Tips for Getting Picky Eaters to Try New Foods

Below are the links to the products that were talked about in the Speechie show:

• My Munch Bug Site: www.mymunchbug.com
• Picky Eater Course (Use Promo Code: mymunchbug20): https://mymunchbug.com/picky-eater-course/
• Melanie’s Books: https://mymunchbug.com/books/

If you’d rather listen to the audio version of the Speechie Show, click here:

Or if you prefer to read the transcript, see below:

Welcome to the Speechie Show! Being a speech-language pathologist often means having too much work and not enough planning time. To beat the overwhelm, we’re bringing you the tricks and tools that will make your job a little bit easier.

Carrie:  Hi everybody and welcome to the Speechie Show.  I’m Carrie Clark with speechandlanguagekids.com and we’re here today with Melanie Potock from mymunchbug.com. Thank you for joining us today Melanie.

Melanie: Hello Carrie!

Carrie:  Hello!  Alright, so we are talking today about picky eaters.  So, if you are a parent of picky eaters or a speech language pathologist with a caseload of picky eaters, stay tuned with us today we’re going to share the three E’s to encourage a child to try new foods who is a picky eater. If you are new to the show my name is Carrie Clark and I am from SpeechandLanguagekids.com and this is The Speechie Show.  We come on once a week. We hang out with a speech and language pathologist and we share some tips and we help you with a very specific Speech & Language or speeding problem and give some good giveaways at the end. So, if you are joining us on Facebook Live stay tuned for the giveaways here in a moment. And as we’re getting started and everyone is rolling in go ahead and type in the comments where you’re joining us from today, we’d like to see where everyone is. Alright, go ahead Melanie and introduce yourself and talk about what’s going on over at mymunchbug.com.

Melanie:  I’d love to. One thing all the listeners need to know is we’re having a little bit of a delay and so if I pause for a second to wait for the processing I’m just waiting for the conversation to finish on your end so bear with me. My name is Melanie Potock and I am a speech and language pathologist. But my specialty is eating. Either it’s a child that’s the garden-variety picky eater that’s also common. In fact, if you look on the American speech-language-hearing Association website you’ll see that 25 to 45% of typically developing children will have feeding difficulty. That’s how common it is. Or whether I’m working with a child with Autism or perhaps a child with Down Syndrome or maybe it’s just a premature baby who’s really having trouble moving through what we call the developmental process of feeding, that’s what I get to do. I’m All About Kids in food. And I’m an author of four books on the topic that we will be talking about a little later. And I’m a national speaker on feeding therapy.

Carrie:  We had a little bit of a technical problem we are sorry everybody, but we’re going to try to push through and get this interview to work. We lost just a little bit at the end, but we heard that you are an author and you are a speaker, as well.

Melanie:  Terrific! If there’s anything I can fill in just let me know. But we can certainly just get to the good stuff which is how do we help kids learn to eat.

Carrie:  Absolutely, absolutely! Alright we have a few people joining us. We’ve got someone from Florida, well a couple from Florida. Welcome everyone we hope you’re getting some good information and hope the technical trouble is not too much. Alright so we’re going to go ahead and share the three E’s that are the ways that you’re going to be able to encourage a child who is a picky eater. So, the first E we are going to talk about today is expose.  Melanie talk to us about what expose means for the 3 E’s.

Melanie:   Absolutely! So, the three E’s is a concept I came up with a few years ago. And the very first eat is expose. Expose means that we provide opportunities for kids to just get to know, let’s say vegetables, that’s always the big one, right?  We get to know vegetables, for example. Or making friends with vegetables. It’s their first play date with vegetables. So that might include gardening, going to the produce aisle, going to the Farmers Market. It might include being exposed to vegetables via picture box. There’s good research that shows that toddler to read picture books about vegetables with their mom and dad actually are more likely to try that new vegetable. So, it’s that simple daily routine that actually help kids learn to become more adventurous eaters.

Carrie:   That’s wonderful.  I had never heard the bit about vegetable books. That sounds fun. Wonderful! Okay that’s the first one you said was expose and how long do you do this before you start moving on to one of the other E’s?  Or are you doing these things all simultaneously?

Melanie: it’s really up to the family. You don’t have to wait for a specific time, but certainly keep in mind that if you have a very hesitant eater and your family, that we’re going to take this process very slowly step by step. So, you might just want to first start with exposure. Because you don’t want to push children to do any more than they can do on that particular day, but our job is just too gently encourage. So, if we move on to the next E which as you said is exploration, that has more to do with getting our hands involved. And there’s lots of good research that shows that kids who explore new food groups and vegetables and making crafts and cooking with those vegetables it gives them exposure and exploration. So, they are pretty tight connected there.

Carrie:   Okay we had just a little bit of an audio glitch there but you were talking about using cooking and crafts as your exploration activities. Was there another one we missed in there?

Melanie:  well just keep in mind that exposure and exploration are very closely connected. So, you might include as we say gardening, but you might include cooking. You might include crafts. We were talking about something as …click here to read the full transcript.