How to talk to your child about food – Food For Kids Podcast episode 33

Joanne Roach (00:13)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. In today's episode I'm going to talk about how to talk about food with your child if you're trying to take the pressure off them and especially if you have a fussy or anxious eater.

Way back in episode 9 we talked about why it's probably not your fault if your child's a bit fussy with new foods but there is still a lot you can do to help them if they are and we've had a couple of great children's dietitians on talking about why it's really important to take the pressure off children around food so I'm not going to go over those things again do go check out episode 9 if you want to hear more.

I am going to go over why it's important to be careful about how we talk about food at the table and then give some suggestions for ways that we can talk about food when exploring food with our child that isn't linked to their being pressured to eat.

All of this is covered in my 90 minute familiarity workshop which I will link to in the show notes in case you're interested in it. It's only £7.49 and it runs through all the science of why children can be fussy and gives you ideas and printables to help you build familiarity with them away from the table. But we're just going to go through the communication part of that today.

One of the important things that children's food experts will tell you is that when we are well-meaningly trying to encourage our children to be more adventurous, we often focus on the food and talk about the food way too much at the point of offering the food, and that can often feel like pressure to children.

Obviously we know that telling a child to try something, persuading them, cajoling them, bribing them, all of that's a kind of pressure, but sometimes just being over-enthusiastic ourselves in a way which isn't natural or over-praising children for eating can also feel like pressure, especially to a child who has developed a lot of fear and defensiveness around food.

So it's really important not to talk about the food too much at the table or at any point where your child might feel like you talking about it is leading up to you asking them or wanting them to eat it.

This can be quite hard and we have to be really honest with ourselves that sometimes we are pretending to be casual about something when we do really actually have an agenda.

We can get really anxious about our children's eating and that will seep through into how we communicate about it. And we have to realise that our kids pick up on those unconscious cues and know that we have some hopes or expectations of them. They might know that you aren't going to make them eat something, but they can also feel the weight of your hope or frustration and know that they will disappoint you if they don't. And that's a different kind of pressure.

So what should we say at the table?

Apart from introductory or hosting descriptions of what the food is if it's not obvious so that people know what they're choosing from and then functional things like could you please pass the beans across or would anybody like more tomatoes we should try to talk about other things.

If a thing that you would naturally always do is to compliment the chef or thank your partner for making the dinner, if you would do that at home or in a restaurant, or if you would normally ask questions about the food in a restaurant or at home, then by all means do so, but make sure it's genuinely directed at the person you're saying it to and not secretly side aimed at your child. So you might ask, is this a different sauce to last time? Or I really like this version better than with cheese and when it just had the breadcrumbs, something like that. But what we tend to do when we're stressed about our child's eating is subconsciously try and use more of that than is natural in the hopes of engaging our child with food and that really can come across to them and feel manufactured.

So if in doubt err on the side of saying less about the food and more about other things while enjoying a meal time together. Talk about what happened at nursery or who they played with today or for the adults what happened at work. Talk about something that's coming up or something interesting in the news. Talk about other things. What we're trying to get across to children is that meal times are something fun where everybody shares family time together and although food is obviously very important to the fun times in people's lives the point of meal times is to get together and share loving memories with each other.

So we're trying to build up that overall impression of when I come to the table it's going to be nice and I'm going to get to join in the conversation. As always what we're trying to do is to build up the number of positive meetings with a range of different foods whether they eat them or not. So wholly positive encounters with individual foods where your child is exposed to a food and it is either neutral or positive and no one expects them to eat it or like it.

This can be at the table in the context of food being on the table and available but not being pushed at them and them not being expected to eat it or it can be away from the table in the familiarity exercises that I talk about in that workshop but again with no expectation of eating the food.

So if you've managed to do this, you've managed to take the pressure off your mealtimes and created an environment where food is not the focus of everyone's attention except to describe it and maybe thank the person who made it.

You've got to a place where your child really feels like they're allowed to leave food on their plate or not choose foods from the selection on the table, depending on how you've served it. You've worked on taking the pressure away and now you want to try some things to build their confidence and that's going to include some kind of interaction with food and communicating about it in some way. So how do you talk about unfamiliar foods?

If you're exploring a food away from the table or if your child looks genuinely interested in talking about a food then try shifting away from a yes no type of talk where the yes is yes I like it and the no is no I don't. That's the idea of yummy vs yucky. This reinforces the idea that opinions about taste are static and binary and that foods are one or the other and that they stay that way.

