Celebrate Feeding

WOW! What an event!

Last week, the CELEBRATE Feeding project hosted a collaborative workshop to bring together our project participants, partners, and researchers.

We wanted to create a space to share the successes and challenges of our CELEBRATE intervention. We also delved into some exciting preliminary results, coaching resources & supports, and steps for the future.

The workshop gave us an opportunity to collaborate across groups and explore the pathway to growing the project even bigger.

What a day it was! Swipe through to check out some awesome collaboration!

Supporting kids in deciding what and how much to eat can be tough! Especially when there is not endless supplies of food.

Here’s our Coaching Cue 🌟 to help you manage this in a more responsive way 👇

🌟Tell children they can pick what they want from what is being served AND let them know they are responsible for ensuring they leave some fro friends

🌟Tell kids there will be more available if your centre has extra food

🌟Talk about the foods being served without pressruing them to eat them, descirbe the texture, colour, taste

🌟Prompt kids to think about how full their belly is

🌟Avoid projecting how much you think a child should or should not eat

🌟if there are limited amounts of a food, prompt them to start with a servign size that allows everyone to get some “so our friends can all try some if they want to”

🚨 Coaching cue 🚨

Responding to a child saying “I don’t want that” at a meal.

🌟 Support the child by helping them understand they never have to eat
anything they don’t want

🌟Remain neutral when talking about foods and offering other options. Use this an opportunity to teach them all foods are allowed and can fuel us.

🌟Explore reasons why they may not like something or how you can help make it taste better with dips, shapes, sprinkles, pairing with something else.

🌟Teach them about the food, where it grows, what it comes from, how it is made.

🌟Share when the next eating time will be and what will be served is important to help reduce mealtime stress for kids.

What are family 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 style meals?

Family-style meals 🍽️ are those that serve food to the table in large plates and bowls giving everyone an opportunity to select and serve what they want.

Using this method with children encourages food autonomy and creates a more responsive feeding environment. Using family-style feeding also offers a time to engage in mealtime manners, cognitive growth, motor growth, and mealtime confidence that can help children explore new taste and textures.

Our project concept uses the foundation of family-style serving to create more opportunity for children to serve themselves and develop positive mealtime experiences.

Here are our top tips 👇

🥣2-3 smaller bowls vs 2 big serving bowl

Smaller plastic bowls and serving tools

Encourage 1-2 scoops to start

Pause family-style when sickness is high

Facilitate play related to food and family-style serving

Check out the link in our bio to learn more about our project!

Let’s Get Cooking!

Involving kids in age-appropriate kitchen activities is a great way to offer pressure free and fun exposure to food.

Here are some of our favourites!

🍋SQUEEZE! Squeezing is a good way to expose kids to textures and sensations around food.

📏MEASURE! Dry and liquid measuring can help improve motor control, learning numbers, and food characteristics.

🍽️PLATE! Get kids to plate foods as long as they aren’t hot or delicate foods that need precision.

👅 TASTE! Offering a pressure free opportunity to taste (safe/cooked/clean) ingredients and final products allows them to explore how food changes in cooking.

🌿GARNISH! Give them the opportunity to sprinkle on some finishing touches and explains the colours, textures, and tastes these garnishes offer.

🥧KNEAD! Have a pizza or pie session and get those little hands working! Another way to offer sensory experience and creativity.

🥄STIR & MIX! The perfect intro activity for kids in the kitchen. It may get messy but this is a great exposure method, motor skill developer, and action at any age.

Get your kiddos cooking and keep the experience pressure free! Encourage creativity and exploration without any pressure to east/taste the foods.

Let us know what you like to cook with kiddos!

How can you better respond to children’s eating behaviours to be more responsive?

Swipe through to check out our coaching cues!

🍴Ensure children know they don’t have to eat if their belly does not feel hungry

🍴Tell children when their next chance to eat will be and what will be offered

🍴Offer them the foods they prefer with other foods

🍴Offer other foods without pressure

🍴allow them to leave the table when they are done

🍴Let children decide when they are done

🍴use neutral language around food

🍴avoid pressuring them to try foods

🍴avoid food/intake related praise or cheerleading, this can be perceived as pressure by children

🍴offer different ways to explore a food like smell or touch

🍴use neural comments or no comments around intake (Ex “what do you think about the food?”)

Let us help you unpack mealtime praise and why it is discouraged when we are aiming to be more responsive in our feeding practices!

Bottom line is maintaining neutrality with food for kiddos.

Click through and let us know what ya think!

Exposing kids to new foods is more than just eating!

