Rainbow Blog

Picky eaters:Parents are talking but not with their kids – Part 1

posted by: Dara

At five months pregnant I was digging a vegetable garden ‘” at eight months, I was harvesting … on my due date, I picked blueberries. We bought a food processor, and even before my child was born, I was mindfully preparing his first foods.

He loved his unsweetened stewed rhubarb, fresh garden carrots, and especially the blueberries. On his first birthday, our menu consisted of raw fruits and vegetables, tabouleh, spaghetti squash, hummus and pita chips. If ever I came across a food he didn’t like, I’d just sprinkle some curry powder on it and he’d eat it with relish.

Then, around his third birthday, the fairy tale suddenly came to a screeching halt. He didn’t want vegetables ‘” hated most homemade items. His preferred condiment switched from curry powder to ketchup.

We’re still not sure what happened. Partly, we know, the textures of foods began to disturb him. But we also know we made mistakes.

We offered alternatives ‘” peanut butter sandwiches became a fairly constant meal. In an effort not to turn mealtimes into a power struggle, we rolled over and played dead.

We followed the advice of ‘experts’ and offered vegetables with every meal but didn’t insist he eat them. He got worse. Suddenly, rice and non-processed meats were out.

When I wrote my first column, a commentator suggested that I give my son vegetables for breakfast, lunch and supper. Little did he know, we often do. Muffins, cookies, pancakes, hamburgers, and especially pasta, always have vegetables in them in our house. That food processor is still going strong almost six years later.

We make sure to tell our son that his food does include vegetables and he’s OK with that as long as he can’t see them or feel them. I can understand the texture issue. I hate mushrooms and raw tomatoes but love tomato sauce and mushroom flavouring in casseroles.

Last week our son asked to eat raw red and green peppers. Then ate his supper without me having to puree and hide the yellow zucchini and onions.

I danced, I cried and I immediately followed him to his Today I Ate a Rainbow chart to put his magnets on and sing the Rainbow song together. I’d like to say he now eats vegetables like he did those first years, but we’re still working on it. There are some things we’ve done that I know didn’t work. Others definitely helped; we’ll continue the learning process with him.

Things that didn’t work
The things that didn’t work are the very ones most experts now suggest. In one book on the subject I was told to ignore the issue, don’t make a big deal of it as this will lead to power struggles. But it was when we began making an issue of it that he saw how important it was to us.

Another article told me not to withhold dessert or treats if he doesn’t finish all his supper. Another told me to reward any vegetable eating with praise, treats, toys. Neither of these worked.

What did work was a system we discovered using the Today I Ate a Rainbow chart that allowed us to praise efforts towards eating healthy fruits and vegetables and offer a lot of praise when the ‘rainbow’ was complete.

For over a year our son would receive a sticker on his behaviour chart for eating vegetables. He never cared about not getting those stickers. The moment we brought the new chart in the house, he began to try for those rewards.

I’ve thought a lot about why the Rainbow chart works and I think it’s because it does exactly what a lot of ‘experts’ tell us not to do. It encourages us to make an issue of vegetables and healthy eating. It offers a model for discussion that a child can understand.

While I sometimes worried that we’d cause long-term food issues by talking about food too much, I discovered that the more we talked about it the more interested, concerned and willing to take action our children became.

My children know that too much McDonalds will make them overweight.

They know that being overweight means it will be harder for them to play and that they could get very sick. They’re aware that Mommy won’t serve processed foods because sodium can give them high blood pressure, which can make them tired and sick. They know that lots of sugar and, for my son at least, red food colouring, makes them act bad and that makes Mommy and Daddy mad.

We’ve talked about all these things and we’ve also talked about the reasons why we need to eat certain foods.

Despite what I’ve read from ‘experts,’ making an issue of what we eat and don’t eat has not led to power struggles, but to discussion and conversation.

Now it’s not just Mommy being mindful of what we eat, but all of us.

Dara Squires www.readilyaparent.com