How to Stumble Over the Cure to Picky Eating on the Road to Duty

Aug 1, 2013 by Anna Migeon

“Happiness is not found by looking for it. You stumble over happiness on the road to duty.” — Dr. Bob Jones Sr.

If your child is a picky eater, you are looking for the cure. You are probably working hard to get him to eat more of the things you want him to eat. You are probably talking about it a good bit at mealtimes. You are probably offering your child incentives to eat. You may dread mealtimes. You no doubt worry a lot about your child’s eating. You might be changing what foods you offer in response to your child’s pickiness. You’re doing all you know to do. You are looking for happiness.

The problem is, and you’ve probably noticed it, that pressuring your child to eat isn’t solving the problem. It’s not that you don’t care or aren’t trying, but working hard at solving the problem is getting you…

Not in the top five: my own favorite blog post

Jan 4, 2011 by Anna Migeon

Happy New Year, as we start 2011 helping you improve your child’s diet and appetite together!  Let me know how I can help you.

The top five Sacred Appetite reader favorite blog posts this year don’t even include my personal favorite: How to Get Kids to Eat at the Table, Part III. It comes in response to a reader’s question about how to get her kids to quit dawdling at the table. I think it’s underrated. It sums up well a key idea that I’ve formulated this year: instead of ever pushing food on kids, look for ways to pull food away, restrict their access to food,…

Why Dessert as a Bribe is a Bad Bargain

Aug 13, 2010 by Anna Migeon

Let’s just say we want to eat ice cream every night as dessert after dinner. We’re grown-ups, so we eat our dinner first. The problem comes when the kids, who don’t care about what’s good for them, just want to eat the ice cream and skip the salad, meat and veggies.

So we make a bargain, for their own good: they have to eat dinner before they can have ice cream. Sometimes it works. Sometimes maybe it’s the only way we can make the children eat their dinner.  It becomes complicated, though: just how much dinner must one eat to get the ice cream? If they won’t eat what we want them to eat, we deny them the ice cream. Then they throw fits. Should we quit eating ice cream? Should we let the kids do what they want? Things are not going well, and no answer to the problem…

Six ways to orchestrate kids' desire to eat what you want them to eat, Part II

Aug 5, 2010 by Anna Migeon

This post continues from Six ways to orchestrate kids’ desire to eat what you want them to eat, Part I

Four: Keep them from eating: be out doing something fun. Distract them from eating at times you don’t want them to eat. Take them to the park, the library, anywhere where it will be easy enough to keep them away from food.

Then have a meal prepared ahead of time to serve upon arrival, and they will be too hungry to turn it down.

Marlena’s kids would be foraging in the kitchen all afternoon, after not really eating lunch.  So they would spoil their appetite for dinner, thus perpetuating the cycle. They would need a “second dinner” before bedtime, after refusing dinner, in order to stay asleep all night. She decided the only way to stop them would be to get them out of the house.

I know you can’t…