Eat happy

Picky eating doesn’t need to be a barrier to kids enjoying food and eating well. In this episode we talk to Accredited Practising Dietitian, Deb Blakley from Kids Dig Food about how you and your children can eat happy. We touch on picky eating, how to break down barriers around it and useful strategies to deal with fussy eaters, with a focus on the school setting.

About the guest:

Deb is an Accredited Practising Dietitian and is passionate about supporting grown-ups to positively and joyfully connect or reconnect with food and eating and share this with the children in their care. 

Deb’s approach supports parents, carers, families and educators to make decisions about nutrition and health from a place of care and consideration, rather than control.

Access to the Feed Your Picky Eater [without going crazy] online, self-paced video course for parents and caregivers (Cost: $29.70): https://kidsdigfood.vipmembervault.com/products/courses/view/6

Proudly brought to you by the Queensland Association of School Tuckshops and funded by the Queensland Government through Health and Wellbeing Queensland. 

This podcast is proudly brought to you by the Queensland Association of School Tuckshops and funded by the Queensland Government through Health and Wellbeing Queensland.

Transcript

Deanne Wooden 
Hello everyone. This is Deanne Wooden and you're listening to the Talking Healthier Tuckshops podcast, the show that talks all things school tuckshops. This podcast is proudly brought to you by the Queensland Association of School Tuckshops and funded by the Queensland Government through Health and Wellbeing Queensland. From the health of your kids and family, to your own wellbeing and happiness, we'll explore topics that matter to you, giving you easy ways to implement them in your tuckshop and your day to day life. Today, we're diving into how you and your children can eat happy. We'll touch on picky eating, how to break down barriers around it and useful strategies to deal with fussy eaters, with a focus on the school setting. We're joined by the wonderful Deb Blakley from Kids Dig Food. Deb is an accredited practising dietitian. She's passionate about supporting grownups to positively and joyfully connect or reconnect with food and eating and share this with the children in their care. Deb's approach supports parents, carers, families and educators to make decisions about nutrition and health from a place of care and consideration, rather than control. Deb, Welcome to the show,  and thanks for joining us. Your passion for kids learning to dig food was sparked by your now teenage kiddo who provides a constant source of action learning and on the job training. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Deb Blakley 
Yeah, thanks Deanne for having me on. And yeah, my teenage kiddo who is 15 now, started out from when we first introduced solids as being what I would class now as a fairly typical picky eater. They did all of the usual developmental things like rejecting food that maybe they originally were eating, when they were a tiny, tiny baby, my child presented me with some challenges that I wasn't prepared for. Particularly as a dietitian, I thought that, you know, I knew everything that I needed to know about how to feed a child. And, just caveat, I have only one child. So I had one go at it. And I was really, initially very surprised when that child didn't react the way I thought that they were going to react. And that kind of set me down a bit of a path to discover, gosh, how do I feed this kid? And why aren't they eating fruits! For my kiddo, fruits was really challenging, veggies not so much, and continues to be challenging for this day, you know. They've still got a fairly limited range of fruits that they readily accept. The wonderful thing is that that's okay for them.

Deanne Wooden 
Yeah, that sounds pretty familiar to me. I a have a dietitian background myself. And yeah, my kids didn't follow that projected path that we hear about or learn about when we're doing our studies. So yeah, that sounds pretty familiar. There's so many different ways that we can describe fussy eating or picky eating, how do you talk about it? And what does it actually mean?

Deb Blakley 
Yes, so these terms are not clearly defined in the literature or out there in just parent land. There are terms that are very subjective. And so each parent, and I'm assuming parents, and tuckshop conveners, out there who are listening to this podcast, think of the word picky eater, picky eating. If we took a poll I'm sure that we would come up with lots and lots of different responses. And it also depends on our experience as well. So for example, each of us have a different relationship with food. We have a different range of foods that we enjoy, some of us are total foodies, and we'll eat pretty much anything and everything and others of us are not so much. And we get along just fine with having a limited, more limited food range. So when we're speaking with parents who come in our doors for one-to-one support, for example, or when I'm speaking, say to a group of parents or educators, what I try and get across is that this is a very subjective thing, and that your understanding, your experience of your child's picky eating or picky or fussy eating, however you want to describe it, or the children in your care, is very much coloured by your own experience, and your emotions as well. Because you know, for some parents, the fact that a kiddo won't eat the food that the rest of the family is eating, for example, is extremely stressful. And for other parents, they find ways to manage that just fine. Maybe they're a bit more relaxed about the situation, maybe they've got other priorities that mean that they can be more relaxed. And there's no judgement around either of those scenarios. And I do want to just tip my hat as well with this particular topic. To say that I know that there will be lots of people listening, who have children in their lives, who are displaying quite extreme feeding challenges and feeding differences. I'm actually more moving towards that language of feeding differences. And particularly our kiddos who have a diagnosis such as autism, or ADHD, or neuro-divergent kiddos, which is another way to describe those kids and there's lots of forms of neurodiversity, those children's experience of food is extremely different to the majority of the population. And that means that the way that they approach food is really different, their eating looks different, and how we can support them also looks different.