Instead, try shifting to talking about properties of food rather than whether they are winning or losing the taste test. Don't forget that there are many stages to eating and tasting is just the final one. So you can talk about how a food looks, how it feels, its size or weight or shape, the differences between the inside and the outside, how it changes when it's being handled, prepared or cooked, all the textures and smells and colours. You can talk about the name of the food, whether it sounds like what it looks like, if it's like another food, what they think it will be like, where they think it comes from or how it grows. All of these are without any expectation of eating it.

So some examples might be noticing that a red pepper has gone really dark in colour now that it's been cooked or that the inside of a cucumber is soft and has seeds but the outside is more like a hard skin or that a mushroom feels rubbery to the touch when it's raw but quite slimy and wet when it's cooked

Or could be a food fact like the fact that the part of a carrot that we eat grows under the ground and actually it's the plant's way of storing sugar over winter to have energy for next year so that's why they are sweet. Or that apples and pears are in the same plant family as a rose bush.

In the mini workshop I give printables which enable children to explore foods each month using different skills to make it fun, observing, describing, investigating and so on. All of these use some kind of talking about food without needing to eat it, but all of them build familiarity and confidence with foods.

The printables correspond to those different steps in the process of learning to eat a new food, so they're a good shortcut if you want to go check them out. But if you just think about all the parts of getting to know a food, you can talk about them in all of those areas. Talk about foods in the supermarket, even if you're not buying them, point out something that looks particularly big or juicy or colourful this week. Ask children to help with small prep tasks like just cutting one item up or washing something and talk about it while they do. Talking about it helps them to cement that memory about that interaction and notice their senses, but only as long as there's no expectation of having to eat the food while you're talking about it so they don't shut down their defences.

One of the downloads in the course is a list of adjectives that you can use with children to describe foods and they are split into the different steps to eating so words for how foods look, words for how foods feel, words for how foods smell, and finally how foods taste. If your child isn't in a phase of being comfortable trying new foods, you can just use the looks, feels and smells words for the new foods you explore and save the taste words for things that your child already likes.

It is important for them to have words to describe their safe foods too, so that it isn't just yuck and yum for those either. What we're trying to do is build up their vocabulary of words that describe something without approving or disapproving of it. The full list is in the £7.49 workshop which again I'll link to in the show notes, but I have a simpler list on my website which you can download for free and that can be a good starting point so I'll also link to that. You and your child can see if there are words on there that work for a food that you want to talk about and you can add your own words, real or made up. The list is your tool for enabling them to talk about food in a completely natural, descriptive way, which is how we want them to shift towards looking at foods which are not good or bad, friendly or dangerous, yummy or yucky, they are just foods, they are morally neutral and they are just a thing in our environment like our clothes or our toys or even our friends, all of which have properties that we can learn to describe and some of those properties we'll like and some of them we won't and over time we might change our minds about them too.

The main two things to remember is that we can reduce pressure and anxiety about food by removing too much food talk from the point of eating. And secondly, we can build up their confidence about approaching food by building up their vocabulary and knowledge of food as part of their general understanding of their world.

Start by talking about foods they already like and feel comfortable with so that they know you don't have an agenda and then you can gradually move on to interacting with and describing more unfamiliar foods. Keep it fun, keep it playful and never expect them to eat anything.

As always, if you think your child might need some additional help with their eating if they're showing a lot of anxiety around food or if they have a very small or diminishing range of safe foods, then please do talk to a professional about it. In episode 4, Emma Shafqat of Dietitian with a Difference ran through some of the things to look out for, so check that out if you're not sure. There are lots of great children's dietitians available now both on the NHS or in private services.  So go to the British Dietetic Association website to find one near you or look at some of the brilliant people who've been on this podcast or who I flag up on Instagram with their great content. But if your child is just going through fairly standard fussiness and needing a bit of a reset with their confidence with food, why not start by downloading the free adjectives list or buy the mini workshop with the printables find some ways away from the table this month to get your child talking about foods in a natural way and in contexts where they don't have to eat anything.

In the meantime, try to talk about food less at the table and see if their confidence handling and talking about food grows and forget about eating new foods for now that will grow over time as their confidence grows as and when they're ready. I'll put the links to the workshop and the free list in the show notes and to some great posts about this topic by dietitians on Instagram so please go and check those out. I hope you found this useful as a starting point. Have a great weekend and I hope to see you on Monday and in the meantime, happy eating!

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

01:24 Why it matters how we talk about food with kids

02:44 How to talk about food at the table

04:58 How to talk about food away from the table

08:02 Helping children to talk about food

09:31 Summary and outro