Solutions to Mealtime Meltdowns and Picky Eater Battles

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Hi, everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and on today’s episode, we are going to revisit the topic of eating issues with kids, particularly how to use our communication to support improvement in things like picky eating, feeding problems, and just general mealtime stress. Eating challenges are something you all ask about so often, so I know that the tips and the info today is going to help you regardless of your child’s age, their issues, or diagnosis, or their needs. My guest is Stephanie Meyers. We are going to talk about how table talk, what you say to your kids about eating while they’re eating, is a great tool for improving the dynamics during mealtimes and helping your kids develop the skills of healthy eating that they can use throughout their lives. Let me tell you a little bit about Stephanie.

She’s a dietician, nutritionist, and founder of Families Eating Well, a nutrition practice training parents to coach healthy eating habits in kids. She’s also the nutrition manager in the Zakim Center for Integrative Therapies and Healthy Living at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a former instructor in the graduate nutrition department at Boston University. Stephanie presents seminars worldwide on mindful eating, family nutrition, and cancer survivorship and has a new book just out called End the Mealtime Meltdown: Using the Table Talk Method to Free Your Family from Daily Struggles Over Food and Picky Eating. I have been so looking forward to this conversation. Stephanie, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Stephanie Meyers

Thank you so much for inviting me, Dr. Nicole. I’m a big fan of your show, and I’m really looking forward to sort of unpacking the challenges of, as you said, regardless of what your kids’ age is and what their eating issues might be. I think as parents, it’s one of the things, quite frankly, that prompted me to write the book, was my own life and lives of friends of mine. Feeding kids can feel like one of the low points in parenting.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Totally. And that’s such a bummer, because it’s something we have to do multiple times a day, every single day, which I think is why this is such a stressor and comes up so often. Like I said, it’s one of the top things that listeners of the show ask about at our clinic. And it’s because it’s a constant thing. It’s not just something that comes up periodically. We are dealing with it multiple times a day, every day. And so it’s just such an important thing for parents to have tools around. I’d actually love for you to share a little bit of your story and background. I shared your official bio, all of your amazing professional credentials, but I know that you are a parent also. So I’d just love for you to share a little bit of your background, like how did you get passionate around maybe even nutrition in general, but particularly around eating behavior around kids, around families? How did that come to be for you?

Stephanie Meyers

Sure, I am passionate about nutrition, actually. It’s one of those moments where like 25 years into your career, you are sort of like “I wonder how I first got fascinated with food and eating?” For me, it was growing up in rural North Dakota, even a town in North Dakota, with grandparents who had a farm. And in hindsight, I can see now how going to the farm every weekend, where, literally, there was a 360 view of the horizon, and my grandmother would send me to the garden with a laundry basket to dig up whatever we were having for lunch and dinner. And she made everything from scratch and her whole existence was around food prep. And that’s just sort of how I grew up. I was very close to the food that we were making, and it was really a wonderful experience. And then in college, I sort of was living away from home for the first time and realizing how much I appreciated the thoughtfulness that went into meals, the sort of participation that I was really fortunate to have had that exposure and that experience. That’s what got me interested in nutrition, I think, in the grand scheme of things, but what got me interested in how that relationship takes shape in families and with kids was becoming a parent myself. So I had countless conversations on playgrounds with other parents who, when my daughter was very young, they were like, “How do you get her to eat that?” Or “What do you have to say to make her try that?”