Deanne Wooden  
Yeah, well, I wanted to pick up on when you talked about how stressful it can be for parents, when their kids aren't eating what the rest of the family is eating. And you know, because I have an interest in nutrition and health, I wanted to just explore a little bit about the impact of picky eating on kids health and their families and those around them. Just from that health perspective, I guess, because for me, that's what makes me stressed about when my kids won't eat what I've prepared for them. It's like, oh, they're not going to be eating what they should for good health.

Deb Blakley 
Yeah, that's right. Well, the actual impact, I think, can be a lot, or not much at all, just depending on each scenario. So as you would know, having a dietetics background and your nutrition background, we can do food diaries, that will give us an indication of a snapshot of the way somebody's eating. And the interesting thing that I find when I'm working with my families one on one is then when we analyse those food diaries, kids are most often coming at least close to their nutritional requirements. Now, that doesn't mean that they're having a huge variety. If we think about that concept of thinking about nutritional adequacy, they have a nutritionally adequate diet, but they may not have a nutritionally varied or, you know, expansive diet, but they're meeting their basic needs. So and I think, you know, when we're working with families, one on one that can often be quite a surprise to them. How can a child who's mostly eating white foods, and hardly any fruits or veggies, or maybe none at all, be coming close to meeting their nutrient requirements? But that's actually what we see, when we do the analysis. Sometimes what happens is that we do notice that there are nutrients of concern. And there are some nutrients that pop up more frequently than others, one of the main ones is iron. And when something like that happens, we can support families to be either finding ways within the diet, within the child's current food range, perhaps, to inject more opportunities for the child to eat, say, for example, more iron-rich foods. And sometimes what we see also in consultation with doctors and checking on bloods and things like that, that, you know, if a child really has an issue with iron, they're iron deficient, or maybe they have a diagnosis of iron deficiency anaemia, then that child might need some supplementation. And so supplements do play a part for some children to kind of help families sort of settle down. But the broader thinking about this the broader question that you asked about what is the impact of picky eating on healthy families and those around them... if we're thinking about families and those around them, family feeding relationships can really take a bit of a nosedive when there's a child who's maybe not eating as widely as other children in the family.  Or parents have a different expectation about what the child should be doing, should very much being in inverted commas, with their eating. And so the impacts that we see on our families that access our service are lots of stress, lots of anxiety around mealtimes, lots of worry about what the child's going to eat. Lots and lots of catering. Maybe serving totally separate meals, which, you know, again, I want to have a caveat here, sometimes we need to do in certain situations, and those accommodations are necessary for some children. But often what it looks like for the majority of families is that parents just feel really shaky. And they find themselves in this worry cycle where they're starting to use feeding practices that are counterproductive to their child's feeding development. And that's what we want to support parents to be able to kind of see the forest for the trees a little bit with feeding, and know that you have be able to get that bigger picture of okay, where's my child going with feeding? Where are they at right now? How can I best support them to be a lifelong food learner?

Deanne Wooden  
No worries, Deb. Let's move on to talking about tuckshops, because that's  what we're talking about today. When we first caught up to organise this chat, you mentioned that you have essentially had an evolution in your thinking about healthy food and tuckshops over the course of your career. So, coming from a nutrition dietitian background, can you explain this change to the listeners, please?

