Tonight was a victory: our entire family ate the same thing for dinner! Every single person (including Sam) enjoyed their food and didn't require a word of prodding to convince them to gobble it up. This hasn't happened in our house for over three years.
Granted, we had apple cinnamon pancakes with maple syrup for dinner, a meal most sane people would enjoy without much persuasion. But if you had asked Ben or myself four months ago if we thought it was possible to convince Ellis to eat a pancake, we would have been skeptical. It's a small success, but from everything we've researched, we should be happy for the baby steps Ellis is taking.
If you know anyone with similar feeding issues to Ellis', or even picky-eating issues that are not quite as extreme as his, I would pass along two recommendations: feeding therapy (and a few tricks we've learned from our beloved Miss Kathy) and "Food Chaining." Allow me to elaborate . . .
1. Feeding therapy. We have been taking Ellis to visit his friend, Miss Kathy, for weekly visits since August. She is a speech therapist trained in feeding therapy who deals with kids like Ellis all the time. She told me when we first began that a) I didn't cause Ellis' feeding problems (although I may have influenced them in certain directions); b) his problems are a combination of sensory/texture issues, anxiety, and behavior; c) the problems wouldn't go anywhere without regular feeding therapy. While I'm certain someone could figure out how to "fix" this problem at home, I sure am happy to have some guidance. For one thing, it's great to have someone besides the parent helping Ellis out. He is ten times more likely to do something Kathy asks him to do than something I ask him to do. She's very good at working with him, and he adores her. For another thing, she has some amazing tricks up her sleeve that I never would have thought of.
What are her tricks? She has a few strategies that really seem to work. When we go to see her, we bring a few foods that Ellis doesn't normally eat. She has him decide what he wants to do with the food (no pressure to eat it). He can look at it, touch it, count it, smell it, lick it, kiss it, cut it, stir it, put it on his tongue, etc. Over time, this helps him get used to foods that are unfamiliar and scary to him. She always pushes him just up to his limit, but not so far that he loses his trust in her. She'll have him take a piece of the food and hold it on his tongue (no hands!); then they count for 5 or 10 seconds and then take it off. They'll do that 5 or 6 times, then try holding it between the teeth (no hands again!). She'll change it up in different ways (hold all the different pieces of food on the tongue; try different sides of the mouth, etc) and just keep on manipulating it in as many ways as possible. Anything to make it fun so that he's no longer worrying about the food, but his fingers, tongue, lips, and teeth are used to handling the food. Then when he's that comfortable with it, she'll ask him to take the tiniest bite out of the side of his mouth. I was SHOCKED the first time I saw him go along with this. She convinced him to eat a Ritz cracker for the first time this way, and then did it with many other foods. She can't always convince him, but at least he's getting more comfortable with each food.
We also have feeding therapy "steps" every day at home together, where we try to do the same things with different types of food. He's not nearly as responsive to me as he is to her, but we've had a lot of successes (among the many tantrums and tears).
Which leads me to talking about
2. Food Chaining. A friend of mine introduced me to this brilliant book called
Food Chaining. It may not be the best book for a parent of a regular picky eater -- it's definitely geared more specifically toward parents of resistant or problem eaters. But I still think the principles could work for a regular picky eater. The concept is that you take a food that the child eats and enjoys, and find a way to map it (through many steps) to a food that you want them to eat.
For example, I wanted Ellis to eat a peanut butter sandwich. I know he likes cookies, so I started with Nutter Butters and created a food chain going from Nutter Butters to Ritz Bits to regular Ritz crackers spread with real peanut butter to Ritz with peanut butter and honey to a peanut butter and honey sandwich. That might sound easy, but then each step was a complex process (using feeding therapy tricks described above). It took me 45 minutes to convince him to eat a Nutter Butter. I had to dissect a Reese's Peanut Butter cup (which he likes), let him taste that peanut butter plain, then let him eat chocolate chips with little bits of the peanut butter from the Nutter Butters on them, gradually increasing the peanut butter. Then eventually, he ate a half of a mini Nutter Butter with a chocolate chip on it. After that, he was sold on Nutter Butters. We celebrated that day because Ellis discovered that he likes peanut butter! We talked about it a lot for a few days and ate Nutter Butters until he was convinced that he really loves peanut butter, and then we were able to move slowly onto the next step.
Food chaining seems like a pretty obvious concept, but it wasn't something we would have thought of on our own. For one thing, I think the idea is to break things down into teeny little baby steps. You can't just try a food with your child once, and then give up when they reject it. We tried to convince Ellis many times before to eat pancakes with maple syrup, but he would never even consider licking the syrup before! So instead of jumping right to pancakes and trying to convince him that they tasted sweet like candy, we moved him from trying pumpkin muffins (which he likes) to trying pumpkin pancakes. Then we added "frosting syrup" to the pancakes. Then I got him to taste some syrup in a "dipping festival" we had in which we tried dipping oyster crackers in all sorts of dips (yogurt, honey, peanut butter, jelly, syrup, etc). Then I tried giving him pumpkin pancakes with "frosting syrup" and maple syrup. Then tonight's cinnamon pancakes with maple syrup were a breeze!
The other concept that I've really liked from this book is "flavor masking." It's the idea that if you can get your child to try a food with a flavor they know they like, then they will get used to a more subtle version of the flavor they're unsure of. This is the concept behind my trying the chocolate chip with the peanut butter as described above. It's also why I wanted him to try all of the different dips, because if he can fall in love with maple syrup or peanut butter, that opens up a whole new window of things he might try with those flavors in them. I've also done a bit of "texture masking." Knowing he likes granola bars, I got Ellis to try a Special K granola bar that had a bit of dried fruit in it. Then I was able to take little bits of granola bar and put Craisins in it and eventually (30 minutes into the process) get him to eat a Craisin plain. And who knows where that might take us?
I know to most people it might seem crazy that I'm rejoicing that my child ate a peanut butter sandwich, a few Craisins, and a pancake with syrup. But these are things that really seemed IMPOSSIBLE to us a few months ago. It also seems crazy to me that I'm suddenly going down the grocery aisle buying things like Nutter Butters, Ritz Bits, and chocolate covered nuts. I even bought Pop Tarts a couple of weeks ago . . . all in the name of food chaining! I seriously never thought I'd see the day when I first of all purchased Pop Tarts, and then spent 15 minutes trying to persuade my child to eat them! I've really had to let go of some of my food snobbery to make way for these baby steps. I'm just so happy with the success Ellis has had so far, although I know we still have a LONG way to go toward "normal," let alone "healthy."
If you're really interested in seeing our progress so far and where we plan to go next in our baby steps, you can check out this
Food Map that Ben and I created. You can zoom in and scroll side to side if needed. The foods circled in blue are the foods Ellis ate before we started feeding therapy -- basically 9 different foods. The foods circled in green are the foods we have added since August, with the date marking when we added them. The foods with no circles are some ideas we have for different directions we might go with the food chaining. If you have any ideas for other foods we might try that might lead us to more food options, we'd love to hear your suggestions! Also, Ben put a link to Ellis' Food Map on the sidebar of our blog, in case you want to continue tracking his progress (or if you are considering inviting him over for dinner and want to know what to make :).
Kind of makes it look like we don't have a life, huh? Well, it helps us to keep track of our progress and goals, and it makes me happy. I just love this boy too much to let him go off to college with a suitcase full of Gerber purées. We'll get there eventually, I hope.
This is me with my café badge, dealing with the aftermath of the event, which is still taking over our house...