At the time I was teaching at Boston University in the graduate nutrition program, and the course I taught was a nutrition counseling course. So I was training graduate students on how to be an effective agent for change with patients, how to sort of co-create with them and recognize where they were at as eaters, and help them make sustainable behavior change. And you know what? It just was like a lightbulb moment where I was thinking about the things that I heard people saying to their kids, like “Can you just try it? You have never really eaten that. You need to eat nutritious food.” Or “You really need to get focused on eating.” Things that we might say to our kids were things that I was explicitly training my graduate students never to say.  So I was thinking to myself, this is interesting, how we are connecting, or not connecting, rather relating to our kids over food, perhaps that’s an area worth exploring. So it started off what ended up being a decade’s worth of qualitative research where I interviewed parents, received anonymous submissions of what I call table talk, and sort of put those things together and let my thinking cap sort of process how we talk to kids, and I came up with eight different categories of things we commonly say to kids, and over time, developed new ways to transform that language, to help parents feel less frustrated at the dinner table, and also to help kids have the autonomy and agency they need and want around eating. Not just for that meal, but sort of for their whole lifetime.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, I love that. And I think what, what strikes me as powerful about this type of approach, and it’s been really the hallmark of all the work that I have done over the last 25 years, is we tend to, with kids, focus on them and their behavior, trying to get them to do things, to make changes, to do things. And what we actually need to realize is, we can’t control anything that they do as much as we would like to think we can — right? Actually, we cannot. And so our focus, really, first and foremost needs to be on what we can change about ourselves and how we are doing things, how we are communicating, in this case, how we are talking about food and mealtime, so that that can be a catalyst of change for them. Because when we get locked into these battles of trying to get them to do stuff, get them to eat the broccoli, get them to understand why this is important, you can’t make change that way. So this resonates so much with me, this idea of actually, let’s look at what we can control, which is how we communicate and talk about these things. I think that’s a really powerful shift in how parents can be thinking about approaching this.

Stephanie Meyers

And Dr. Nicole, I talk with parents about it first. Most of the parents who come to my private practice are feeling frustrated. They haven’t tried just one thing to make their family meals more peaceful. They haven’t tried just one thing to get their kid eating better. They’ve been on Instagram, they’ve read a lot of books, they’re cutting things into cute shapes, they’re putting things not touching other things. They know all the strategies that you talk about. Maybe we don’t need more strategies, right? My takeaway from that when I became a parent myself, was that there is something incredibly powerful you can do as a parent, and it’s right on the tip of your tongue. It doesn’t mean you have to stop doing all those other things if they’re working for you. But if you feel like you are just going to want to throw in the towel because you have done everything, and it’s still not making a difference in in how your family meals feel, then perhaps it’s worth taking a look at this sort of unexamined thing, which is what we say to our kids. Like, “Try this, you might like it”, or “Just take one bite, please”, or “You liked it last time, this is the same recipe I made last time.” So these are some of the examples of things — and when I talk to parents about what I call table talk, it can feel really unnervingly familiar, it does for me too. I say that in the book really clearly: I am not here to judge. I am a parent living right alongside you with the same struggles and frustrations. So I absolutely want to preface everything we are going to talk about today with: This is not coming from a place of superiority. I am not a parenting expert, I am just living it alongside you, and I do hope, though, that by sharing some of the ideas around how you can take what you might habitually say to your kid about food and how you can rethink that and come up with some very specific new phrases, that can cause seismic shifts at your dinner table. And not only that, it can get rid of the meltdowns with the feelings of frustration, but it can actually give a parent a chance to teach what they really want to about food. Parents desperately want to teach the skills of healthy eating. You and I both agree, healthy eating is a skill. It’s a skill that we practice over life. And changing what you say about food and eating is the thing that gives your kid a chance to practice that skill.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah. So well said I love that. And it’s true. So often, when people think about eating, they don’t think of it as a skill, or healthy eating, they don’t. And as we have covered, in various episodes of the show previously, those of you who have listened to any of the episodes that have been done on picky eating or feeding disorders or things like that, we take for granted just putting things in our mouth. We don’t think about all of the skills that go into that. And I think you are making a beautiful point here, which is healthy eating, the type of eating we do, that also is a learned skill. And so we have got to guide kids in the development of this skill. It doesn’t just magically appear.