Deb Blakley 
Sure. Well, I was actually a community dietitian around the time when the tuckshop food and nutrition guidelines were brought in many, many moons ago. It seems like just yesterday, I think, Deanne to you and I, but it has been a really long time now. And at that time I loved and still do love the core purpose of those guidelines to be able to allow children to have a wider access to a variety of foods, particularly when they're at school. You know, that's what the tuckshop guidelines are about... supporting tuckshop conveners to provide menu options that meet the needs of children, no matter how they're developing with their food and eating journey. And I guess the evolution has been more flexibility in what constitutes a tuckshop menu that meets the needs of all of the children in our school community. Because, you know, there is value and I'm sure you'd agree, that there is value in every single food that we eat, whether it be a green, amber or red food, there is some form of value, both nutritionally socially, enjoyment wise, all of those things. And to my way of thinking, what we're wanting to do is to encourage children to become lifelong food learners... to have a wider variety of food that they can feasibly eat and develop that over time enough so that they can get by with whatever they're doing in life. So that might mean that you have some children who remain, for a very long time, possibly into adulthood, maybe forever, who have a much limited range of foods that they enjoy eating. But they can still meet their nutritional needs. They can still go out and enjoy food with others. They can find themselves in any life situation and be able to make do with the food available without anxiety or concern or feeling like they can't eat all of these things that we often see crop up with kids who have feeding challenges. And I guess the way that I see tuckshops being able to support that is by broadening your focus from "greening" the menu, which is an amazing thing in itself, but broadening that focus to say okay, what would I choose? If I was the child who really wasn't at that stage where they I ate any fruits or veggies for example? How can I make it easier for kids who are very early on their food learning journey? Maybe they have autism? We're seeing a lot more kids with diagnosis, neurodivergent diagnoses happening earlier and earlier. How do we support those kids as well as all the other kids to have a really positive experience at the school tuckshop. And I believe that this is really possible. I've seen so many times in my clinical experience where children who are finding school a fairly settled place,  who are finding that initial curiosity to explore foods, actually find it easier to do in situations outside the home, for example, particularly if there's been a lot of anxiety and angst from parents (and hopefully parents are being supported to work on that), and that comes from a really positive, really loving place. But sometimes it takes a while for that feeding relationship to settle down. So, when children find themselves in other environments where maybe mum and dad aren't watching them, they're not sensing mum and dad's anxiety about the fact that they're not eating vegetables, or whatever it is the parents want them to be eating, they are seeing their peers, sometimes it's something new, that can be a really positive thing for them. But if the expectation is that we're going to get every kid at school to eat salad, that's probably not realistic.

Deanne Wooden 
Yeah, so what you're saying really, is that the school tuckshop can actually play a role in helping picky, picky or fussy eaters get interested in and enjoy new foods that they won't necessarily try in the home environment.

Deb Blakley
Exactly. You know, just to give a couple of examples. I've had a kiddo who the mac and cheese was one of his go-to foods and would only eat mac and cheese at home prepared by mum and dad a certain way. If there was any variation on that, then he wouldn't eat it. And he saw a friend at school have mac and cheese one day, came home to mum and said, I really would like to try mac and cheese at the tuckshop, can I have tuckshop? That was the first time this kiddo had ever shown an interest in eating anything really much outside the home. And so that parent, to their credit, just went cool, sent the child with some backup food, in case the mac and cheese experience didn't go well, that they had something to fall back on. And for the first few times, they didn't eat much of the mac and cheese. And then sometimes they would eat a fair amount of it, sometimes half of it, sometimes not much at all. But we didn't make a big deal of it. The teachers didn't make a big deal of it. The  parents and no one made a big deal of it. We just allowed that kid to explore that mac and cheese. And over that experience, he learned that he could eat mac and cheese at school. Now mac and cheese from a nutritional perspective, we've got at least two food groups there. Don't worry, we've got pasta, and we've got cheese. So we've got that dairy group there. And depending on maybe some of the other things that you've got in there, you know, we can expand out from there. But that's just one example that doesn't seem like much but is huge in the lives of families who have picky eaters or more children with more severe feeding difficulties or feeding differences.

Deanne Wooden 
Okay, so on that topic of parents who do have picky eaters, and I'm one of them, I've got a nine year old who's pretty fussy and won't accept new foods into her repertoire. What are your three top tips to parents with children that are picky or fussy eaters?