When we help kids explore a new food in ways that aren’t eating, we offer a pressure free way for them to be exposed to it. This helps create a more positive experience with a food. This can make a kid feel more comfortable actually trying the food later.

Learn - plan a lesson around the food

Plate - plate the food but never pressure them to eat it. Try plating a small portion of a new food with some of the foods they do like

Touch - explore the texture of the new food, ask what it feels like. Soft, hard, smooth, etc.

Read - find a book talking about the food

Craft - use the food in a craft or model a craft after the food

Smell - smell the food and explore the sensations

Look - observe the food with no pressure to eat it

Cook - try cooking a new recipe with the food. Include kids with age appropriate tasks like mixing, slicing, stirring.

Lick - licking or using the tongue to wean into actually chewing and eating a food is good method to use with kids who are willing. No pressure should be used.

Giving kids the autonomy to experience a food without the pressure to eat it is a fantastic way to make them feel more comfortable with new things. Remember that more exposures through time can mean more receptivity to trying eventually.

Let us know what you think!

Joyful eating, swift through for our CELEBRATE Feeding Crash course! Thanks to our registered dietitian feeding coaches for this!

Like & follow for more!

Check out these cool tools!

Having the appropriate mealtime tools is a fantastic way to help kids celebrate feeding! Proper tools give them autonomy and confidence at mealtime.

Tools may include kiddo sized items like utensils, cups, lids, plates, items with extra grips and smaller proportions, and fun serving additions.

Check out these cool kiddo sized utensils that are designed for better grip. They offer kid sized ergonomics and help build coordination skills and positive mealtime experiences.

What mealtime tools have you tried? Let us know!

Want to know more about the CELEBRATE Feeding Project?

Our website is the perfect place to go!

🌟Get updates on the CELEBRATE Feeding project goals

🌟Meet the team

🌟Learn more about the project and responsive feeding

🌟FREE resources and downloadable handouts

Navigate on over to our website, link in bio!

May is Celiac awareness month!

Celiac is an autoimmune disease that causes damage to the small intestine. Gluten-containing foods trigger the disease and avoiding all gluten is the only current treatment for people with celiac.

Gluten is in foods like breads, baked goods, cereals, pasta, condiments, crackers, snacks, and many more unless they are made with gluten-free alternatives.

Education children on dietary restrictions is so important to help celebrate the dietary needs of all people. Educating them in an age appropriate manner allows for a more positive feeding environment that can help keep everyone safe and happy.

Check out this full post to see how you can help children understand dietary needs like Celiac!

🍽️COACHING CUE🍽️

A coaching cue to kick your Friday off!

The WHY and HOW of facilitating non-mealtime food exposure for children.

When we facilitate exposure to food outside of a meal, we remove the pressure to eat that children sometimes feel when they are at the table. Perceived pressure can make a mealtime hard for children and make it a not so fun experience for everyone.

Non-mealtime food exposure can be in our language around foods, in our play kitchen, at circle time, in books, in the garden, in arts & crafts, and even just conversations outside of mealtime.

Give the non-mealtime food exposure method a try and let us know how it goes!

Happy Friday!

🌍 Celebrate diversity 🌎

Celebrating diversity is a huge part of our projects goals and such an important aspect of food and feeding as well!

Food is a large part of what makes up diversity, how we eat, what we eat, and when we eat. Celebrating the food part of diversity isn’t just eating though, it’s the bigger picture of how we can help teach kiddos that diversity, especially in food is an awesome thing we can celebrate at mealtime and beyond!

COACHING CUES:

🌍Check your menu for foods with different origins

🌍Have fun conversations using a map or globe about where various foods are from

🌍Check produce stickers and help kiddos explore where the fruit/veg is from. Chat about the climate and where those foods grow.

🌍Facilitate conversations around the different cultures and occasions the kiddos have, the things they eat, what they like.

Diversity in food is a fantastic way to celebrate and embrace the differences amongst kiddos. Making mealtime and playtime more inclusive and pressure free space around food allowing us to help facilitate curiosity that helps kids grow and develop their understanding of food and how/why we eat things.

✨COACHING CUE ✨

How to support children in accepting new foods 🍴

There are so many foods in the world and introducing them to kiddos can feel overwhelming to both you and them. Backed with research, here’s how our CELEBRATE coaches do it:

⭐️Identify the type of eater your kiddo is so you know what kind and how much support you should give.

⭐️Introduce the food prior to meal time: talk about it, teach about it, expose them to the food outside of mealtime first. This allows kids to explore the food without the pressure to try it.

⭐️During the meal make it pressure free, even just having it on the plate can help. Describe the food and eat it with them to help them explore it.