Stephanie Meyers

Yes, it doesn’t. And I think some parents think, “Okay, I’m just…” — their focus is on getting them to eat the green beans, the broccoli, the spinach, whatever that day. But I tell my parents, and I mean this lovingly: Getting your kid to eat a series of one-off bites is not what builds a healthy relationship with food or a healthy eater. That’s not the same skill. That’s unfortunately, not even — in my opinion, it’s counterproductive. I tell people my definition of healthy eating is learning how to take care of what’s going on inside of you. So as a parent, that’s hard, right? Your kid is going to be disappointed sometimes about dinner. My kids are disappointed about dinner plenty of times. But when you can come to the table with a set of new language tools, you can change how the interaction goes, you maintain some of the integrity of the interaction, and also help your kid get curious in ways they might not have been able to before. So I’d love to share some specific examples. And you can tell me which direction we want to go.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I definitely want specific examples. I want to touch on something really important that I think you just said, which is this idea of one-off bites in the short term does not lead to the patterns of comfortable healthy eating we want in the long term. And so it’s this idea that is so counterintuitive, but so important, of actually slowing down in the short term to speed up in the long term. And that’s so hard. There’s so much fear and resistance in us as parents, because in the moment when we are trying to get the kid to eat the green bean or whatever, we have got all our own anxieties about, if you don’t eat this, what’s going to happen to you? And so we go for the instant gratification of “Put this in your mouth right now, because actually, that’s going to soothe my anxiety that I’m feeling right now. And then I’ll feel better.” But to your point, while that may soothe us in the moment, it puts us on this path of that same pattern meal after meal. And it’s actually not doing anything for the kid to become a competent, comfortable healthy eater in the long run. And so it’s that differentiating of what’s our issue and our anxiety, and how we are managing that, versus what actually needs to happen for our kid.

Stephanie Meyers

Absolutely. And when you look at the research on this, it’s really clear: Kids who are forced to try a food — and I’m speaking in generalities here, so obviously, everyone needs to do what works best for their family. But when I meet a family who’s using a try bite, or a no thank you bite, or whatever you want to call it — I rarely meet a lot of families who actually feel like that’s going well. They’re doing it because they don’t know what else to do, but they’re doing it, like you said, because they need to feel like their kid got at least something green in this month. But the thing about that is kids may not be eating that food because they like it. They’re just trying to get their parents off their back. And unfortunately, when I talk to my adult clients, they often remember the foods that they were made to eat as a young kid. And spoiler alert, they don’t like the food. Usually they don’t like the food and they also don’t like the feeling. And a huge part of my work is how do we cultivate some self-compassion as eaters? Both for my adult clients, and how we as parents understand how we relate to our kids around food will help them be a friend to themselves around food throughout their lifetime. But actually, because we want to talk specifics, and I love that about your show, I love the fact that this show is about simple strategies that you can use right now, so I thought maybe since we talked a little bit about the try bite or the no thank you bite, for parents who want to let go of that because they don’t feel like it’s serving them. The first thing I teach them — This is kind of silly, but when I’m teaching them in class, I have them put their hands up to their eyebrows. And I know your viewers can’t see us right now, but I’m doing it for you. So I literally put my hands like I’m saluting both of them up to my eyebrows. And I say to them: What we are trying to do is get below the eyebrow line. When it comes to food and eating, the sensory experiences we have of food are happening below our brow line: Our eyes, our nose, our mouth, our hands, our heart, our stomach, etc. And when we are in the try-bite moment with our kid, we are usually up here. When I say up here, I should say it out loud, because you and I can see each other, but your listeners are going to want to know that I’m pointing to my brain. My brain is thinking just what you said, Dr. Nicole, “Oh my kid hasn’t been eating many vegetables, not enough fiber lately.” The thinking mind gets involved, and it takes us out of what our kids need in the moment, which is to get below the eyebrow line. So the new table talk, the new phrase I encourage parents to use if they want to either get rid of the tribe or maybe they just want to experiment with getting rid of the try bite, is to say “What is happening for you with the ______ (asparagus)?” I’m just going to put that in there. I’m going to say that phrase again, for parents who are using a try bite right now, and they want to experiment with not using a try bite anymore, let’s say your kid’s got asparagus on their plate, and they’re just pushing it around, or avoiding it entirely, rather than say, “Just take a bite.” Or “If you take one bite, then you can have dessert”, whatever you might have usually said to invoke the try bite, instead of that, just try asking your child, “What’s happening for you with the asparagus?” Or “What do you notice about asparagus?” In the book, I write about this, it’s called an open-ended question. And when you are a nutrition counselor — I literally spend my whole day as a nutrition counselor asking open ended questions. So this is the first part of my method: Can you just ask your kid an open ended question that gets them to think or maybe respond about the color, the texture, the smell, the temperature, the whirly twirly nature of asparagus? You might be surprised what your kid has to say. And you may not have to say anything after that. The goal of changing your table talk in this instance, is not to make your kid eat asparagus. It’s to change the way you are relating to your child in a moment when they’re disappointed about food.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

That’s huge. I want you to say that out loud for everybody again.

