When your child is diagnosed with a food intolerance, start where you can today.* I recently met someone at a boxed dinner event chowing down on everything in her box. She offered me part of her cookie. When I said, I’d love to eat it, but I’m gluten-free. She said, “I’m supposed to be too.” I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard this. And when it comes to children who are picky eaters already, it can be easy to ignore the risk of long-term effects and ignore the doctor’s advice.
The problem with that approach is our children could feel so much better, avoid potential chronic disease, and excel in ways we can’t imagine. I say this as someone looking back remembering how I’d puke when running track after a certain kind of breakfast. It was embarrassing to hurl in front of my classmates.
Cutting my track career short wasn’t particularly problematic, I wasn’t that good. But I was a good swimmer who felt increasingly less motivated because I didn’t want to expose my problematic skin. This has even affected me in adult life – robbing me of the joy of being in the water as often. Yes, rash guards help, but having to do something to hide something still weighs on self-esteem and makes everything feel less care-free.
I don’t think any of us want to deliberately rob our children of the option to feel carefree. We just may not be up for the struggle we imagine it will take to get our children to change how they eat. And it can be a real struggle. I’ve seen even very young children who will refuse to eat for so long that they make themselves sick. We don’t want to make food a battlefield.
The age and personality of your child will lead you to the best approach. Observation and listening are a good first step. From that point, start where you can today and build up to the optimum diet.
So often when we get a diagnosis that requires dietary change, we feel like we’ve just been told we have to halt everything immediately and do a 180. While this is true in the case of life-threatening allergies, other conditions allow us time to get our footing and make a plan.
A simple plan can begin with serving familiar foods that naturally fit the regimen your child has been instructed to follow. This means you don’t have to alter anything immediately or announce you’re taking something away. In fact, you can eat this way for awhile before even discussing upcoming changes (depending on the age of your child).
Once you are ready to ease further into the new plan, mention to your child that they can keep eating the things like X, Y, and Z that you’ve been serving. From that point, introduce something new that’s an adaptation of a favorite or incorporates ingredients the child likes.
For example, if your child loves chocolate and needs to be gluten-free, begin the switch-over with chocolate cake, brownies, muffins, chocolate-chip cookies or pancakes. The goal is to ease into the restrictions by providing foods that feel good but are adherent to prescribed restrictions.
A diabetic child who enjoys chocolate might like strawberries dipped in lightly sweetened dark chocolate, hot chocolate lightly sweetened with honey, a brownie made with almond flour, or chocolate hummus on celery sticks.
You can incorporate your child’s best motivators – stickers, a treat, money, time alone with mom or dad, a movie, a trip to the park, a bug or dinosaur hunt – as incentives for trying new things. I just don’t like to begin with, or wholly rely on, incentives because it feels too much like bribery and as though I’m not confident the new foods I’m offering taste good.
That’s not the impression I want to create, and I’d like the changes to feel like an organic extension of what the kids already enjoy. But I’ll be the first to say, if it works, it works. You know your child better than I do.
Another consideration when making dietary changes is the altering of routine. Routines can be comforting. That includes meal times, locations, and menus. When there’s a way, I like to keep as much as possible the same until everyone is comfortable with the changes.
At my house, lunch and dinner are both variable, so I start by slowly introducing new foods into one of those meals before moving on to the other two. This lessens the shock of change.
Once everyone is feeling comfortable, it can be fun to have a contest among siblings to see who is the bravest and will try the most new things. If you’re worried no one will participate, imagine what would happen if you put a new kind of packaged sugary snack in front of them. You’d probably get at least one taker, right?
Even if they don’t end up liking the new snack, they’re willing to try it because they’ve had a good experience with something similar before. Building slowly to this point with new foods will build the same kind of foundation for comfort in trying new things at home.
It can be hard to stick to a plan, so committing in advance to a certain length of time for implementation may be helpful. Once you embark, you may discover that the timetable can be accelerated or may need to slow down. But don’t overwhelm yourself with the big picture at first.
Getting started is the key. Instead of worrying too much about what you’ll do tomorrow, start where you can today.
