Healthy Eating for Children: Build Upon Success

A few days ago a parent and I discussed a feeding related issue that is quite honestly, one of the most difficult parts to food chaining we feeding parents deal with: NOT taking the successful foods away. Often, the foods that our children are successful at are not the healthiest foods in the world. Generally they are chips, crackers, chicken nuggets, fries, and other less healthy choices. As parents, it has been ingrained in our brains, that our children should be eating fruits and vegetables and baked chicken all day long. When the feeding child before us insists on living off chips and popsicles our instincts tell us to yank the chips and popsicles from the diet and only offer those fruits, vegetables, and baked chickens. Well, if you've ever lived for ONE day with a feeding kiddo, you know that strategy is like banging your head against the wall. The phrase 'he will eat when he's hungry' doesn't always apply to these children.

One of the biggest lessons to food chaining is to keep what works and BUILD from those foods, to expand from those core foods, to explore what is similar and interesting about those core food and to NOT take away these successful core foods. Why take away what the child is successful at? Why not keep what the child can successfully eat and grow that food repertoire to include foods that are similar in taste, texture, and aftertaste to the core diet? Food chaining is about building upon success. Food chaining is about growing a whole child, about building a love for food, a tolerance for trying new things, about educating the child about food and eating, and most importantly, about understanding what your child can handle and making that child feel safe and successful with eating.

As you have seen in this blog, my son Ewan has come a long way. He started with an extremely restrictive diet and has slowly worked his way towards eating many fresh and raw fruits and vegetables, meats, and a variety of other single ingredient types of foods (spaghetti and no sauce). We didn't get there overnight and guess what--all those foods he came into the clinic with such as waffles and Pop-Tarts, still have a place in his diet. Those foods helped us find the flavors and textures that he is comfortable with and as much as I wanted to empty my cupboards of all waffles, crackers, and chips we stopped ourselves from doing just that. Instead, we pushed Ewan to try different flavors, different varities, build upon texture acceptance, and to use dips and flavor masking in order to build a complete diet for him.

Happy Chaining Everyone!
Alicia