Making Mealtime Fun

Do you ever feel like you are in a rut? You try to make healthy, nutritious meals and your child turns up his or her nose. They won’t eat or they will only eat the same few foods. If this sounds like mealtime at your house, this FAQ is for you. Try some of these fun ideas and make mealtime fun and enjoyable for all. It’s amazing how simple some of these ideas are and how effective they can be. Be creative and see where you get.

Family meals: is the first step to enjoyable mealtimes. This is by far the most important step to happy mealtimes and successful eating. You are an important role model. Your children want to be like you.

Seated mealtimes: Make sure that your child is sitting during the entire mealtime. Children who are allowed to wander and graze throughout meals will never learn healthy eating patterns. The first step is to decide on a reasonable time that your child needs to be seated. Let your child know that even if he/she decides not to eat he/she needs to remain seated. A timer can help.

Turn off the TV. TV should never be on during mealtime. When the TV is on, it distracts the child from processing that he is eating or what is being eaten. Your child may not learn the important self-regulatory cues of hunger and satiation. If your child is addicted to mealtime TV, or you need to distract your child to eat, a comprehensive feeding evaluation may be indicated. Your feeding specialist will design a program to help you have every meal a TV free meal.

Allow polite spit: Encourage your child to try the age and skill appropriate foods that you are eating. Let them know that they can politely spit out the food in a napkin if they want to. Older children may be required to chew first (maybe as many times as their age). This will increase the willingness to swallow new foods.

Other easy ways to get kids excited about and involved in eating:

• Make a grocery list together and recruit their help at the grocery store.

• Give your child nutritious choices of what to eat for lunch and let them pick their meal.

• Plant a small garden or herb garden. You do not need a large space it can be done in a house/apartment window. • Have a picnic and feed stuffed animals, dolls, etc.

• Feed ducks at a local lake (or feed pretend ducks indoors). Taking the focus off of the child often relieves the stress of trying a different food. We have had many parents report that their child who would not eat, eagerly ate the duck’s food. Make sure that your bread, etc is not moldy just in case they decide to try it.

• Let your child help prepare foods. As appropriate, let them take foods out of their packages, stir, cut, serve, etc.

• Involve your child in cleaning up. Encourage them to pick up the foods on their plate and put or throw away. This gives them more unstressed opportunities to have exposure to the food.

• Use straws, Popsicle sticks, tooth picks etc. in place of forks to pick up foods.

• Count fruit, veggies, etc. on their plate or as they are eating.

• Fill and pour food into small cups.

Ways to make ordinary foods fun:

• Change the shape of routine foods buy using cookie cutters or just cut into different shapes. Let your child decide what shape to cut it into.

• Make “sandwiches” with foods other than bread (use pancakes, crackers, etc.)

• Baked potatoes make good sail boats, a baby carrot as the mast, and a piece of cheese as the sail.

• Dipping foods makes everything more fun: yogurt, pudding, ranch dressing, ketchup, barbecue sauce, etc. • Make smoothies and let your child decide and place the ingredients.

• Add colorful sprinkles to foods (they have natural colored sprinkles if your worried about food coloring. Encourage your child to pick them out with her fingers for sensory exploration.

• Create bread balls out of sandwiches.

• Toast sandwiches and cut into sticks or different shapes. Cookie cutters work great for this.

• Eat purees through a straw. Bonus: it is an excellent way to increase posterior tongue elevation for swallowing.

• Cut foods into different sizes and name them after favorite cartoon characters.

• Creatively name foods (toasted sandwiches=zaps, carrots=rabbit sticks).

Fun Foods:

• Potato Smiles by McCains (frozen section)

• Alphabet cookies, animal shape cookies and crackers

• Macaroni & Cheese shaped like cartoon characters, alphabet or other shapes

• Cheese shapes, Veggie sticks