How do I know if my child is really a picky eater?
On this episode of the Learn With Less® podcast, Ayelet sat down with speech-language pathologist Melanie Potock, who describes herself as “a mom who once had a picky eater.” She’s experienced first-hand the stress that parents feel when they are worried about their child’s nutritional health.
Fast forward to today, and you’ll find Melanie blending her knowledge of feeding therapy with practical parenting strategies that help the entire family eat healthier. She’s an international speaker and author of three books, including co-authoring the award-winning Raising a Healthy Happy Eater.
We discuss:
- Melanie’s personal and professional background, and how she came to do the work she’s doing today
- Typical stages of eating development with oral eaters
- How to tell whether you’re dealing with a “picky eater” or just a typical toddler
- Melanie’s top 3 tips for true “picky eaters” and top 3 tips for more typical toddler food preferences
- Melanie’s favorite resources to share with families who are dealing with eating challenges
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
Melanie’s playlist on YouTube for Pediatrician Advice
Raising a Healthy, Happy Eater, by Melanie Potock and Nimali Fernando
Adventures in Veggieland, by Melanie Potock
You are not an Otter: The Story of How to Become an Adventurous Eater, by Melanie Potock
Connect With Us:
Melanie: Website / Instagram / Facebook
Ayelet: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest
Text Transcript of the Episode
Ayelet: Today I am speaking with Melanie Potock, an international speaker on the topic of feeding babies, toddlers, and school-aged kids. She is the co-author of the award winning Raising a Healthy, Happy Eater, a stage by stage guide to setting your child on the path to adventurous eating, and Baby Self Feeding: solutions for introducing purees and solids to create lifelong healthy eating habits.
The tips in her cookbook for parents and kids, Adventures in Veggieland, help your kids learn to love vegetables with 100 easy activities and recipes, are based on the latest research and Melanie’s 20 years of success as a pediatric feeding therapist. Melanie’s children’s book, You Are Not An Otter, takes preschoolers on a food adventure exploring all the ways that various animals eat. Melanie’s advice has been shared in a variety of television and print media, including the New York Times The Wall Street Journal cnn.com, and parents magazine. Melanie, thank you so much for being here with us today. Welcome to Learn With Less.
Melanie: Well, this is so fun to get to know you! And I’m just so glad we’re doing this today. Thank you for having me on.
Ayelet: My pleasure. So Melanie, today I’ve asked you to come on speak to us about how to deal with picky eating in babies and toddlers. But first, just to get a little bit of information about you. Why don’t you tell us more about you and how you got into this work that you are doing today?
Melanie: Well, thank you sure I, you know, it’s I’m going to try to give you the brief version. All right, having my own very picky eater, before I ever went back to school to become a speech pathologist, and even when I was in graduate school, I didn’t really focus on feeding, I was focusing on augmentative communication. But then as life, as we know, has these twists and turns, I worked in a rehab hospital and they had an opening in the NICU. And that is what got me really thinking about the fact that feeding is developmental. That we learn to swallow in the womb, and that we learn to bite and chew and enjoy a variety of foods, really over the next four years.
And then, from there, a lifetime – because we’re all learning eaters. You know, I tried haggis for the first time last year, speaking of Scotland. So I’m learning eater, but it really got me realizing that with my own very picky eater, I knew I needed to keep it fun. I knew I needed to keep the joy in family meal times, but also that there was a learning curve here. And that’s when I started to combine my own experience as a mom with what I learned initially in the NICU, and then helping these kids as they grew and becoming a pediatric feeding specialist.
Ayelet: Amazing. Yes. Well, we have that in common that actual technical background, and then “becoming the parent” background. When you marry those and connect those. It’s quite an experience and a very different experience.
Melanie: It is it just kind of rounds it all out. And it raises so many more questions, right?
Ayelet: Absolutely. Well, let’s dig right in. Tell us a little bit about those typical stages of eating development with oral eaters. And by oral eaters, I’m really referring specifically for our audience to those children receiving nutrition orally as opposed to say, a feeding tube.
