Mealtime Madness

Do you find yourself dreading mealtimes with your children? The complaints, refusals, the “I’m not eating that.” Food on the floor. Tired, hangry, grumpy children. You are not alone. In this episode we’ll explore what’s really going on at mealtimes and look at practical solutions to help ease the madness. 

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You love your child more than anything, and some days they drive you crazy. I'm Colette, a speech and language therapist, sense maker, and mom of three. Welcome to Get Curious, Not Furious. Together let's make sense of your child and what's really happening in those moments that feel out of control. Less reacting, more understanding. If you're ready to get curious, instead of furious, keep listening. Do you find yourself dreading mealtimes with your children? The complaints, refusals, I'm not eating that, food on the floor, tired, hangry, grumpy children. You are not alone. In this episode, we'll explore what's really going on at mealtimes and look at some practical solutions to help ease the madness. Picture the scene. Stressed out parent making different meals for different children. Food left on a plate, kids screaming, everyone stressed and unhappy. Then bedtime rolls around. I'm hungry. I can't go to sleep. You, tired, over at parent, gives in, gives the bedtime snack, which delays bedtime even more. Teeth need to be redone. Your resentment grows and grows. And you know tomorrow is groundhog day. You promise yourself this is the last time you will give in at bedtime. No more bedtime snack tomorrow. And you tell your child this as you get ready to say goodnight. Does this sound familiar? Nourishing our children from the moment they're born is one of the most important parenting jobs we'll ever do. Food and attachment are deeply intertwined. Mealtimes are not just about food, they are about relationships and connection. When we can start to look at mealtimes and feeding our children from a place of relationship and connection, then it gives us a different framework for understanding some of the problems that show up at mealtimes. What do you remember about mealtimes growing up? I have some really vivid memories, being forced to eat cold eggs, being forced to stay at the table until I'd eaten something that I really didn't want, being forced to eat foods that I didn't like. Now, when I think back, I can see that that was how things were done in the generation that I grew up in. You were grateful for the food that you were provided, and you needed to eat it no matter what. Now, thankfully, I say, times have changed, and we, as parents, have learned more about what mealtimes are really about, and don't feel the need to hopefully force our children to eat something that they don't want to have. But reflecting on my mealtimes growing up makes me think about what is my relationship with food and why is this important when I parent and offer food to my children. So, what is your relationship with food? What does it mean to you to nourish and provide food for your children? When we think about nourishing, it is really not just simply about food. If we focus only on food and we focus just on the content of what our children are eating, it risks taking away the joy of eating and making food something that's devoid of any relational properties. Now I'm not saying it's not important to pay attention to the content of the food that we feed our children, it certainly is. And there are lots of opinions, views, knowledge, and information out there about what is nutritionally good food for our children. I'm not a nutritionist, so this isn't about the nutritional content of food. I'm not gonna talk about that, that's not my area of expertise. But where I do have knowledge and expertise is in the relational component of mealtimes and eating, and also experience of working with children with feeding and swallowing disorders. So my insights around mealtime madness come from both my parenting days and from my professional work as a speech and language therapist. When we provide food for our children, what does this really mean? What do they feel, hear, see when we present them with food we know they love? What do they feel, see, hear, believe when we present them food we know that they don't love? Now I'm not saying that we only give children the foods that they love because let's face it, many of the foods that they love are not nutritionally very sound, and it wouldn't be in their best interests that we only give them those foods. Mealtimes aren't just about sitting at a table together, but not everyone feels comfortable coming to the table. Sometimes coming to the table can be a source of wounding and stress, so our children don't want to come to the table. Maybe they've had experiences where mealtimes have been really stressful, lots of shouting, yelling, family conflict, and so that it's not a warm, welcoming place for them to want to come. Some of our children who have specific feeding disorders or developmental challenges, mealtimes may not be an easy experience for them or something that they're able to easily participate in. But setting those individual differences aside, what I want you to think about is how can you create a mealtime environment where it's inviting and welcoming, and everybody does want to come together to connect and share over food. It's not so much about what food you provide. What really matters is who brings everybody together and what are those relationships like. Thinking about what food we do provide as parents, it is our responsibility to take the lead in