Stephanie Meyers

Okay, so you are not changing your table talk in order to make your child eat something or eat less of something. You are not trying to change what they’re putting into their mouth. You are trying to change the dynamic, the way you are relating to each other when they’re not having the happiest moment around food. Or maybe they are having the happiest moment, because by the way, just this morning, a client of mine called and she’s worried that her kid is just overeating. She wants help. She asked for help in telling her child how to tell her child to stop. She thinks she’s eating too much. This is another example we can go into, because table talk, it’s not about just picky eating. It’s not about just kids who aren’t eating enough of X, Y and Z. By the way, I think it’s interesting to just note: There is no actual official definition of picky eating. Picky eating is very subjective. And I’m a really big fan, even on the title, the word picky eating is in my title, I went back and forth about that, because I hate that term, and I don’t like that term. When I work with parents, I tell them right away, we are going off of that. Your kid is not a picky eater. We are not going to talk about that as a term or a label we can ascribe to children. Because if picky eating is even a thing, picky eating is the byproduct of what’s going on in the interaction over food.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And that’s so key. First, the language we use is powerful, which is the premise of all of your work, but that language around defining kids, from an early age, they’ll start to say — All kids come into the clinic, “Oh, I’m a picky eater.” And I’m like, “Right. That’s how you define yourself because that’s how adults have defined you because of all of it.” And so the language piece of that is huge, but I think to your point about: This is helping to strengthen the emotional and the relational dynamics around food, and here’s what we know in all of the research literature about how kids learn, and how humans make behavior change: It’s anchored in emotions and relationships. So this makes perfect sense that of course, we want to focus more on the emotional and relational connection pieces of what’s happening around food and eating, because that’s going to anchor then everything else that’s going to happen as far as the behaviors with food.

Stephanie Meyers

Yeah, in chapter three of my book, Dr. Nicole, I outline these eight types of table talk. Yeah, it was the hardest chapter to write for me because it made me worry that parents would feel judged. And so I just want to say that out loud, and it speaks to that point that you made, that when I wrote the chapter, it felt so important, though, because a lot of what we habitually say as parents to kids around food insinuates inadequacy. And I have met so many adults, just as you have too, that they still carry that label of pickiness with them into adulthood. They feel like they somehow did it all wrong. The unworthiness that comes along with that, that they still can’t manage to get it right as an eater, and that’s unfortunately, or fortunately, however you want to look at it, that’s actually something we can change as parents. That’s something we can do differently, simply, at least as a starting point with shifting our language.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

You just said the eight types of table talk. I’d love for you to expand on that a bit. You shared the example of some of the typical table talk in that category of that no thank you bite, the just take one bite, whatever, and you gave some examples around that. Can you just sort of give an overview of these categories? Were these just the main categories that emerged as you talked with and engaged with parents around what it is they’re actually saying at the table?

Stephanie Meyers

That’s exactly right. It all just organically came out of a major brain dump over like 6 years of literally thousands of parents reporting what they say around food and eating, both in focus groups, and also online and anonymous submissions. At that point, I was just curious about how dinnertime conversation about food happened, and it took a while for me to realize that there were some really common themes, and that these common phrases that parents said, tended to collect, at least in my way of organizing them, into sort of eight categories. So really quickly instructive table talk is when you are telling your kid what to do. So “Try this, you might like it”, or “Lean over your plate”. You are giving them an instruction.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

“Use your napkin.”