Melanie: Well, first of all, I think that is an excellent, excellent question. It is the whole reason why wrote Raising a Healthy, Happy Eater, a parent’s handbook… to really explain to parents – and professionals like that book too, but to really explain to parents that, as I said earlier, feeding is developmental. So there are various stages of development that children move through to help them learn to love food. Although I can’t explain every single one in this short time. Just to give you a couple brief examples.
As I mentioned earlier, babies actually learn to swallow in the womb. And then once they come into the world, and they are going to breast or bottle feed, they rely on reflexes, the suckling reflex, the sucking reflex that sucks, swallow, breathe, coordination, all of these incredible ways that their body works naturally to teach them to eat. They actually learn from those reflexes. And then the reflexes integrate because we don’t need them anymore.
Well, likewise, the toddlers, they also learn from the tongue lateralization reflex. So if you simply were to touch the side of like a 12 month old’s tongue, the tongue will actually move toward the stimulation. And that’s, that’s a reflexive move that starts in that first year life, but then it starts to go away because the babies have already figured out – because the reflex taught them – how to move their tongue left to right. And all of those natural phases of feeding development, that we see all the way up to about age three, are what help kids try new foods in combination with these awesome parents.
Ayelet: Love that. Yes. All right, well, how can parents and caregivers tell whether they are dealing with a quote unquote “picky eater?” Or just a typical toddler?
Melanie: Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, we have to recognize the fact that there is this garden variety stage of picky eating that almost every child will go through in the toddler years, they’re supposed to, you know, kids learn the word “No.” They also have a huge drop in appetite, because their growth really slows down, especially as they approach age two, so between 18 months and three years of age is this window of time where kids will be picky on and off, and it can be really frustrating for parents. But the honest truth is, if we just parent proactively, and we follow a few tips, the kids will emerge out the other side at about age three, once again, on the journey to adventurous eating.
The dilemma is, is that it’s really common to get advice from other medical professionals that say, all toddlers are picky, they’ll grow out of it. Well, that’s actually not the case: one in four typically developing children will develop a feeding disorder. In other words, they don’t grow out of it. And we don’t want to wait to see if that’s going to happen. So to answer your question, just a few red flags. And I list all of them in my book, Raising a Healthy, Happy Eater, as well as some of my other books. Just a few red flags in those toddler years is, is it incredibly stressful on a consistent basis? That’s my big one. Is there really no joy in meal times anymore? Do you find that you’re having to serve the same thing over and over and over?
That signals that problem, and it definitely is something to call attention to when you talk to your pediatrician. And if you’re wondering how to do that, I have a whole playlist on my YouTube channel, which is titled, Pediatrician Advice, that will walk you through exactly what to say and what pictures to bring in, frankly, before and after a meal, or where to get a three day food diary to share with your pediatrician to really get to the why that this is stressful trying to find that why is so important.
And just a couple other red flags that I’ll throw out to the audience. With toddlers, we of course, want to be very aware of choking. But once kids get into that, oh, you know, the early toddler years, 14-15 months, they really shouldn’t be gagging on a daily basis. And definitely, if you have even one choking episode, just one, you have to talk to your pediatrician about that and document what happened before the choking episode, what happened during, and what happened after, so we can make sure that doesn’t happen again. And that it doesn’t possibly signal difficulty swallowing in some way. Because sometimes, kids can just get really large tonsils and have a choking episode. You know, there’s a lot of different reasons for that.
And then finally, I would say that one of the major red flags when it comes to toddlers developing a feeding disorder is that they limit what they’ll eat to a specific texture like oh, the kid only patches of applesauce, etc. all day long. He never really likes to chew. Those sorts of things.
Ayelet: Right? So that distinction between Yes, he loves applesauce, but he won’t eat an apple. He won’t try a sliced apple. Interesting. So those are great, wonderful tips. And I think it’s really interesting, too about you know, we going back to what you said about the reflexes, we think about motor development and reflexes, like I think most parents have heard about suckling and palmar grasp and like those early reflexes, but I think it’s really helpful to think about feeding and eating as well. And it definitely surprised me when I first heard about the fact that toddlers have these reflexes remaining like we think about that is often something that goes away in those early infant months.
