This post addresses common feeding challenges and offers practical solutions for your child. Some of the greatest family and social eating challenges involve the “picky eating” habits of children with sensory issues with certain textures, shapes, flavors, smells or even colors of food.
Many children these days have selective eating patterns. It’s important to help your child eat a varied, nutrient-dense diet and enjoy it, too! The more diverse your child’s whole-food nutritional palette, the better their lifelong health outcomes will be across the board, in great part because of the beneficial impact of different plant foods on the microbiota, which impacts every area of health and functioning. However, supporting this varied palette might require some creativity and patience on your part!
Typically, the most pronounced picky eating patterns appear in children with special needs, such as autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, and sensory processing disorder. To make matters more challenging, these children have special nutritional needs that make their parents and provider teams especially eager to feed them a nutrient-dense diet.
Don’t get me wrong – many kids with ASD, ADHD, and SPD have no eating issues, and many neurotypical kids have very restrictive eating patterns. We are all individuals, and even if your child has a diagnosed condition, they are unique in their personality, habits, and needs.
Read on to learn what you can do to nourish your child’s physical, emotional, and cognitive development while dealing with any of your child’s specific food attachments or aversions that may be getting in the way of success.
Setting up a supportive, food-positive framework
Most parents are really eager to nourish their children, yet feel caught in the clutches of an eternal power struggle, which can get very emotionally intense very fast.
The first thing I tell parents is that there are four ingredients they must avoid at all costs: guilt, fear, worry and shame. Everything else is negotiable unless the child has a significant intolerance or allergy to a particular food or an autoimmune or neuropsychiatric condition that is triggered by specific food components. This is the starting point. Only when there is a strong emotional foundation can we really work on the deeper changes.
Start where you are, and take little steps
From there, I encourage the parents to start making nutritional changes using their child’s current diet as a starting point, no matter how different it may look from the diet they would like their child to be on. There is time to take gentle steps. Below I offer some practical suggestions for parents and caregivers.
While on this journey toward improved nutrition, I urge parents to remember that any step in the right direction, no matter how small, is a big achievement and that they should give themselves, their child and their family all the credit they can. It’s easier to celebrate little achievements when the goal is steady improvement rather than perfection.
Feeding Trust
The focus here is building a foundation of mutual trust. Without trust, food isn’t nourishment. With small steps in the right direction and with the proper individualized guidance to achieve results, you can effectively nourish and nurture your child with every bite of every meal.
In fact, I work with my parents to help gently change children’s taste buds and sensory perception over time, making the transition to one of these special diets easier and more sustainable over time.
Understanding root causes can help solve problems
Some of the questions I address in the process of investigating the factor(s) that may be causing the child’s symptom pattern and the picky eating and what, consequently, can help clear it are:
- Are there any allergies or sensitivities to food, home/body care products or environmental stimuli?
- Has your child been exposed to toxins that the body is trying to clear through the skin and other organs of elimination?
- What nutrients are missing from your child’s diet?
- Are functional deficiencies in digestion and absorption preventing the body from using nutrients present in the diet?
- Which imbalances affect the intestinal microbiota (the mix of microorganisms living in the gut, responsible for helping proper digestion, absorption, immunity and metabolism)?
In fact, a very significant cause of picky eating patterns in children with autism spectrum disorder, sensory processing disorder, ADHD and related conditions has to do with an imbalance in the gut flora, with overgrowth of unfriendly bacteria and yeasts changing the child’s experience of taste and texture, along with cravings for the very foods that will keep feeding the unwanted overgrowth of unfriendly microorganisms, which in turn perpetuate the child’s digestive, emotional, developmental and behavioral symptoms. It’s fascinating to see research that shows that our microbiota impacts personality.
Cravings and aversions
Common cravings driven by an imbalance in the gut flora are for foods high in sugar, gluten, dairy, processed flour and other starches. Less common ones are also possible. A couple of parents have told me that their children would only eat meat, and one mother said her son went through a phase where he would only eat gazpacho!
