It is common for children with autism to have eating challenges. These challenges can include:

  • Avoiding certain foods
  • Being irritable during meals
  • Eating only a few favorite foods
  • Refusing to try new foods

This can make it challenging to ensure your child is eating a healthy range of foods and can cause stress surrounding food and mealtime.

Children with feeding challenges have milder barriers and can be classified as “picky eaters.” If they have more severe challenges, they are classified as “problem feeders.” Regardless of your child’s severity of feeding barriers, their problems are often rooted in a sensory challenge, oral motor challenge, or both. Children with sensory sensitivities to foods have an over or under-response to visual appearance, texture, smell, and taste. Keep this in mind as you work with your child to improve eating habits.

Below are tips on gently introducing new foods to your child with sensory sensitivities and making mealtime a less stressful experience. These steps can be effective for any child with food challenges!

Step 1: Rule out medical issues

If you notice that your child is struggling with eating certain foods, the first step is ruling out medical problems. Your child may be rejecting specific foods if they know that it will hurt their stomach. Gastrointestinal distress is not unusual among children with autism, and they can struggle to accurately describe their discomfort.

Step 2: Pick a goal

It can be helpful to choose one main food goal. Do you want to expand the variety of foods your child will eat? Improve their mealtime routine? Increase how much they eat? When picking your first food goal, make sure to meet your child where they are. If they currently aren’t eating what you are serving them, expecting them to finish all the food on their plate will likely be unrealistic. Regardless, it will be important to communicate this goal to everyone in the household and at your child’s school.

Step 3: Ease into mealtime

Regardless of how difficult mealtime behavior can be, stay calm and don’t pressure your child. Trying to force them to eat can worsen their anxiety around food and mealtime. Spend a few minutes with them before mealtime to practice taking deep breaths or engage them in breath-related, calming play, such as blowing bubbles.

Throughout mealtime, focus on the food and not their behavior. Stick with one goal at a time! Concentrating conversations on the food and asking questions about it, such as “Does it have a big smell or little smell?” can help your child engage more with the food in front of them.

Step 4: Address their fears and validate their progress

Discuss your child’s food-related fears and concerns openly with them. Show them that you understand how challenging it can be for them to eat certain foods and that this is okay!

Praise them whenever they make progress towards your food goals. Whether it’s taking a bite of a new food or sitting at the table for 10 extra minutes, make sure they understand they’ve done something worth rewarding! While it’s essential to remain calm to avoid putting too much pressure on your child, don’t hold back on the praise. This will help them stay motivated to continue making progress and feel good about themselves. Remember, positive reinforcement is more effective than punishment. This is particularly true for children on the autism spectrum. Learn more about communicating with empathy here.

Step 5: Play with new food and have fun with it!

Encourage your child to explore and play with food. Get them to interact with it through their senses and talk about how foods look or feel. This will stimulate their curiosity around food, whether or not they end up eating it. Baking or doing arts and crafts projects that play with food can also help with this.

Hypersensitivity to textures is common for children with autism. Encourage them to touch food textures before they put them in their mouth. For example, make “worms in dirt” with crushed Oreos and gummy worms. If your child is unsure about exploring with their hands, they can always start with utensils or exploring food textures through transparent Ziploc bags!

Step 6: Gradually introduce new foods

When introducing new foods, ensure that your child always has access to a preferred food to feel safe and comfortable learning about non-preferred foods.

Remember, there are more ways to get to know food than tasting! You can look at it with your eyes, interact with it with utensils, smell it, or touch it with your hands. Allow your child to explore the new food with their different senses.

Always offer your child choices and give them control over what they put in their mouth. A “learning plate” is an excellent way to do this. A “learning plate” is a plate with new foods that your child is still learning about and might like to explore with their other senses before tasting them. Make sure they understand that this is their choice! Even doing this for one meal a day is a simple way to encourage them to try new foods in a safe, reassuring way. Happy feeding!

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Post by Lily Vesel