Stephanie Meyers

“Use your napkin”, yeah. Corrective table talk is when you are telling them what they’re doing wrong, like “Stop eating with your hands”, or “Don’t take such big bites”, or “Enough mac and cheese, you need to eat some broccoli, too.” That’s a common theme where you are correcting something you wish your kid was doing differently. Praise is when you praise your kid. “Good job eating your veggies”, or appreciative table talk is a different category. That’s when you thank them. “Thank you for trying.” Now, it might seem like what’s wrong with praising? Why is that a problem? Right? And I can go into more on that if you want, but essentially what that does is it thrusts parents’ approval into the realm of what kids are trying to sort out as they’re sitting there in front of the asparagus.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It just struck me when you said, thanking them, the appreciation, “Thank you for doing that”, oh, we center ourselves in the whole thing, and we make our kids relationship with food actually about their relationship with us and approval and whatever. And oh, man, does that mess us up as adults.

Stephanie Meyers

It does, and also, I just want to say for the parents listening right now, if you are kind of freaking out thinking, “I’m doing everything wrong”, I want to say this, I’ll say it twice: You are not doing everything wrong. You are doing a much better job feeding your kid than you are giving yourself credit for. And I sincerely mean that. This is tough. It’s tough. When I wrote the book, I was like, “Oh, man, I do not want people to feel worse about themselves as parents”. That’s something I’m all too familiar with. And so the reason for even naming these categories was to help people frame what’s currently happening, and learn how to transform it. Learn what you can say instead.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I think this is a powerful opportunity too, for everybody listening, I’m listening to Stephanie give examples in these categories. I have been parenting for 22 years, I have said or done virtually all of these things. Let’s just be clear. And so I think when we encounter sensitive topics like this, if you are finding yourself triggered by some of this information, some of the things that Stephanie is sharing, some of these examples, and you are going into this place then, of feeling shame, or feeling defensive, or feeling blamed ,or whatever, this is an opportunity for us to step back, examine where that comes from, work through our own emotions about it and say: Okay, this is information that I can use to meet what I have said my goals are as a parent, which is to do better with this. The fact that I have said and done all of these things doesn’t make me a horrible parent, doesn’t mean I doomed my kids. It doesn’t mean anything other than, oh, this is information. This is something I didn’t know before. And now I can take this in and I can use this to help me do better. So that’s how we want to be thinking about this. So just check in with yourself right now: What are my emotions about this? What’s my attitude about this? And just sort of breathe through it and say, “Okay, let me continue to take this in because this is going to help me to do better tomorrow than I was able to do yesterday.” That’s how we like to frame these things.

Stephanie Meyers

Absolutely, Dr. Nicole. That’s completely the case. And when you said that you said and did every single thing I just offered as an example, so did I. Every cringeworthy thing I wrote down in the book, I didn’t include a single phrase that I haven’t said myself. And also in the book I write about, there’s no such thing as perfect table talk. It doesn’t exist. Even if you read the book. So when you think about that, I still say plenty of times, “That’s enough chips”, and then when I do it, the only difference is now that I know, now that I have studied this long enough and practiced this long enough, I know what to say instead, which in that moment, the real live moment with my kid, I just say, “You know what? That’s not what I meant to say.” Then I correct, I just restate what I want to say, what I intended to convey, which was not a judgment about over-eating chips, but just saving some hungry for dinner, which is going to be ready in 10 minutes. It has nothing to do with chips. Food is not more morally good or bad, right? That’s another topic.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

That’s so good. And I love what you said about noticing for yourself and making the repair, and even depending on the kids’ age, saying that out loud, “Oh, wait a second. That’s not what I meant to say about that.”

Stephanie Meyers

And no matter the kid’s age, I actually recommend you saying that.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I love it.

Stephanie Meyers

Say it out loud because for your child, what we say about food in our parenting becomes the inner dialogue our children take forward with them in their lives around food and eating. So when they have unhelpful self-talk about eating at some point in their life, which I think is pretty much a universal experience, at least in 25 years of being a dietitian, pretty much everyone has some encounter with that, they have a new way to relate to that. “Oh, hold on, I can listen to myself in a new way, instead of just letting that talk rattle on.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah. It’s so good. So I think we had three more. Did we do all the categories?

