Food

Welcome to 
Food for Sensational Children!

I hope you find some ideas that will help you feed your picky eaters. Remember, wether your child has SPD or is just a "picky eater", you can't "fix it" overnight. Helping your child enjoy a healthy diet will take years of patience and restraint! Forcing children to "eat your vegetables" will only teach them to "hate their vegetables". Forcing and bribing (yes, we all say it…."no dessert until you finish your veggies") only develops unhealthy attitudes towards food. If you don't want your children to eat dessert…..don't make dessert. And if you have a child with SPD that only eats dessert, use the dessert as a stepping stone to a more sophisticated diet. 

My sensational son, John, only ate mac and cheese from a box….now he eats everything! It took years, but I tempted his taste buds two ways; by continuously cooking nutritious foods and eating them myself and by slowly introducing them in his mac and cheese. Slowly doesn't mean cutting up or even shredding pieces of carrots (that would only cause the food to fly in a temper tantrum). The idea is to add a pinch of it so he can't see it or taste it. There won't be any nutritional value, but his sensitive taste buds will slowly become desensitized. And here's where the patience comes in….increasing the pinch to a larger pinch will take months. DON'T do it right away! It'll take years before he'll eat an actual carrot. YEARS. In the meantime, cooking the nutritional foods and eating them myself also helped John and other siblings; children learn through example (by watching their parents). They also learn to appreciate different foods by being exposed to the smells. Unfortunately, John was also sensitive to smells and the smell of certain foods made him vomit. I had to avoid chicken soup (one of my favourite meals) for years! 

Patience….lots of patience!