Caring for a child who has experienced loss, chaos, or neglect can be challenging. When that child’s trauma shows up in extremely picky eating, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and stressed. It’s important to remember that food issues are just as stressful for the kids you welcome into your home.
Start by Adjusting Your Expectations
How and what we eat, dining together, and celebrating traditions through food are core values of many cultures and communities. However, while you might hold these events dear to your heart, your grandchild might feel very differently. You must identify your expectations and adjust them to meet this child’s needs.
Children impacted by trauma, prenatal exposure, attachment struggles, or other similar issues thrive on routine and predictability. A once-a-year tribal tradition or messy ventures like making homemade cookies or bread may feel safe or predictable to them. These activities can trigger challenging behaviors or meltdowns while they are in your home. This doesn’t mean this child will never be able to handle their food issues. Instead, think about what this child can take right now and what you can change or delay for another time.
Food Isn’t Always Love
You may have grown up with the unspoken message that “food is love” as a family or cultural value. The expectations of this value can feel magnified when you welcome a hurting child into your home. Feeding a child is the most basic form of nurturing that child. It feels almost instinctual – the planning, preparing, and sharing of food is something you do to care for them, show love, and offer safety to heal. However, a picky eater can throw a wrench into your preferred expressions of nurture.
When you welcome a child who has experienced trauma, they have a lot of changes to make in a short time frame. Their way of eating is likely different from yours. Neglect, parental substance abuse, food scarcity, poverty, or a regular diet of processed food all impact a child’s eating preferences and ideas of comfort or care. These kids often develop a narrow set of food and eating preferences.
8 Practical Tips for Feeding a Picky Eater
These practical tips apply to most picky eating situations when raising a loved one.
1. Offer food and drink reliably and predictably.
Please establish a regular schedule for your household, including designated times for fueling and hydrating. Consistently offer the same types of foods at the same time of day as much as you can. Try to enforce regular times for nighttime snacks and weekday breakfasts to ward off extreme hunger that might drive challenging behaviors. This consistency will be an anchor for the picky eater.
2. Offer new foods but keep reliable options available.
When incorporating this child into your family’s rituals and celebrations, consider that new foods might not feel fun or meaningful to them. Your family may enjoy the tradition of cinnamon rolls on Saturday mornings. A picky eater might prefer to eat the same breakfast all week long. Having one or two familiar favorites at special events and meals can relieve pressure on the child to try something new.
3. Try not to pressure anyone over food.
Your motto with new foods may be “many ways, many times!” However, this child might need help understanding your desire to try new things. Instead, put out the new food alongside familiar foods and focus on enjoying each other’s company. Pressuring a picky eater to eat – or try new foods – will likely end in arguments and stress, making them eat less well.
4. Offer choices.
When a child feels as if they have no voice or choice, they often respond with controlling, challenging behaviors. Prevent the power struggle by allowing this child to choose what goes on their plate. Serving family style (with all the food in large serving bowls at the center of the table) or even cafeteria/buffet style will help everyone feel empowered to choose. Allowing this child (and others at your table) to have a choice equips them to branch out on their own timeline and with a sense of ownership over their choices.
5. Empower your picky eater.
If your grandchild is a reader, consider writing a weekly menu. You can write it on the family wall calendar or a dry-erase board on the fridge. Include special events that impact mealtimes, like your weekly dinner at the community center or the school’s pizza fundraiser. Empower them to read it and remind themselves that they will always be fed when they want or need it.
When this child feels safe at the family table, knowing they can find something to eat, they are more likely to be open to trying new foods or eating healthy portions of the foods they love.
6. Try not to prioritize nutrition over connection.
It’s expected to be concerned about your grandchild’s nutritional health. However, building a connection of safety and trust between you is far more urgent for this child’s well-being. To ease a picky eater’s anxiety around mealtime, try to offer a mix of favorites and new foods. This can include sides or condiments that are familiar and comforting. Focus instead on conversations that build up your grandchild and your ability to connect with each other.
7. Invite a picky eater into preparations.
Your loved one might not tolerate eating new or unusual food right now. But inviting them into your preparations – grocery list making, shopping, washing vegetables, mixing dough, etc. – can ease their anxiety about food and spark their curiosity. Even if they don’t try the food they help you make, you are making memories together and building safety for them.
8. Think about this child’s “safe food.”
Picky eaters often have a “safe food” or two, like ketchup or white rice. Bring that “safe food” to food-centered activities outside your home. Include a serving size in their school lunch. Offering this familiar food can increase their sense of safety and ease anxiety.
Does your picky eater need to crunch? Are they comforted by the smell of apples and cinnamon? Invite this child to help you pick a side dish or dessert that includes their “safe food” to bring to a community event, family dinner, or holiday celebration.
Be Patient with a Picky Eater.
Helping this child overcome the constraints of picky eating is a long haul. Even if you’ve made progress in helping a picky eater, things like the holiday season, changes in routine, or upsets in family dynamics can trigger anxiety in this child. Their picky eating habits might come back.
Be patient, consistent, and gracious as they figure it all out. Keep focused on building a sense of safety by providing predictability and consistency. Even tiny doses of familiarity will go a long way toward helping a picky eater overcome the challenges they experience around food.
These tips are adapted from Dr. Katja Rowell, The Feeding Doctor. She is the author of Love Me, Feed Me: The Foster and Adoptive Parent’s Guide to Responsive Feeding*, and the co-author of Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating: A Step-by-Step Guide for Overcoming Selective Eating, Food Aversion, and Feeding Disorders.*