Stephanie Meyers

I don’t think we got through all of them yet. Conditional table talk is if, then eat it. So “If you eat two bites of this, then you can have that.” Or “If you clean up your room before soccer practice, we can go get ice cream.” So there’s a condition. Now that just really briefly sets up reward punishment systems around eating. No parent ever intentionally wants to do that. But it’s a slippery slope, right? Like we all have had that happen.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I’ll say something about that, though, for those of you listening who maybe have had a child who has been through some forms of traditional feeding therapy, or maybe has gotten — even from well-meaning professionals around this, that often is the track that you have been put in. You are told to handle it that way. “If you put this in your mouth, then you can have this”, and that comes out of an old behavioral paradigm of managing that stuff that used to be the best we knew how to do, but now we know better. So some of you have come by those habits or that way of talking, very honestly, because you have been told to do that. I have yet to meet a parent coming into my clinic who has found that to be long term very effective, but then they feel stuck. “Well, this is what I was told to do.”

Stephanie Meyers

And Dr. Nicole, can we talk about that stuck-ness for a second? Because I have a new table talk I would like to give your listeners if that’s happening for them.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yes, please do.

Stephanie Meyers

So let’s say you have been through that experience of feeding therapy and you are working on scrambled eggs this week, we will say, and you are trying to help your child want or be able to take a bite or two. Here’s what I offer for table talk, I’m just going to cut right to the chase: Use a reflective statement, which starts with the magic words. “It seems like.” Those are your starting words. “It seems like there’s trouble with the scrambled eggs.” And then the words you say right after that are “What would help it?” “It seems like there’s trouble with the scrambled eggs,” or whatever, fill in the blank food, “What would help it?” Do you know what would help it sometimes? Sometimes it’s ketchup or a condiment and sometimes it’s sitting on your lap, or not doing this right now, or bringing a friend. I had a client last week who her daughter was like what would help it was that her little stuffed animal, Squirrely, could come to the table and eat with her. Okay, that’s an easy fix. We never would get there unless we ask the open-ended question though. So a reflective statement: “It seems like there’s trouble, it seems like that’s not — whatever. “It seems like”, and just your observation. You don’t have to memorize these lines. “It seems like” is all you have to start with. And “What would help it?” That’s where I would encourage people to go who feel stuck on that.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

That’s awesome. I love that. And I think for those of you listening who are like, “Well, my my child is nonverbal” or “My child won’t have any suggestions of what would help it”, I would think then, Stephanie, that the piece would be to start with that, and then maybe offer some options like, “We could take some of this off the plate”, or “I could sit with you”. You know your child, so you maybe could offer some ideas of what would be helpful if your kid is overwhelmed, or like whatever in the moment and isn’t able to articulate that.

Stephanie Meyers

Absolutely. And thank you for mentioning that, because of my work — I consider myself sort of like a garden variety dietitian when it comes to helping people. But there are people for whom — the neurodivergent families, for example, or families for whom this is not as simple and straightforward as I’m making it sound right now. And I want to make sure exactly, as you said, that people can take the tools and adapt them to their family life so that they can feel the freedom that we are all looking for with this situation. So yes, absolutely. And that to the point, my phrase, “What would help it?”, you know that Mr. Rogers thing like “Always look for the helpers in the situation”? When you just described that so beautifully, how a parent whose child may not be verbal is looking to help their kid, and they know that on this sort of intuitive level, then absolutely, by just using the language, “What would help it?” is sort of suggesting we are going to work together on this. We are going to come together around this moment you are having that feels really not great about food, instead of “I’ve got to get you to eat these eggs.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah. That’s a different dynamic for us too. What you are talking about, this table talk, the language we use, yes, it’s having an impact on our child, but it also is having an impact on us. When you said that phrase, like, “It seems like”, and then “What would help it?”, it puts me as the adult in a different space within myself emotionally, cognitively, relationally, of again, like you said, that partnering, it puts me in a space of empathy and partnering with, as opposed to pushing and fighting against, which is a really valuable thing, too.

