avoiding all the co-morbidities that walk hand-in-hand with obesity). I also feel since we know the gut matures and produces additional enzymes to aid digestion and nutrient absorption when baby is somewhere between 4 to 6 months (though we can’t tell where between 4 to 6 months from baby to baby), I’d rather error on the side of caution and wait until I know for sure my Birdie’s intestines are nice and mature.
There are many other suggested and probable benefits to waiting until closer to 6 months (possible decrease in allergies, less anemia, continued maximum protection from illness conferred by large amounts of my milk) but the other benefit that I feel strongly about is that at 6 months, my baby has much more control of her arms, hands, and mouth. As a therapist, I find this reason to be one of the most compelling, since I know from my schooling as well as from 8 years of direct work with infants and toddlers that they are inherent learners and explorers. They are highly motivated to learn a new skill and to master that skill. Conversely they get indignant when you try to “force” them to do it your way (anyone tried to make a baby eat or sleep when they don’t want to knows that you’d have more luck trying to persuade a dictator to relinquish their power).
Somewhere around 4 and a half months, Birdie started to show that increased coordination in her hands and mouth and has therefore started putting everything she comes across in her fists, then into her mouth. As her coordination improves it will become easier and easier for her to feed herself small bits of actual food when she gets closer to 6 months. That way, when we give her the opportunity, she will be able to do it herself (obviously with close supervision) and will develop a drive to try new foods, as well as to learn to manipulate small objects in her fingers, just as she has a drive to learn to crawl and sit up. I won’t have to battle with her to try to get spoonfuls of pureed up food in her mouth, nor will I have to take the time to puree up all our food. I should be able to offer her small amounts of the foods we eat, directly from my our meal, that are suitable for her. Additionally, since her lips/tongue/swallow will be more mature, there is less risk of her choking on these small bits of soft foods than she has if I let her do this now by putting these bits of food in her mouth for her. So my goal over then next month, is to take advantage of her budding interest in what my husband and I are eating to teach her about variety of foods and to set a good example of healthy eating (since I also know from experience and schooling) that babies and toddlers want to do and be just like mommy and daddy. So bring on the fruits, vegetables, and healthy food choices in my day to day life!