But there are developmental pieces to eating and changing and food and feeding and eating development. And I think that’s so important. So thanks for really going into that with us a little bit. Let’s take just a brief break to hear a word from our sponsors. And then we’re going to hear a few tips from Melanie about what you can do to support young children with regard to eating preferences, and we’ll hear about her favorite resources to share with families.
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Ayelet: All right, Melanie, we would love to hear… we’ve got two sets of sort of tips that I’d love to go into. The first is: we’d love to hear a few of your top tips for families who are actually dealing with true picky eaters,
Melanie: You bet so is kind of that garden variety picky eater, you know, is doing fine on the growth curve, but just isn’t very adventurous, really hesitant to try new things. But there’s enough of a food repertoire that nutritionally they’re doing okay, we just need to expand on that. Well, for those what I call “garden variety picky eaters,” it’s interesting because no matter where a child is on the picky eating spectrum, whether they’re garden variety, or highly selective, or what we call extreme picky eaters, we still have the same foundational tips for both, and then we expand from there.
So if I can just give you three basic ones that will fall into both categories. And I can tell you a little bit more about our more extreme picky eaters. The first one is make sure that your toddlers and older are on what we call a hunger schedule. And by that I mean the moment they sit down for breakfast, it’s another two to two and a half hours later before they sit down for a snack again. So the time at breakfast, gosh, it might be 10 minutes, it might be 20 minutes, you know, everybody’s a little bit different. But the moment they sit down, they have their breakfast and they take their plate to the counter to say they’re all done. They’re all done. The kitchen is closed, you know water, yes, of course.
But that two to two and a half hours until a small snack is offered? That’s growing time. That’s playing time. And you can learn more about that eating time and growing time schedule. If you go to melaniepotock.com and just click on my free toolbox tab and you can download that schedule and put it right in your kitchen to help you remember how to get kids a little bit hungry for meal times, but not hangry. But definitely the hunger schedule is good.
Ayelet: And just to clarify, again, this is for those kiddos who are really experiencing, like this is not for those just typical toddler food preference, like maybe a little bit here, maybe a little bit there. But this is for kiddos who really have been sort of diagnosed or identified as real picky eaters?
Melanie: Actually, it’s for both no question would be for both. So let’s just take a look at that for one second. So one of the easiest missteps we can make as parents is to let kids graze throughout the day, and especially our picky eaters, as a mom myself of one I know it was really tempting that every time she opened her mouth, I offered her a goldfish cracker, you just want to get some food there. And the reality is that we know that kids will actually try new foods, are more likely to try new foods, and will eat even their preferred foods in more reasonable amounts because picky eating also involves volume a lot of times… if they truly come to the table hungry. So as tempting as it is to let them graze throughout the day, all of the best registered dietitians, and of course my favorite pediatrician Dr. Young, who wrote Raising a Healthy Eater with me, agree that kids really need to have two to two and a half hours between snacks and meals.
But there is one more reason for that. And that is their teeth. The American Dental Association also recommends that so that the mouth can really be restored to the typical pH that it needs to be. If we graze all day, we actually have a much higher risk for dental cavities, etc. But to answer your your comment there for our more extreme picky eaters, it’s the number one thing I start with because even if we’re only going to have three foods that we eat, and we have months of therapy to learn how to eat even two more, we still have to create that hunger, not not “hanger,” you don’t want them hangry! – but hunger, so that at least we have a little bit of desire.
Most kids who are extreme picky eaters, who have the diagnosis of avoidant restrictive food intake disorder or ARFID, aren’t really that excited about food, you know, they don’t really find food that pleasurable. And part of the reason why is they have a very low homeostatic appetite, and that means they’re just not really that hungry and they sort of just eat because we eat, you know? Where you and I are like… when’s dinner?
Ayelet: Definitely, yes, definitely. I can, I can agree with that for myself, for sure. I think it is really important, though, to distinguish that, and to to help parents really understand that this is not about withholding food. This is not about creating an environment in which we’re saying, No, you cannot eat, or you can only eat on this very rigid schedule. We’re talking about giving additional opportunities for children to develop an appetite. And this is just one strategy among many that you would recommend, Melanie.