⭐️Keep trying and practice patience! There are a lot of foods and flavours out there for kids to try and multiple pressure-free exposures can help kiddos build their confidence around foods.

Let us know how you introduce new foods to your kiddos!

The Before Mealtime cheat sheet to being a responsive feeding champion at the table with kiddos!

1️⃣ask them if they are hungry (and know it’s okay if they aren’t… even if they haven’t eaten in a while, trust them!)

2️⃣tell them what is being offered today, use the actual names of foods and try to describe it. Texture descriptions can be a fun and explorative way to explain the menu.

3️⃣encourage children to help get the meal ready: set the table, mix, get sauces out, carry food

4️⃣invite children to the table to eat without pressure. It’s okay if they don’t want to eat this meal but it’s also important to tell them when food will be available/offered to them again later.

5️⃣Minimize the wait time for food at the table. Try to serve as soon as kiddos are seated.

Want to learn more? Like, save & follow us!

Don’t forget to enter our spring giveaway too! The perfect starter kit to your celebrate feeding journey!

🌟 SPRING GIVEAWAY 🌟

We have an AWESOME spring giveaway for you!!! The CELEBRATE Feeding starter pack to help you build an awesome mealtime environment for your kiddos! Whether your an educator, parent or anyone in between, this prize pack is the perfect way to help bring a more positive mealtime experience to the table with kiddos.

Prize includes:
🌟 Food to grow on: the ultimate guide to childhood nutrition

🌟Table talk conversation starter cards to guide positive & neutral table talk

🌟Silicon cupcake liners & fun food picks to liven up the mealtime space and encourage food exploration!

What you have to do:
💫 Follow us

💫Like this post

💫Tag 3 people in separate comments

BONUS entry if you share to your story & tag us!

Unlimited entries, open to all Canadian residences 18+. Closed at midnight April 30th. Winner will be announced & directly DM’d May 1st.

GOOD LUCK!!! Happy Tagging!!!

This promotion is in no way sponsored or associated with Instagram and all entrants agree to Instagrams terms of use.

The Easter bunny wants you to know how to celebrate feeding with them this weekend!

Even if you don’t celebrate Easter, children will be exposed to the energy around the holiday from different food displays in the stores to the traditions of those around them.

Using this time to encourage exploration during and outside of eating occasions is a great way to celebrate feeding with children.

Remember, aiming to maintain neutral food talk, pressure free exploration, and encouraging curiosity while trusting kids know their hunger/fullness are the best tools we can use.

Drop a comment with questions or ways you celebrate easter!

Thanks to our wonderful PEI coaching Dietitian Margaret for helping put this one together!

Hoppy Easter!

✨ Centre Highlight ✨

The centre we have been working with is totally rocking it with the CELEBRATE Project!

With coaching, they have seen some wonderful meal time improvements and have the kiddos serving themselves with kid-friendly utensils. Self-serving is one of the simplest ways to empower kids to feel confident about their food choices.

Also check out their picture menu board that allows kids to see 👀 what they will served that day, and the books available to facilitate food exposure outside of mealtimes.

Way to go Spryfield !!!

🌟 CENTER HIGHLIGHT 🌟

Down to Earth Child Care is one of our project centre’s located in Kingsboro, PE.

They have so many components of responsive feeding around their centre including an awesome indoor play kitchen, an outdoor mud kitchen that stimulates a lot of imagination, toys and books, and a HUGE veggie garden that gets utilized in the snacks and meals served at the center.

The kiddos get repeated food exposure using these components and the educators are doing amazing work with how they use their language and role model for them as well.

💫 The staff notes that with coaching help, the introduction of a visual menu for kids to see has helped alleviate mealtime stress for the kiddos, in addition to being able to return to self-serve meals.

Great ways to really CELEBRATE feeding! 👏

It’s National Registered Dietitian Day in Canada!

The CELEBRATE team is very lucky to have some amazing RD’s and future RDs on the team.

We are so grateful for your knowledge and inspiring role in healthcare and nutrition research!

Helping to create generations of independent and intelligent eaters that CELEBRATE all foods!

Check out some of our favourite books that celebrate feeding!

Including food into other areas of a kiddos day can help offer safe and pressure free spaces to explore new foods.

Books are a great way to get in some reading time and food exposure. These ones have positive food messages that our team uses as an added resource for the centre’s we work with!

What are some of your favourite positive food message books?

A “sweet” example of why a kiddo may not have eaten something at a mealtime.

Kiddos have all kinds of cues playing into their food choices both internally and externally. Our goal is to help support them in listening to those cues that we may not be able to see or understand as well as them.