Stephanie Meyers

Yeah, it is. And for me, when I first realized how this may be helpful to parents, selfishly, it is, because it helps decrease my own stress at mealtime. And so yes, to your point, I think that is absolutely true. I think we only have two more types of table talk, I’ll tell you quickly: The expectant table talk is when you tell your child what to expect. Like “This tastes just like the other thing you like”, or “You ate at last time”, and that brings up a lot of skepticism when you tell a kid what to expect. They’re like, “Oh, I will decide for myself. Thanks for that.” If you are working with a kid whose behavior is a little bit resistant or they may reject food, telling them what to expect is probably not going to help, I just want to say.

And then the last category is what I call closed ended questions. Closed ended questions start with usually one of six verbs: Do, did, can, will, have, and are. So, “Do you like the chicken? Did you even try it? Can you at least take one bite? Are you sure you ate enough?” I know, I know, it’s like nails on a chalkboard. But again, I’m just going to say, I’ve said every one of those things and I still do. And it’s all about the willingness to come back to the moment, and actually, that’s the other foundation of my work, is mindfulness. Anytime you say something to your kid about food, don’t worry about judging yourself harshly. But if you find yourself using one of these types of table talk, there is a way you can do it differently in the very moment, in real time. And actually, when I think about it, people are like, “Oh my gosh, I have to learn eight different things.” Nope. The eight different categories I have just described, you hear about them, you already know it. You can close that chapter forever. The way the book works is it’s meant to be personal exploration, where it’s not a workbook, but there are journaling prompts where you can break down answers to your questions and get some more leverage out of this. But ultimately, you are literally going to learn three big themes of how new table talks can work, and those three big themes, I call them formulas, even though eventually your language around food is not formulaic at all. But in the beginning phases, when you are learning about it, you kind of need some way to put it into categories. I teach about open-ended questions, which we have already talked about: “What do you notice?” and “Tell me about”. Those are two very specific examples. And for listeners who are feeling a little overwhelmed and they just want to walk away with two phrases today, those are the two phrases I would suggest starting with. “What do you notice”, and “Tell me about”. Those are the two open ended questions to start with. Reflective statements we just talked about, “It seems like there’s trouble with the eggs. What would help it?” is another open-ended question.

And the last one is ING verbs. ING verbs, so we talked before about “Stop wiping your face on your sleeve”, or whatever. So there’s a piece of table talk, right? “Stop wiping your face on your sleeve”, or “Can’t you just use your napkin?” or something like that. When your kid is doing something you wish to instruct or correct, rather than saying all the other things, just say the verb you want them to do in its ING form. So let’s say they are smearing their hands on their pants or their face on their sleeve, what you’d rather they do is wipe their face on a napkin, say “Wiping”, and show it. You pick up your napkin and show it on your own face. Don’t say anything more. And when you want your kid to lean over their plate, and so they get the crumbs all over the floor, don’t say “Lean over your plate, you are spilling it”, just say “Leaning” and lean, show it with your own body, lean forward. Model the behavior and use the fewest words you can, ideally a verb that’s in the ING form.

So if I were to tell listeners the fast way to start changing today with their table talk, which again, being with you on the show, the joy is all mine because you are so about simple strategies. So if you want to try something new based on what you have heard today, try an open ended question like, “What do you notice?” Or “Tell me about” or “What would help it?”, try a reflective statement, “It seems like the soup isn’t your favorite tonight. What are you noticing?” Or if your kid is just doing something like chewing with their mouth open, “Closing”, use an ING verb, close your own lips, don’t say anything more. We can avoid a lot of shame and blame and guilt and feelings of unworthiness in our kids if we shift our language, we say we say a lot less. When you learn new table talk, people think “Oh my gosh, I’m going to be talking so much more about all this nonstop jibber jabber about food”. It’s actually not about talking more, it’s actually about talking better, or a lot less. Yeah.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And that’s so key for those of you who have a neurodivergent child, for those of you who have a child with any type of processing issue, which is all of our kids on the autism spectrum, all of our ADHD kids, all of our anxious kids or learning-disabled kids, what whatever it might be. The more we talk, the more words and the blah, blah, blah we put into it, the more difficult it is for them to process and actually hone in on what it is that’s important there. So what I love, Stephanie, about what you said, particularly with the verb like “Leaning”, and then modeling it, that is so effective, especially if you have a developmentally young child, or a child with processing issues. It cuts through all the rest of it. And that helps their anxiety and their stress go down because they’re not trying to mentally sort through all of the 700 things you just said, and double negatives, like “Don’t” whatever. It just makes it so clear, and that reduces their stress, they can process it better. And that helps them feel capable. And guess what? When they feel less stressed and more capable, they’re going to be more likely to do it the next time. So that’s just brilliant. I love that.

