How Words impact your picky eater's success

How did your family talk about food growing up? Were your parents the type of parents who said, "you can't eat dessert until you finish all of your vegetables?" For some families, food is an all day event, which can be tough for our picky eaters!

stop interviewing,
​start commenting

"How does it taste? Is it too hot? Too cold? Is it yummy?"

It's tough for our picky eaters to answer these questions when they are trying to focus on food - which requires all of their focus at the moment. 

Their sensory systems are overloaded and they are likely in fight or flight mode so answering questions becomes a daunting task. 

Instead, make general comments as if you were talking to yourself. 

"These carrots are crunchy, This tastes just like grandma's. This tastes so sweet!"

​Commenting reduces demands on the child to respond; they can instead just listen to you in the background.

keep demands off the table- literally

"Take a bite. Lick it. Just try it!"

​Demands put pressure on kids and can cause them to backslide/regress in their eating! We want them to be excited about food and excited to eat food, which will not happen if we're constantly imposing.

replace negative with positive words

"Yuck!" "Ew!"

We want to squash these negative words! We can say things like:

"We are hurting the food's feelings" (for the younger kids)
"We don't talk about food that way" (for the rule followers)

Instead, teach your child to use their five senses to describe their experience.

"That smell tickles my nose."
"That feels sticky"
"That's a big smell"

This makes what they're feeling concrete, and means that we can overcome this! We can overcome touching sticky things, but we can't overcome something "gross" (because what does that even mean?)

Want to learn more? Listen to my free podcast episode on this exact topic for more details! Click the link here to listen in!