In addition to specific cravings, we often see aversions. Some children love crunchy foods. Others really dislike them because they have an auditory processing issue that makes the crunching sound seem painfully loud as they chew. I remind parents to be patient with their child’s texture and taste aversions and to remember that this is hard for them, too. Reach out to a pediatric occupational therapist before things spiral into a power struggle.
Mineral imbalance
Mineral deficiencies and imbalances can definitely turn up and can be driven by heavy metal toxicity resulting from a combination of genetic susceptibility and exposures, whether known or unknown, that deplete the body’s stores of essential minerals (and vitamin co-factors) while competing with needed minerals at the binding sites in the cell. Make sure you learn more about my approach to mineral balancing here!
Q: My two-year-old hardly drinks water between meals but drinks a whole bottle of water with meals. How can I help my child balance her water intake throughout the day?
Try to make drinking water outside of meals into a game and something you do together enjoyably. For children who struggle to drink water, the first thing to try is different types of spring water, bottled in glass. Some children have a very strong sense of taste and texture perception that can make some types of water taste awful, but others very good. Also, your child may be sensitive to the taste water takes on depending on their cup (plastic and metal being notorious) and even residue from dishwashing detergent, so try serving nice-tasting spring water in a freshly rinsed non-plastic and non-metal cup or mug.
If that’s not enough, you can add a squeeze of lemon, try sparkling spring water (Gerolsteiner, San Pellegrino, etc.), with a squeeze of lemon and lime and perhaps a little electrolyte mix. In the summer, cucumber-infused, watermelon-infused, berry-infused, and garden-herb-infused water can be quite nice too. Sometimes when children and/or adults don’t desire water outside of meals, it’s because the water doesn’t meet their electrolyte/mineral needs – hence these recommendations.
Don’t worry too much about the water she’s drinking with meals, but focus more on getting him to enjoy drinking between meals, which will eventually reduce what she drinks with food.
Q: My three-year-old child doesn’t chew his food well. What can we do to help set an example without nagging and making the meal a drag?
Getting small children to slow down and chew their food well can be a bit of a process. I’d make it fun and do it along with him (sitting in front of him so you can see each other and mirror each other). One tip that has worked for many of my clients (and my son when he was around this age) was changing the words to the “row, row, row your boat” song as follows: “Chew, chew, chew your food/ gently in your mouth/ Thoroughly, thoroughly, thoroughly/ digestion’s north to south.”
Even if some of the words may be a little big for your child’s current age and stage, this little song gets the whole family to slow down and chew better.
Another strategy you can use is setting goals to change the food’s texture. Say you’re eating a dish with lamb, lentils and beets. Announce the family challenge to chew the food until it becomes “yogurt” or something else he associates with a liquid, creamy texture.
Putting it all together: some practical tips
- Add new foods to your child’s diet before taking anything away.
- Use homemade meat stock as a base for grain-based dishes, stews and casseroles. Start by replacing a small amount of the cooking water with stock and increase over time.
- Try adding sauerkraut juice, beet kvass or chickpea, adzuki bean, cannellini bean or lentil miso to soups, casseroles, or even grain dishes, if your child doesn’t like soup. Add to warm, not boiling, foods and start with just a smidge. Increase gradually over time to let your child’s taste buds get used to the change gently.
- Homemade pancakes are a great way for your child to consume healthy fats, fiber, and vegetables. You can combine fresh grated carrot, beet, turnip, potato, and radish with a beaten egg, oat flour or buckwheat flour, and a pinch of sea salt. Mix well and fry in coconut oil, lard or red palm oil.
- Does your little one love fruits such as blueberries, mango, bananas or raspberries? You can make a delicious homemade gelatin snack for them in coconut milk or a specific herbal tea base that incorporates your child’s favorite fruit. Small berries can be left whole, while larger fruit should be diced.
- If your child has a favorite shape or a favorite animal, get cookie cutters or gelatin molds in that shape. Try getting cookie cutters that spell out the child’s name as well. You can then serve snacks in your child’s favorite shapes and get them excited to try a new food.
Let’s work together!
If your child struggles with feeding issues, I’d be happy to help! You can learn more about how I work here.