How to handle picky eater meals

Picture this: You’ve spent an hour cooking a beautiful, delicious meal for your family. You are excited to see what your child thinks of the food. You set the food down on their plate when you hear, “I don’t want this! I don’t like green beans!” Your child throws the green beans on the floor and starts to cry. At the end of the dinner, they have only taken one bite of food.

This is a very common scene for families with young children (or even older children!). As frustrating as it may feel, your child is doing exactly what they should be doing. They aren’t intentionally trying to hurt your feelings or make you upset. They are beginning to develop their independence, preferences, and voice. It is their job to assert themselves and push boundaries. These are critical life skills that they are developing.

And yet, it doesn’t feel good as parents. It is stressful! You want your child to get enough nutrition for them to grow healthy. You put planning and time into preparing meals, only for them to take one look at the food in disgust. You feel confused when your toddler eats three helpings at one meal and three bites at another. Similar to potty training, we cannot truly control how much a child eats (unless you force feed them, which I do not recommend).

As frustrating as it can be, mealtimes do not always have to feel so stressful. Ellyn Satter, of the Ellyn Satter Institute, introduced a concept of “division of responsibility” when it comes to eating and mealtimes. Division of responsibility in feeding means that as a parent, you decide the what, when, and where of feeding, and your child decides the how much and whether to eat what you provide. This is based on the concept that children have a natural ability to understand how much they should eat. They decide how much to eat based on what is right for their bodies at the time and how much they need to grow in that moment.

This might be a hard concept to trust. You might be thinking, “they are just kids! How can they possibly know how much they should eat?” or “if I let my child decide how much they eat, aren’t I letting them get away with it? Aren’t I allowing them to be in control of mealtime, instead of me?”

These are understandable questions and thoughts. As a society, we’ve been conditioned to think that “clean plate club” is best, especially as children. We have been taught that “good” children eat their entire meals, every time. However, as an adult, do you always finish your entire plate? Do you have days where you are starving all day, and others where you do not have much of an appetite? That is normal. Our appetite changes daily, depending on our mood, activity level, and overall hunger. As adults, we listen to the hunger cues in our body, and adapt our eating to fit those cues. The same is true for children.

In addition, research shows that picky eating is made worse when we try to force children to eat non-preferred foods. Imagine someone sitting across from you at the dinner table. They watch your every bite, and when you aren’t eating enough of your broccoli they say, “you need to eat your broccoli, you haven’t had any. You need to have five bites of broccoli right now. You don’t get any dessert until you eat your broccoli.” I don’t know about you, but I would be annoyed that they are watching me eat! I would feel resistant toward eating that broccoli, even if there was a promise of dessert afterward. As a child, this is especially true! I’m sure we can all remember several times that we have asked our child to do something, and they have done the exact opposite. Picky eating is more likely to happen the more we try to force our child to eat something, rather than letting them explore it on their own timeline.

Imagine a different scenario. Your child is sitting with their plate, full of both non-preferred and preferred foods. A plate that you have prepared. As a parent, you do not comment on anything about their eating habits during mealtime. You all sit together as a family and discuss your day. Your child is not reacting to your comments about their food in any behavioral way. They have the freedom to explore their food on their own terms. Maybe they don’t eat the broccoli the first ten times it is on their plate, but they venture a taste on the eleventh try. Not because you asked them to, because we know how that ends. But because they are finally curious about what broccoli tastes like and they want to explore this question on their own.

Here are a couple key components of Satter’s division of responsibility in feeding:

-       Trust that your child will eat the amount they need to grow predictably.

-       Keep regular meal and snack times. Do not allow children to graze all day, as it does not set up mealtimes to be successful.

-       Make sure snacks are filling.

-       Try to eat dinner as a family (as best you can with work, school, and activity schedules). This allows for connection, belonging, and engagement as a family. It also helps show children how to behave at mealtimes together.

-       Make sure to have both preferred and non-preferred foods on their plate, enough so that your child will walk away from the table full if they were only to eat their preferred foods.

-       Try not to comment on what your child is eating. Remember, the more we comment on their food intake, the more likely picky eating or behavioral eating will increase.

Like I said, this can be a hard concept to wrap your head around. Growing up, you probably had a very different set of rules when it came to eating. However, we want to provide our children the autonomy they so desperately crave and allow them to develop into adults that trust their hunger cues and have a good relationship with food.

So, try it out at your next mealtime. This philosophy is not a magic wand; it will take time to see the effects. But you might also find that you aren’t feeling as stressed at mealtimes, that you can actually focus on your own food intake or the conversation you are having with your partner. You might be able to let go of the thought that your child “didn’t eat enough,” because it is okay. They will get the food they need.

See Ellyn Satter’s website for more information and resources: https://www.ellynsatterinstitute.org.