Stephanie Meyers

Thank you. It made me think of the word “cooperation”. When I was writing the book, my publisher said, “This is really about getting kids to cooperate at mealtime, isn’t it?” And I bristled a bit at that term, like cooperate, what do you mean by that? Because the traditional sense of a cooperate is like “You do what I say”, and I said yes and no. Cooperation to me means working together. So if you if you can change your language, simplify what you are saying, and deliver on the on the point of wanting your kid to feel value as an eater, like they are taking their seat as an eater, that’s where I think the power of words, the power of hidden language really does matter.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I think that’s a beautiful distinction. And I have so many other questions for you, but I know we have to wrap up. But I think one of the things I really want to spotlight is if you have a child with more severe diagnosed feeding problems, feeding disorders, maybe they have a severe food allergies, whatever it might be, it’s easy to hear information like this and think, “Well, that doesn’t apply to me, my kid has all these issues”, whatever. And here’s what I would say about that, and Stephanie, I’m interested in your perspective on this too: The things that Stephanie is talking about here may not by themselves be sufficient to address the eating problems that you are dealing with, with your child; you may need other specific tools, professional intervention, whatever. However, these tools absolutely form the foundation that you then layer all those other tools and strategies on top of, and so I just really want to make that point. Because I think it’s easy, especially if you have a kid with severe issues that have been diagnosed to go, “Oh, well, this is just for typical kids, this isn’t for kids who are diagnosed”, it’s like this is for everybody. For some kids who don’t have eating disorders, these kinds of shifts in communication, very likely will be sufficient to address the problem. But even if they’re not, this stuff forms the foundation. So we all need to be doing these things. And then you may need to layer other stuff on top of it. So that just came to me as an important thing to mention and Stephanie, I’d love to hear your perspective.

Stephanie Meyers

I couldn’t agree more there. This set of tools that I put forth in the book, and the work I do with parents is absolutely not meant to replace diagnosed, or particularly as you are describing, more severe situations in which parents and families and kids are going to need additional help. But I have had so many of those people, parents come to my private practice saying “I feel like I’m doing all the things, we are starting to make get some traction”, but especially as their kid gets older, they want to make sure that they’re laying down the sense of self and worth and value that we all crave as eaters, and the way they talk to their kid, the way they relate to their kid over food is how that happens, essentially. I sometimes say that we are using words, but words aren’t even the point, right? We are pointing to something wordless here, which is the feeling of how we all are in our own lives as eaters. And that definitely requires professional guidance, as you described, for many people. And it can also be enhanced if you take note of the way you are talking to your kid about food. So yeah, this can also just be sort of like the icing on the cake, if you will.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah. Beautiful. Stephanie, this is such important work. I love how you framed this, I love how practical it is and the great suggestions that you offered. I want to make sure people know where they can find out more about you and your work, and also where they can get the book, because it’s just out, it’s just brand new out in the world right now.

Stephanie Meyers

Five days old. So thank you for having me on right now. So the book is called End the Mealtime Meltdown: Using the Table Talk Method to Free Your Family from Daily Struggles over Food and Picky Eating. I am on Instagram @TableTalkCoach, and as you mentioned before, my website is familieseatingwell.com, and it has been such a sincere privilege to be with you today, Dr. Nicole. Really, thank you for having me, and thank you to all your listeners for being willing to sort of explore a new way of connecting with your kids around food.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I love it. This has been great. I know all of you have loved it too, go out and get the book, check out the work that Stephanie is doing. Just so many great things to add to our toolboxes, and several things that I’m going to take with me even for my teenage daughter who’s still at home. So thank you for that, and thank you as always to all of you for being here and for listening and we will catch you back here next time.