Melanie: Can I expand on that a little bit? Yeah, exactly. It’s no different than being in preschool. Kids don’t get to graze all day of preschool. You know, there’s a center for snacks, there’s a center for artwork, there’s a very specific schedule. And we always, especially if we happen to have a child who perhaps has had a rough start, or perhaps is coming from an orphanage, I have a number of kids on my caseload who have been adopted in the United States from other countries where, frankly, the kids are kind of worried about food, and is there going to be more food.
And we always want kids to understand that we just had eating time. Right now it’s play time. But then we want to reassure them, so sweetheart, it’s playtime right now. So we’re going to go to the park, we’ll have a small snack, when we get back, you always want to reassure them that absolutely more food is coming. And our job as a parent is to provide options for food, you know, our job is just decide when food will be presented. But it’s not in a way that is… we just don’t want it to be counterproductive to developing a joy for eating.
Ayelet: Sure. I also think it’s important to note that if you, in your family, if you are grazers and that’s just the way that works for your family, and you’re not having any kind of problems, keep doing what you’re doing. It’s – you’re not doing it wrong,
Melanie: Right, you’re not doing it wrong. It’s if you have concerns about it, and you’re raising this to your pediatrician, et cetera. This is the first strategy we start with. And as long as your child takes in a variety of foods for good nutritional health, even if it’s in a grazing pattern, that’s totally fine. As a matter of fact, some kids need to be able to do that, especially if they have type one diabetes, for example, or cystic fibrosis would be another good medical reason or slow stomach emptying gastroparesis.
So there are a lot of reasons that that works better for some people than others. And it’s not unusual in our assessment to determine that perhaps this child may not be able to go on what we call a typical hunger schedule. But instead of snacks and meals being rotated, actually needs five or six mini meals a day.
Ayelet: Yeah, thank you for that. Melanie, I think it’s just really important to always be aware that we’re talking to such a variety of people, and that everyone has strategies that work for them. And no one here is telling you exactly what to do. This is just sharing ideas and information. So thank you for that. Alright, how about… Do you have any other specific tips that you’d like to share about those more true picky eaters? Or shall we move on to more tips for families who are coming into raising toddlers, who are just really expressing those more typical food preferences as I like to call them.
Melanie: Right, let’s give you one more that would apply to both. And you know, if you want to expand from there. When we have the garden variety picky eater, it’s very tempting not to put new foods on their plate, because what’s the point they’re not going to eat it, you know, and we certainly don’t want to waste food. But there is a compromise there where we can continue to do the most important thing, which is expose them to new foods. So I asked my families just to put a tablespoon – literally the tablespoon off your measuring spoons where we you know, we all use to bake with right? I mean, it is small, not a spoonful out of you know, a serving spoon out of your drawer like a true tablespoon.
And just kind of keep that out on the counter to remind yourself that when you pre plate, that you always have a little bit of everything on child’s plate, it’s their choice if they want to eat it. You know, that’s not a big deal. But we’re never letting go of the possibility that one day they’ll be ready. And even for those families who, especially this year, are struggling with just food insecurity and budgets are really tight.
Don’t hesitate to take a few leftovers and just freeze them in an ice cube tray. And then you know, defrost them and keep – and you’re just using them for exposures or even for food play. Like everyone was really tired of that chili you made and you know you don’t want to dump it. You know what you could do with it. Get out a cookie sheet, put a little bit of chili in the middle, get out some plastic dinosaurs and make a big chili volcano and the kids are now exploring it with all of their senses. And if they decide to lick their fingers, we’re just not gonna argue about that!
Ayelet: I really love that. Thank you so much for that great idea, Melanie. Such a good one. Yeah, because I think it’s, it can be really hard for many families to recognize because we have that, like, “Don’t play with your food sort of mentality,” a lot of times, right? Many of us were raised that way. But can you just speak – just for a minute, about why is that important? What is that connection? And of course, we’ve talked a bit about this on previous episodes of Learn With Less, but I’d love to just get your sense about that!
