Diet and nutrition play an important role in everyone’s life. In children or adults with autism restoring and maintaining a healthy gut ecology is uttermost vital.
Unfortunately, in most individuals with autism mealtime is associated with strong conflicts with caregivers, tantrums, crying, and even nausea. There could be a multitude of underlying reasons for it and each child needs individualized attention by a certified health care provider.
However, any parent CAN help children wake up their brain more to new possibilities and eventually move out of this struggle circle. We have put together a list of the most common mistakes parents are making when trying to introduce a more varied diet to support healthy nutrition in their children. Years of experience and our growing understanding of how the brain learns have shown the following “strategies” to be not only counter-productive but often damaging in the long run.
46-89 % of Autistic Children Have Mealtime Challenges
Families of these children are mostly struggling on their own with little to no understanding from family and friends. Studies from 2006 estimate that 46 to 89 percent of children with autism develop mealtime challenges (Ledfort & Gast, 2006).
Here is the list:
- Force-feeding (“make a clean plate”, “take one more bite”)
- Constant prompting (“keep eating”, “look at your plate”, “swallow the food”, “drink some water now”)
- Following children around the house with food
- Sneaking in bites
- Feeding the child instead of letting the child eat alone (when able to)
- Hiding unwanted foods in favorite foods
- Strong encouragement
- Loud enthusiasm
- Praise (“good girl/boy” suggests that when the child is not eating he/she is bad)
- Punishments/rewards
- Emotional blackmail (“good girl would eat their dinner”)
- Bribery
- Tricking children into eating
- Negotiations
- Comparing to siblings or other children
- Exaggerated role-modeling
- Unnatural behavior of parents in efforts to establish a stress-free environment
- Playing games with food
- Telling made-up stories about food
- Desensitizing
- Focusing on charts, data, and “strategies”
- Talking too much
- Moving too fast
- Internally expecting the child to not eat/prejudice
- Being anxious
- Have rigid goals about feeding outcomes
- Feeling fear
- Feeling sadness
- Feeling despair
- Feeling anger
- Thinking negative thoughts (“this will never end”, “I am so frustrated”)
- Emitting a strong desire for the child to eat – thinking pressuring thoughts (“Please, please eat finally!”)
- Focusing too much on the child during mealtime
- Watching every move and bite of our child
- Calling child “picky eater” and describing child to others as one who doesn’t eat anything new
- Saying “thank you” if the child ate
- Making it all about you (“you make me happy when you eat/sad if you don’t eat”; “you don’t want to make me feel sad, do you?”)