providing nourishing food for our children, yes, providing them with foods that we know that they like, and also being the ones to take the lead and exposing them to new and different foods. What I want to know is how do you feel when your child rejects the food that you offer? Do you feel angry, criticized, furious, resentful? What story do you tell yourself about their refusal? Do you go, how dare they be so ungrateful? They just need to get you get what you get and you don't get upset. Lots of different things. And know that if you start to reflect on your own relationship with food, what it was like for you with food and mealtimes growing up, that that will give you some insights into why you might have the feelings that you have when your child does reject the food that you offer. It's okay for you to have those particular feelings. Absolutely, if someone rejects something that you offer, it would be a pretty typical response to feel angry, hurt, upset, frustrated. What I'm inviting you to do is to get a little bit more curious about your response, but also to get more curious about why your child has rejected that food. Is it really just a particular food that they don't like, or is it a sign that something isn't right in their world that you need to pay attention to? So, one of the most influential ideas in feeding intervention and therapy and support for children is Ellen Sater's division of responsibility at mealtimes. What this framework suggests is that the parents are responsible for what, when, and where food is offered, while children are responsible for whether they eat and how much. I love this framework because it takes so much pressure off everyone. Parents and children know their role. It's predictable. Where I would add to it from my work as a speech and language therapist is that some children genuinely struggle to do their part of the bargain because eating itself is difficult. If your child has sensory differences or remoter challenges, swallowing difficulties, anxiety, developmental differences, then the whether and how much isn't always a simple choice. And you might need to reach out to a professional to be supported with this framework and on your child's feeding journey. So what this division of responsibility of meal time does offer is it provides predictability, it takes the guesswork out of it for you and for your child. This is a framework that I have shared with parents in my clinical practice over the years. I can think of one example of a 10-month-old that I worked with about a year ago who was making some progress with solids, but not progressing, not progressing as we might have expected him to do. So we did a comprehensive assessment of his feeding, his oromotor skills. Um, there weren't any signs of uh physical or structural reason why he wasn't able to, you know, progress to more challenging textures. Um, but when I did observe the mealtime interactions, I noticed some differences in what he was trying to communicate and how his parents were responding. There was a mismatch between what cues he was giving and how they were interpreting his cues. And what this had inadvertently created was a whole bunch of kind of emotion and stress around mealtimes and him feeling a lack of autonomy around what he could and couldn't put in his mouth. So what we decided to do was we decided to try the division of responsibility. Initially, his parents were a little bit skeptical about doing it because they were worried about his growth and what if he didn't eat. So when we do this framework, if your child is failing to thrive, has poor weight gain, then it's really important that you only implement any changes to your mealtimes with the support of professionals that have knowledge and experience in working with children with feeding difficulties and nutritional challenges. So back to this 10-month-old. After a week of his parents following the division of responsibility, they saw a dramatic shift in mealtimes. Mealtimes became less stressful for everybody, and he actually started to eat more, and he very quickly was on his way to progressing, as we might expect, with managing more challenging textures. And I checked in with his parents about a month later, and all the feeding challenges and mealtime challenges had resolved. More recently, I worked with a five-year-old who has had pretty long-standing history of challenging behavior at mealtimes, food refusal, lots of heightened emotion when it came to mealtimes. We ruled out any nutritional concerns. The division of responsibility, again, mum was a little bit concerned that if what what do I do if he doesn't eat? What do I do if he wants the bedtime snack? And so we problem-solved ways to make the structure work for her, um, where she felt that he would still get the food that he would need so that he would sleep all night, etc., etc. Um, again, a week later, touch base with mum, and things had dramatically shifted. His behavior had settled down at mealtimes, and he was willing to come to the table. The first few days he didn't eat as much, um, and she was certainly worried about that. But then after about three days, he started becoming more involved in wanting to eat, was happy to come to the table, and the level of stress around family mealtimes had reduced significantly. So much so that this mom shared the division of responsibility with another friend of hers who was having some similar mealtime battles. What you might see when you follow this framework is to begin with, your child is less likely to eat as much as they have been eating. Bearing in mind that the eating they