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A story about Meg

Meg is a picky eater with autism who does what I call, a lot of “drive by” eating. Drive by eating is when your honey has a plate of food at the dinner table that they cruise by, grab a bite from, and pop in their mouth on their way to the next thing. It’s like a childhood equivalent to using the McDonald’s drive thru one bite at a time.

Meg’s mother asks Meg to sit for meals, but she frequently doesn’t. Sometimes Meg will sit down for a minute, but then be up and moving again. It’s almost as though there is a motor in her that won’t let her rest.

When I started to work with Meg’s family, I asked the mother how long mealtimes usually last. She said it was difficult to say, because she leaves Meg’s plate available for a couple of hours at a time and Meg may show more or less interest at various times during that 2-hour interval.

Meg’s mother also shares that her daughter never seems to have much of an appetite. She only has a few favorite foods, and she has a hard time if anything new or different is on her plate.

Meg’s story is a common one. When kids don’t sit down for mealtimes, they lose their focus on eating, and it can take them long periods of time to finish a meal. When this happens, family members often resort, like Meg’s mother, to leaving foods available on the kitchen table for longer stretches of time.

Unfortunately, extending mealtime can be problematic for kids with picky eating.

The trouble with never sitting for meals

Primarily, extending one meal can disrupt hunger at the next meal. Long meals can have the same impact on kids as grazing. I talk about problems associated with grazing (with liquids) in this blog post. I’ll say it once, and I’ll say it again: Grazing is a no-no for picky eaters! It takes the edge off of your honey’s appetite, it makes them fussier about coming to the dining table, and it really mucks with your efforts to help your kiddo try healthy foods.

The alternative

So, what can you do instead? I recommend teaching your honey to sit in their own chair at the table for meals. This will allow you to offer shorter meals with longer breaks between them. This will be an investment of your time upfront, but several magical things can happen:

You can sit with your beautiful honey and eat together for family meals.
Your child will be more focused on eating during meal time.
Your child will be able to hear their hunger and satiety signals. Grazing turns down the volume on these cues. When we turn the volume back up, kids eat more (if they need to) or less (if that’s what their body needs). Ultimately, this can help your child attain a healthy weight.
Meals will be shorter, so, you can clean up and focus on other important things in your day.
When more eating happens at the kitchen table, there will be fewer crumbs across your home! (Such good news, right?!)
Your child may show more flexibility at the idea of trying new, nutritious foods.
When your child is hungry, they can transition to dinner time, or other meals, more easily.

Sound good? Let’s get started with some simple tips!

Tips for helping your child stay seated for mealtimes

As with many things, there is more than one right way to help your child learn to sit at the table, so, I’m going to tell you my favorites, and then you can decide which strategy, or combination of strategies, is best for your honey.

1. Get your child into a comfie chair. When your kiddo is seated at table height and their feet have a nice foot rest, they can focus their energy away from coordinating their body in space, and onto their plate. For young children, this might mean a high chair or booster seat. For older children, this might be a normal chair at your dinner table. You can find my very favorite seats for kids here, here, and here.

This is the seat I use for my honeys, ages 2 and 5:

I love these chairs because they grow with kids and can help you find the best position for your child from 6 months old up to 250-300 pounds!! These chairs are NOT a short term solution, and I enjoy the fact that they look nice in my home. Both of my girls used their stokke trip trapp chairs with the infant insert as their first high chair. To this day, these are my 2 and (almost) 6 year olds’ favorite seats in the house, and I don't see either of them navigating to another chair anytime soon.

This Abiie seat is also great (many of my clients have purchased it), and it is a huge value alternative.

2. Use the seat’s safety belt. If it’s still age appropriate and your child's seat has a safety belt, consider using it-even if you haven’t for a while. You can tell your honey: Momma wants you to use your seat belt as a reminder that we are working on staying in your seat. Be sure to stay close and help your honey unhook the belt when they are ready to get down. Generally, the safety belt or harness is appropriate for children up to around 3 years of age.

3. Set an expectation for the length of time you’d like your child to stay seated. Then, start a timer. This one would be perfect, but a sand timer is also a great choice. Having a visual way to show your child how long they need to sit is the best way to get their initial buy-in. (Offering a reward if your honey follows through on your ask by sitting until the timer sounds is a very good practice, too!)

4. Slowly increase the interval of time you ask your child to sit as they show success. You may need to start with a very short time like 30 seconds and increase by 10 second intervals. For example, when your child can sit successfully for 30 seconds, start working on sitting for set times of 40 seconds, then 50, and so on until they are able to stay seated for the whole meal.

Free Strategies for Picky Eating and Autism

5. Or, as appropriate, jump into the deep-end! As an alternative to slowly asking your honey to sit for longer intervals, you can set an expectation for your child to sit for a larger interval of time from the very beginning, say 5 or 10 minutes. If you take this route, you can simply stop the timer if your child gets up, redirect them back to their seat, and then restart the timer. This approach works best for older kids who follow directions well and transition pretty easily. If your honey struggles with transitions or may become upset if you need to redirect them back to their chair, you may have more success with strategy 2.

6. Sit with your child and provide attention as they eat at the table. You can describe a fun activity you recently shared together or use Table Topics! Table Topics are fun decks of cards you can use to start conversations. These work well for both speaking and non-speaking kids. For speakers, this will give you something to chat about. For non-speakers, the topics can give you inspo on what to talk to them about. The time will pass more quickly for your child if they are engaged and having a great time with you.

Bonus: When you are seated and eating with your child, you are providing a good role model of what you'd like your child to do. This goes a long way for both improving their eating, increasing the length that they sit, AND promoting social interactions. (Wins all across the board!!)