Using our sweet potato example some factors that may impact why they won’t eat something:

🍴A food they prefer more was served at the meal
🍴 The food was touching something else they dislike or are unfamiliar with
🍴 The texture, look, or smell was unfamiliar
🍴 They are still getting familiar with the food
🍴 They are full and listening to their tummy!

Remember that these amy not be the only influences at play during a mealtime. They may have eaten it before and they may eat the food next time, but right now our goal is to guide them in trusting they know whats best for their body.

Celebrating feeding one bite (or not) at a time!

It’s National Nutrition Month and our CELEBRATE Team is a pretty awesome team of Nutrition nerds!

Our goal is to bring the best and most up to date nutrition research to our practices in order to advance our project goals in supporting early childhood feeding practices.

Our project CELEBRATE Feeding encompasses the physical and psychological parts of nutrition and feeding in early learning environments.

2 provinces but 1 amazing group of people!

Follow along to learn more about celebrating feeding and our projects progress!

Let’s talk about praise around mealtime!

When we celebrate feeding, we are aiming to celebrate all mealtime experiences to make it a positive space that encourages children to tune into their own hunger cues.

When children are praised for eating, they may eat in order to please caregivers rather than listening to their hunger and fullness cues. Our goal at mealtime is to help children tune into their internal cues rather then the external cues of provider praise.

Praise does have a role at mealtime though! We can use praise for other mealtime behaviours not related to food. Try some of these things to praise instead:

🌟 Using manners
⭐️ Helping to clean up & clear dishes
🌟 Using self serving skills like scooping and pouring
⭐️ Practicing kindness and patience with a friend

🌟 Educators provide, children decide🌟

Mealtime should be a positive experience that can be shared and celebrated 🎉

We are all born with the innate ability to understand our hunger and fullness. It is our job as adults to nurture that in our kiddos and trust that they know their body’s and bellies best.

Our role is to provide them with the what and when and they get to choose the what and how much of what is served.

Follow us fro tips, tricks, and our research projects process as we advance research in this area!

Happy week to all our PEI educators!!! You do so much and we have so much gratitude for you! Our project would not be possible without you!

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In responsive feeding practice, children get to decide WHAT & HOW MUCH they eat from the foods offered to them.

This is the division of responsibility when it comes to feeding. As caregivers, our job is to provide them with the food and support them through the journey. Our goal is to help them feel in control and without pressure around the foods they eat so they can have a positive mealtime experience.

Sometimes this looks like eating a lot of one food, a little of some, and none of another… and thats totally okay!

Practicing more responsive feeding is a process but contributes to happier and healthier kiddos at the table and beyond!

🌟 COACHING CUE 🌟

Starting meals and snacks by explaining to the kiddos what is being offered. This is one of the simplest and fastest changes you can make to make your mealtimes more responsive and positive for children.

Naming each food and describing textures, tastes, and smells promotes food neutrality and can prompt better acceptance of newer/unfamiliar foods for kids.

Kids, just like us adults, like to know the menu and what to expect on our plates so they can use that knowledge to make choices about how and what they want to eat.

Try this method ⤵️

1️⃣ Name the foods being served

2️⃣ Describe the foods using textures, tastes, smells. (crunchy, soft, chewy, hard, sweet, salty, bitter, etc)

3️⃣Keep it neutral, avoid calling some foods good/healthy, or bad/unhealthy. Statements like “our pork chops are filled with protein to help our bodies grow and the mashed potatos are carbohydrates to give us energy” can help educate neutrally.

4️⃣Offer serving suggestions especially for unfamiliar foods. Encourage them to dip, mix, take apart, build, use their fingers, try a fork for serving foods. This allows a child to feel safer going out of their comfort zone with food and contributing to a more positive mealtime experience.

What does play related to food and feeding look like?

We promise you it’s a whole lot more than playing with food on the plate at mealtime! Play related to food and feeding is all the stuff beyond the table experience!

This is facilitating creative and dramatic play that may include food, pretend cooking, and exposure to ingredients. Books with neutral food messages, sensory activities allowing touch and smell of foods, and arts/crafts about or using foods can all be wonderful ways to incorporate food and feeding into play. Offering a variety of toy foods, pots/pans, and decor that display information about foods and where they come from are also great additions.

Why is it important?

Play related to food and feeding allows children to explore foods and textures without the pressure of feeling like they have to taste and try things. Play is often a child-led part of their day that encourages creativity and learning amongst each other. When we offer them the right environment for play related to food and feeding, it can transfer to better mealtime experiences and acceptance of foods.

Try out some play related to food and feeding and stay tuned for resources you can use with your kiddos.