have been doing prior to using this framework is probably eating where there's been some bargaining on your part, where I need you to eat this and then you can have your dessert or whatever it is. But what I can say is it is one of the most effective frameworks for shifting mealtime relationships. It is really important that when you do this framework, that you do it from a place of love and connection. It's certainly not a, well, bad luck, you didn't eat at your dinner time, so therefore you don't get anything else until tomorrow morning. That is not the place of caring that this framework comes from. What you are saying to your child is you're making it predictable, this is when we have a meal time, this is when you have a snack, and I can help you wait until snack time comes around. But definitely coming from a place of love, care, and connection, not from a punitive behavioral perspective. As a caveat, if your child has a feeding disorder, ARPID, which is avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, swallowing difficulties, nutritional concerns, developmental differences, only implement this framework with the advice of a skilled professional. Food-based issues can fuel emotional and relational ones. Relational issues can fuel emotional and food-based ones. They're deeply intertwined. If our children fall out of relationship with us, then the relationship problem can manifest as a food andor an emotional problem. What we want to do is we want to be the ones that take the lead, take the lead in nourishing and providing food for our children. If our child has got allergies, then we absolutely need to take the lead in taking care of that. By letting our children know that they don't need to worry about what food's going to be provided, then we're letting them know that this is a way that we can care for them. Now I know that for some families out there, food insecurity is a real concern. And that's a bigger issue than I can really tackle in a short podcast. When we think about mealtimes and when we think about those challenging behaviors we see with our children refusing food, throwing food in the floor, refusing to eat, then if we can get curious about what's really going on in terms of their relationships, their relationships with food, our relationships with food, the rituals that we create around mealtimes, that's how we can create a pathway to reducing the mealtime madness. There are some other practical things that can really help. Involving children in growing and preparing food, if that's practical. I understand that that's not practical for everybody. If we can stay neutral about food as much as we can, we can talk about the characteristics of food, how it tastes, how it smells, what it looks like. We also know that we have our own individual preferences around food. There are certainly things that I don't like to eat, and I know that if I judge a food really quickly, my child is less likely to want to try it. Don't force your child to take just one bite of something. That's not something that's going to be helpful in the long term in terms of them feeling safe and trustworthy around food. Don't make dessert conditional on whether or not they eat their main meal. If dessert is something that's part of the meal for everybody, then make it available to them, not contingent upon whether they eat something else on their plate. Offer food from a place of love and connection. We can let our children know we've been thinking about them when we bring them their favourite snack. This doesn't have to be a treat food. My 11-year-old face lights up when I bring him a container of chopped-up carrots when he's sitting down having some chill time after school. And every time he looks at me and says, Oh Mom, I love this. It's my favorite thing. Thank you so much. Little did I ever know that chopping up a carrot and sticking it in a bowl would be the thing that lights his face up and has him feeling so loved and cared about. And if we can focus on the relationship and the attachment and look at food and nourishing our children from that space, that will lead to a reduction in the mealtime madness. As usual, none of these strategies are quick fixes. Sometimes it'll seem difficult. Sometimes you really do just want to get dinner time over so you can get on with the next thing. But I'm betting that most of you want to nourish your children and make sure that they've had enough good food to eat so that they can engage in their learning, engage in their play, be less grumpy, be more cooperative. And as parents, we do worry that our children are getting enough of the right food. I want you to get curious about your child and how they show up at mealtimes. I want you to stay curious about yourself and what your child's responses at mealtimes show up for you. And know that if mealtime challenges are not something you're able to find easy resolution to by yourself, there is professional support and help available, whether it's from a nutritionist who can support you with the nutritional content of what your child is eating, a speech and language therapist who specializes in feeding that can help you unpack some feeding challenges that your child might have. Sometimes you might need to see your GP or a pediatrician. Don't be afraid to reach out and ask for help. So, what part of your child's world are you finding hardest to make sense of? Leave your question in the comments. It might inspire a future episode. If you're enjoying the podcast, make sure to follow or subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. Until next time, stay curious.