For our first edition here, let’s introduce ourselves, and our picky eater (or eaters). Then in whatever format you choose, share one tip for a success you’ve had with your picky eater, or ask for tips for dealing one challenge that you’ve been facing with your picky eater.I’ll try to include a tip both for the standard picky eater and for the picky eater with additional medical challenges in each of my posts. (For Picky Eater’s Club information click here.)
Hello there! Have a picky eater or two (or three…)? Well, join the club! I’m Michelle and I’ve got two of them, Jacqui is five, and Kyle just turned two. Jacqui, on top of being naturally picky, had a ton of early medical issues that further enhanced her picky-ness through sensory and food texture issues and the like. Kyle isn’t naturally picky, but he has severe reflux that we finally have pretty well controlled with medication. The reflux has caused him to balk at certain flavors and textures so I have some picky-ness issues with him too. Our house is just tons o’ fun!
I hear all the time from moms that they just can’t get their kiddos to eat, so I thought why not pool our experiences here and outsmart the little rascals! Here are my tips for the week, one for the standard picky eater and one for dealing with extra medical challenges:
My Eating Jar/Good Job Jar System…
Once I finally got Jacqui eating, I began looking for a way to get her to self-motivate during meals. It gets so tiring to sit there saying “take another bite… take another bite…” What I came up with is a pretty simple little system that cashes in on her fascination with piggy banks. I went to our local Dollar Tree store and picked up a duckie toothbrush holder, a wicker basket, three bags of craft gemstones and a larger jar with a stopper. Six dollars total.
The large jar is her ‘Good Job Jar’. She gets gemstones for doing things well: Keeping her room clean, making her bed, using polite words, putting her coat and shoes away when we first come home — that sort of thing. She loses stones for yelling, messing up her room, bickering with her brother, etc. When the jar is all full (takes her about three months on average) she gets a special outing of her choice. We’ve gone to a local amusement park, the beach, the aquarium. She’s currently saving to go to the zoo.
The little toothbrush holder jar is her ‘Eating Jar’. She gets a gemstone for each food item finished to a parent’s satisfaction and two gemstones for trying a new food for the first time. She gets three stones at the end of a meal if we don’t have to remind her to keep eating. No stones are ever taken out of the eating jar. When it is full she exchanges it for 30 minutes of computer time, a sheet of stickers, or some other reward we have agreed on. She typically fills up her ‘Eating Jar’ twice a week. We do have to frequently change the reward or she gets bored.
The other part of the system is a timer. If she is being particularly belligerent, a set amount of a type of food that should easily be able to be finished in five minutes is set aside on her plate. The timer is set for five minutes and if she doesn’t eat it before the timer goes off, she loses a stone out of the ‘Good Job Jar’ for not following directions. The timer is set for another five minutes and so on. It usually only takes one or two rounds of this to get her focused back on earning stones for the ‘Eating Jar’ instead of losing stones from the ‘Good Job Jar’.
This little trick along with some others I’ll share later have saved us a lot of mealtime headaches. Hope it can help someone else out as well — bottom line is never give up and keep looking for unique ways to motivate your child.
Dealing With Medical Related Eating Issues…
So let’s begin at the beginning here. You’re a new mom, with a baby in the NICU on tube feedings. Maybe they’re a preemie, maybe they’re on a ventilator. Whatever the case, not every NICU is going to tell you how important it is to maintain your baby’s sucking reflex. So I’m going to tell you… if it is in any way an option, it’s super important to maintain your baby’s sucking reflex. If you can work on breastfeeding with your baby, do it. Even if your baby is on tube feedings, come in before feedings and work on breast feeding. Be aware that there are tons of aids for complications with breastfeeding such as Supplemental Nursing Systems that you can talk to a lactation consultant at the hospital about and get help with. If your baby needs to bottle feed but has special complications with a bottle there are specialized bottles such as the Haberman Feeder with adjustable flow rates.
If your baby cannot drink anything by mouth, it’s still important to work on maintaining your baby’s sucking reflex if you can. I know that there is a lot of negative info out there about pacifiers, but this is one situation where a pacifier becomes a very good thing. Particularly if your baby is on a ventilator. When Jacqui was on a ventilator for six weeks as an infant, I kept a pacifier going with her as much as I could while she was awake. Most hospitals actually stock pacifiers and the majority of hospitals stock the Soothie brand pacifiers. There are several nice things about these pacifiers: Babies who often refuse other pacifiers will frequently accept a Soothie, the hub of the Soothie can be cut with scissors to fit around a ventilator tube, and they can be ordered attached to cute little stuffed animals (like Jacqui’s old duckie pictured above) called Wubbanubs, which can help keep the pacifier in place for your baby when you are not able to be in the NICU.
Maintaining your baby’s sucking reflex sets you up for an easier time transitioning to oral feedings later. If the sucking reflex isn’t maintained and your baby isn’t given any positive oral experiences, they are at high risk for developing an oral aversions: Low or zero tolerance for anything in or near the mouth, which can make the transition to oral feeding extremely difficult. If at all possible, encourage your baby to take a pacifier during any bolus tube feedings to help your baby associate sucking with the sensation of his or her stomach filling during a feeding. If you are able to do this, it can make the transition to breastfeeding or bottle-feeding so much easier. Even if your child doesn’t eat by mouth until much later (Jacqui wasn’t off tube feedings until age four), making sure your baby has some positive oral experiences while in the NICU will make everything from brushing teeth to learning to eat that much easier. Nurture that sucking reflex any way you can, if you have the option.
What About You? What picky eater tips or questions do you have? I’m looking forward to hearing them!
parenting children motherhood Picky Eater’s Club getting my child to eat In The Life Of A Child medically fragile tube feeding trach ventilator G-tube blog carnival blogging community
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