Deb Blakley 
Yeah. So the first one is don't panic, because for most kids, this is usually a really normal and I shouldn't say normal, I hate that word, a typical part of child development. We know that this is a part of that sort of differentiation phase of a child's development where they're learning that they can do their own thing, they can be master of their own destiny, and they do start to say no to things, they do start to exert that influence over decisions that involve them. And that this can be just that, you know, that sort of middle ground where they're finding their feet with what they want to do in terms of their food learning. And it's also not to panic if we've got one of those children that who are I guess, in the more extreme category as well. Panic never serves anybody. The second thing we can do is reduce pressure. And we're looking at not only of overt signs of pressure, we're looking at things like just subtle pressure, you know, so I guess they've overt sizes, you know, those more authoritarian style feeding practices where we might be assisting children to finish their plate or eat the vegetables before they eat the good stuff that they enjoy. But it can also look like oh, just take a couple more bites, it could look like policing of lunchboxes at schools, which we know is counterproductive. It's can be very detrimental for students, and for parents and that family environment. And so yeah, just looking at not only the more clear cut signs of pressure, but also those really fine tuning of pressure, that we need to make sure that children are 100% in charge of what they eat from what our parents and caregivers provide for them. And hopefully, we've got some foods in there, enough foods that the child finds to be safe and acceptable to them, so that they can fill up on enough food. And we allow children to go back to more of those foods. And the third thing would be, know that food learning takes time.  It's not helpful to be going for the goal of having foodies by the age of five, or even 10, or even 15, or even 20 sometimes. So if I think back on what my lunchbox looked like as a kid, it was really bland and basic, and not a lot of variety. So I speak to these with my hat on as a white, female, Caucasian, Australian, you know, I understand that there are so many different things that parents put in lunchboxes. But for me, my experience of lunchboxes was way more limited than my child's ever was. There was a vegemite sandwich, there might have been an apple or a banana, there might have been a piece of cake. And it wasn't much more than that, really, until I got into high school, and I was starting to take control of my own lunchbox, and things got a bit more varied from there. But I think the expectation these days, particularly with Instagram, and social media, just say, look at these expectations that sometimes we have for children's eating and go, is that really reasonable to be asking our kids to to be doing that? I think a lot of the time the answer is no. So food learning will take time. It's okay for our children to have a limited food range, and they can usually still meet their nutritional needs, even if it is limited. And our job is to support them to be as calm and relaxed around food as they can be so that they can find ways to get themselves fed, and learn how to be a lifelong food learner.

Deanne Wooden 
All right, that's great. Thanks, Deb. And you mentioned a little bit before about sort of more extreme examples of picky eating or fussy eating. So if, for those listening, if they think they might be dealing with something that's a little bit more extreme, where where can they go to access help?

Deb Blakley
Well, there's a number of places depending on what you want to do, I guess at the forefront of those. There is a lot of information online that we can access, but we need to make sure that we're accessing it from a reputable source. Certainly somebody who has a background in paediatric nutrition would be a good place to start. And then if you're really feeling Hey, we're in the mire, we don't know how to get out of this worry spiral, we're really concerned that our child might not be meeting their nutritional requirements, then the best place to go would be to a dietician who specialises in feeding and child nutrition and family nutrition. And, you know, the way that that our team practices is very much not just centred on the child, so we're looking at the child but we're also looking at what's going on around that child. So we're looking for ways to support the family unit that provides support to the child's. Because the work we do is really not primarily around getting children to eat certain foods because the child's learning is going to happen naturally in the way that's right for them. But there are certainly things that will either support or inhibit that growth and development. If you're concerned, you don't know if there's somebody in your local area, then often your local GP will have some good links, maybe to some local dieticians and paediatricians as well. And, you know, we're not just looking at the nutritional aspect of things like a feeding specialist and a nutrition dietetics feeding specialist. We'll also be looking for red flags of other concerns that might be related to that child's eating. So for example, maybe we need to refer on to a speech pathologist, if there looks like there might be some red flags for emotive challenges for example, maybe the child does have a diagnosis of autism, or maybe they don't, but we're seeing that the child is really dysregulated, around eating and possibly at other times. So we're looking to refer on and get really positive wraparound supports for those families. Because often it's not just a dietician, sometimes that they wider supports. And what we also do, as well is liaise with schools and day-cares. And who is responsible for providing places where children eat, for example, at school, children are eating at least twice a day, sometimes three times a day, where we can provide education and support for, for students and for the caregivers and teachers of those students to be supporting individual students with their feeding challenges. Sometimes feeding at school looks a lot more limited than home. And that can, for our more challenging children, can be because school can be quite a dysregulated place. It's very noisy. There's a lot going on, there's lots of expectations around paying attention and focusing and learning and sometimes what we see is that children's eating really falls away at that time. And then add in the extra challenge of children who might be on medication that say, for example, inhibits appetite, and usually through the main part of the day, because that's when they need to be having their attention and focus at its best. And so we can help and support parents managing those kinds of challenges, too.

Deanne Wooden  
All right. That's great. Thanks so much, Deb. I have learned so much today, things that I can put into practice in my own home for sure. And I really hope that our listeners have as well. So just wanted to once again, thank you for your time, Dave. It's been really great.

Deb Blakley
Thanks so much for having me and good luck, everybody. And I'm sure if you're listening to this, you're really wanting to make your tuckshops more inclusive places to be so I really applaud you for that.

Deanne Wooden  
There you have it. Deb Blakley, accredited practising dietitian and founder and CEO of Kids Dig Food. We'll link all the details about Deb's business in the show notes, so make sure you check them out.

The Talking Healthier Tuckshops podcast is produced by the team at QAST and made possible thanks to funding from the Queensland Government through Health and Wellbeing Queensland. Visit qast.org.au to learn more about other program opportunities, and for the latest tuckshop tips, ideas and advice