Melanie: I love to talk about that because I wrote a whole book about it. But, you know, it actually ties nicely into the third suggestion that I was gonna give. You have a picky eater or an extreme picky eater, and that is to follow my three E’s. That’s what I always say to my parents. Listen, there are three E’s, you’re gonna follow: expose, explore, expand. And that’s how we get from fun to yum. We start with exposure. And exposure can be food play that you and I just talked about. But the food play, as much as we love it to be messy, therapists, we love messy play, you know, because it incorporates all the senses, and kids need to get messy.
But it can also be a food activity. Like in my book Adventures in Veggieland, I go through 20 different vegetables according to season. And right now we’d be in the chapter with asparagus. And asparagus… What’s fun to do with that? Make it asparagus log cabin! So we just get, we just get a milk carton and we spread it with cream cheese, and we take our asparagus and we make a cabin. Now if you take a bite of raw asparagus in the process, that’s cool, too, you know, raw asparagus is is actually very yummy. Most people don’t realize that, that’s okay. But it’s not the primary goal because we’re in the expose face expose might also mean helping to wash the asparagus and using a child-safe knife to trim the ends or learn how to snap off the end, you know that we all do it that magic spot on the end of the asparagus, but it from there, then we get into explore.
And explore mostly means cooking together. There’s so much good research that shows that when you bring your kids into the kitchen, and you cook together, and you don’t worry about the end result whether or not the recipe comes out perfect, and you just parent in the kitchen… that those kids are much more likely to be adventurous eaters and much, frankly, much more likely to be healthy eaters. And then finally, expand just means that you take the skills that you’ve got from expose and explore. And maybe you make more complicated recipes, or you branch out to, Oh, a veggie lasagna that has asparagus in it. You know, in other words, there’s more texture, there’s more elements to the dish, and from a sensory perspective, that takes time to develop that skill. So absolutely any sort of food activity, food play, using food in a way that isn’t necessarily about taking a bite is actually what will lead to the kids taking a bite.
Ayelet: That’s fun. All right, let’s move on just into a little bit about some of your favorite resources. We always like to empower those families and give them resources that say you’d like to share with families who are dealing with any type of eating challenges.
Melanie: Sure, you bet. It is the whole reason I developed my website and I have so many free resources for families. I have a tab on melaniepotock.com as I was mentioning earlier, called your free toolbox. And you’ll find over, Gosh, I think about 12 or 13 free downloads there. Several of them go along with my children’s book that you mentioned, You Are Not an Otter. And they involve games and matching cards and fun things that you can do with kids just to introduce the idea of being a learning eater, of being an adventurous eater, of being a food explorer. That’s the point.
And then on my YouTube channel, I have Gosh, I don’t know over 180 videos now, and all according to playlist. And one thing I do want to mention about YouTube, you don’t always have to watch YouTube, a lot of my videos are much more like a podcast, like the wonderful ones that you provide. And you know, I hate to clean my house. But if I can just put YouTube in my ear and just listen to a few of these videos or listen to a great podcast like yours, boy, I can get a lot of cleaning done. So you know, that’s a great way to find some information. And then lastly, my social media is packed full of free information and resources for parents.
My Instagram has so many different infographics. And lately I’ve been really pleased to get emails from speech pathologists, occupational therapists and parents saying is it okay if I print this off? Yeah, I’ll keep your copyright on it because I print this off and I want to laminate it and stick it up in my preschool classroom. Absolutely. Please do that. That’s why I’m creating them just to find as many ways I can in addition to my books and my video courses, but ways the parents don’t have to spend any money to really get this information.
Ayelet: I wonder if you have other types of feeding therapists who you love to follow or that you would recommend also that other people follow?
Melanie: Yeah, you know, there are, the one that actually comes to mind. She’s not a feeding therapist. Yes, yes, she’s, she’s wonderful. And her name is Dani and you’ll find her under kid food explorers on Instagram. And she has got the most fabulous books. She used to work in special education. She’s also a teacher and a mom and she is brilliant at helping kids learn to love food. So she’s also a dear friend of mine that I met on Instagram, which is the way I met you too! So I would say that is honestly Dani’s is my favorite to go for all the time to her.
Ayelet: Great, thank you. Melanie, thank you so much for your time and energy today for everyone listening from home or on the go. Thank you so much for joining us and we will see you next time.