7. Allow your child to bring a favorite toy or comfort item with them to the table. This may help them transition more easily. A big challenge when asking kids come to the table is that they are already doing something they like to do a lot more than eating. So, allowing them to bring a toy with them, can make it a little easier for them to do. If the item becomes a distraction away from eating, you can ask them to park the item on the table until they are done.

8. Alter the schedule BEFORE the meal. Another approach is to consider the schedule leading up to mealtime and ensure that your child is NOT leaving a favorite activity to come sit at the table. You'll have a lot more success if you're asking your child to transition from homework to family dinner than video games to dinner, for example.

9. Start wtih easy foods. At first, try to present only favorite foods to your child when they are practicing sitting at the table. This can help to ease what might otherwise become a power struggle as your child learns this new skill. Overtime and as your child succeeds, you can introduce new foods. Here are lots of ideas on how to support you child with being brave or accepting small changes as you add new things to their plate in the future.

There you have it, 9 ways to help your kiddo stay seated for meals.

Except...

I promised 14 ways to help your child stay seated for meals, and I don't feel like this post is complete until I talk about screens. Am I right? Whether or not to use screen time at meals is a hot topic, and a lot of families have questions.

Mostly, I think families want to know…

**Are screens okay for keeping kids at the table?**

Based on my experience, I think that using screens generally goes in 1 of 2 directions from a family perspective:

i.) You're using a screen at the dining table and it's distracting your child away from eating. Their watching their show, they're playing their game, but little are they consuming the meal in front of them. It's not going very well.

ii.) You're using a screen at the table and it helps your child transition to and stay at the table. (And, if you're reading this, it might be because this approach is working, but you feel there is room for improvement.)

There's a THIRD (also important) perspective that I hear a lot of providers add to the conversation:

iii.) Screens are distracting kids from their bodies' hunger signals so that they may be eating too much or not enough.

Let's just keep that perspective in mind as we consider the options...

If you are in bucket #1, it's probably time to make some changes around how you're using the screen at the dining table. You're having difficulty getting your child to the table, or keeping them there, and the screen is distracting them away from the meal when they are there.

In this situation, you can also re-evaluate whether or not you WANT to use a screen at meals. But guess what? You don't need to stop using a screen at the table if you don't want to! You're in charge, and your family values are the most important agenda.

If you are in bucket #2, and you like how things are going, no need to change! If, however, you're in bucket #2 and you don't like having the screen at the table, or you are concerned that your honey isn't listening to their body, then let's work on it. The good news is, you have a strategy that's helping your child come to the table and stay there. Now we just need to work on fading out the screen while keeping your child engaged at the table.

A word on that 3rd perspective: There is research to suggest that listening to your body (at least in adulthood) is linked to maintaining a healthy weight (Tylka & Kroon Van Diest, 2013). We also know that family meals (presumably ones where we are engaged with one another, not our devices) lead to a myriad of positive outcomes for kids and adolescents (Hammons & Fiese, 2011). So, there is merit to having mealtimes without screens, whether that be something you can start now or work toward in the future.

That said, keep in mind, that those studies are not highlighting neurodiverse kids and their families. Nor do they consider the benefits of using a screen in the short-term to increase positive mealtime behaviors so that families can enjoy family meals without screens in the long-term. For these reasons, I always encourage families to consider their goals and to prioritize their own family values as they determine their plan.

How to use screens to encourage your child to stay seated at mealtimes:

If you've decided its best for your child to have their screen at mealtimes, I suggest the following tips to help get you going in the right direction:

10) If you're offering a screen, make the screen available when your child is at the table. Ideally, you want your child to transition to the meal and gain access to their screen when they get to the table. This encourages your child to hop up to their seat quickly when you ask.

11) Have the device up on a stand so they aren't straining their neck to watch. Using a screen at mealtimes shouldn’t prohibit good posture, so, pick up a stand for your child’s tablet or ipad. Here’s the one that I use:

12) Set a bite requirement. If your child tends to "zone out" and not eat when they have their screen at the table, you might want to set a bite requirement for turning the screen on. For example, you could say, once you take 5 bites you can have 1 minute of screen time. After they have the 5 bites and 1-minute of screen time, you can simply repeat the bite expectation and screen time until the meal is over.

This is also a good approach if your child currently comes to the table to eat when screens are available, but you want to fade out screen time. You could slowly stretch the 5-bite requirement up (to 6, 8, 12, etc.) until your child is able to eat their whole meal before accessing screen time.

13) Pause the screen as needed. Another way to approach a kiddo who is "zoning out" to screens at meals is to pause the device if/when your child stops eating. When they resume eating, you can turn the screen back on. In this case the rule is: As long as you are eating, you can watch.

14) Set a timer to limit the total duration of the meal. Because using screen time means your child might be willing to sit at the table for a long time, then you'll want to limit the mealtime to avoid your child from drawing the mealtime out too far. That can result in your child being unready for their next meal. A timer for 20-30 minutes should give your honey plenty of time to fill-up. You can also allow them to leave the table sooner if/when they are all done.

Wrapping up

Whatever your approach to helping your child stay seated for meals, be persistent with your approach! The fastest successes occur when families practice daily at mealtimes.

Do you have other ideas that helped your honey stay seated at mealtimes? Please share them in the comments so others can learn from you!

References

Hammons, A. J., & Fiese, B. H. (2011). Is frequency of shared family meals related to the nutritional health of children and
adolescents?. Pediatrics, 127(6), e1565–e1574. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2010-1440

Tylka, T. L., & Kroon Van Diest, A. M. (2013). The Intuitive Eating Scale–2: Item refinement and psychometric evaluation
with college women and men. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 60(1), 137–153. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030893

This is not medical advice or healthcare of any kind and is provided for educational purposes only. As I describe here, a thorough assessment by a team of professionals before making mealtime changes is best practice.