The #1 best thing you can do to help your picky eater

Picky Eating

Jun. 16

When most parents come to me for help they are frustrated, overwhelmed, and not sure what to do next. Parents wonder “why is my child so picky?” “Is their picky eating my fault?” “How can I make my picky eater eat?”

Good news: I’m going to answer all of those questions for you here!

Two girls sitting on steps and eating together in an article about the best thing you can do to help your picky eater by Shannon Rolph pediatric Occupational Therapist

Let’s start with the basics: why is my child a picky eater? I tackled this question over here where we explored when picky eating is normal or when we might need to dig a little deeper. Then we can explore and better understand 3 of the most common reasons that I see in kids who struggle with eating.

But sometimes we don’t know the underlying reasons. Sometimes it’s actually helpful to just start with where we are today rather than spending time trying to understand the why of it all. That’s what we’re going to do today. We’re going to talk about a strategy you can use regardless of why your child is picky.

Oftentimes, articles like these focus on the ways that you can support your child in changing their eating behaviours, or changing the way that you feed your child. This article is different. Here we’re going to explore the relationship between eating and feeding. It’s all the space between the food we serve and the food our child eats. This space is often overlooked, and it’s really important to pay attention to this when you’re looking to shift to more positive mealtimes.

As we do this, it’s important that we go in with an attitude of curiosity and compassion. There are many, often complicated and intersecting, reasons that picky eating happens. It is no one’s fault or responsibility. There are so many ways that parents are made to feel guilt and shame on this parenting journey - please don’t let this be one of them.

3 overlapping bubbles, one that says 'child's eating', a second that says 'parent's feeding' and one in the middle that overlaps these that says 'the relationship' with an arrow pointing to this saying "where powerful change happens" — the relationship

between feeding an eating is where powerful change happens

The #1 best thing you can do to help your picky eater

The single best thing you can do to help your picky eater is to reduce the stress and pressure at mealtimes. You probably thought I was going to say serve more vegetables, right? Nope! Often when a child is struggling with picky eating we spend a lot of our time focusing on what the child eats, or what you (the caregiver) serve. But we miss out on everything that happens between those two pieces: the relationship. The best thing you can do to support their eating actually has nothing to do with the food itself, and everything to do with how mealtimes feel.

**The way mealtimes feel is more important than what’s on your child’s plate**

The way that we feel at mealtimes matters, and here’s why:

When we feel stress, our body releases a hormone called epinephrine. Epinephrine’s job is to prepare our body to fight or flee. This means that it shuts down non-essential functions of the body, like digestion. When it comes to mealtimes, here’s why stress (or how we feel) matters: short term stress decreases appetite
Research is clear that pressure decreases food intake. This is true for kids who are described as picky eaters and kids who are described as “good” eaters. For all children, when they feel pressured to eat they will eat less.
In the grand scheme of life, we want to teach kids that mealtimes are about more than food, they’re also about connection. It’s often one of the few times of the day that we are all together and present with no phones, tablets, or toys to distract us. Beyond the food, mealtimes are about relationships

Pressure is a tricky thing

Pressure is tricky, and here’s why: we don’t want to pressure our kids! But we do want to keep them healthy. When we see our kids not eating enough we naturally encourage them to eat more. When this is felt as pressure, it can reduce their consumption of food, which then causes us to encourage more, and the cycle continues.

An image of a mother and daughter at a table with an overlay titled "the pressure cycle" showing "parent encourages child to eat more" and "child eats less" with arrows connecting them

The good news is: you can stop this cycle.

How to stop the pressure cycle

One of the most powerful ways to stop the pressure cycle is awareness - just noticing that it’s happening can, in many cases, be enough to stop it.

Here are two questions to consider if you think you might be caught up in the pressure cycle:

Why are you doing it? If the answer is to make your child eat more or try a food (or lick it, or smell it), then it will likely be felt as pressure
How does your child react? If they shut down, protest, turn away, whine, get anxious, etc. it’s probably pressure - even if your intentions are positive

Note that for some kids, even genuine encouragement or praise may be felt as pressure. If you’re unsure, the best thing to do is to check in with your child’s reaction to learn whether or not you’re caught up in the pressure cycle.

a family of 4 sitting at the dinner table with the words "keep the focus at mealtimes on anything other than the food"

When you notice yourself in this pressure cycle, or when you notice that your child is feeling stress or discomfort around mealtimes, now you can name it: oh, here’s that pressure cycle again. Once you’ve noticed it, you can mindfully choose to disengage. If just disengaging sounds hard or not really do-able, I would really encourage you to read up on The Division of Responsibility. This is a different way to view our responsibility as caregivers when it comes to feeding out kids, and is designed to reduce pressure at mealtimes. We spend a lot of time exploring this new way to view mealtimes in the course Managing Picky Eating: Everything you need to end mealtime battles, feel confident, and help your child build a healthy relationship with food
Or, my favourite option: spend 2 weeks where you commit to not saying a single thing about the food at mealtimes. That’s right. Not a single word. Talk about the weather, or how everyone’s day was, or something funny you heard that day. Maybe you have a jar of jokes that you put on the table so when you’re tempted to talk about the food you have something else to reach for instead. It doesn’t matter what, but when we take the focus off of the food and onto relationship and connection, it often works magic for breaking the stress cycle and in the long run improving our child’s relationship with food.

If mealtimes are a struggle and you want foundational tools to address common root causes of these concerns, or if you’re committed to creating more peaceful mealtimes and better eating habits, check out my self-paced course: Managing Picky Eating: Everything you need to end mealtime battles, feel confident, and help your child build a healthy relationship with food

Shannon Rolph is a pediatric Occupational Therapist and a mom to 3 (beautiful, wild, energetic) kids. She wholeheartedly believes 2 things are true: kids are amazing, and parenting can be hard. Shannon shares helpful information and practical strategies with parents and families to support them in finding more ease and joy in their parenting journeys.

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