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We’re replaying this episode because it was the most downloaded, most shared, and most talked-about episode of 2025—and for good reason. Parents consistently told us this conversation changed the way they approached feeding, eased stress at mealtimes, and helped them feel more confident introducing solid foods.

In this encore episode, Kim Grenawitzke from Solid Starts joins Allison for a deep, practical discussion on starting solids and supporting kids in becoming adventurous, confident eaters. Kim is the Senior Feeding and Swallowing Specialist at Solid Starts and a mom of two, and she brings both expertise and incredibly relatable insight.

This episode is packed from start to finish with actionable advice for every feeding stage. You’ll hear strategies for introducing solids, supporting picky eaters, language that keeps mealtimes positive, guidance on food allergies, and so much more. Allison and Kim also share personal experiences and lessons learned from feeding their own children, along with professional tips that help families avoid common mealtime pitfalls.

Below are the topics covered, along with timestamps to help you jump to what you need:
[8:18] When to start introducing solids and developmental signs your child is ready
[12:55] What to do if your child is developmentally ready but shows no interest in food
[14:36] When to talk to your healthcare provider about lack of interest in food
[15:14] Fundamentals of Kim’s approach to introducing solids and physiology behind it
[19:28] How to choose your baby’s first foods
[21:55] Food safety: textures, sizes, and preparing solids appropriately
[28:47] How to respond to gagging and what to do about choking concerns
[32:55] Homemade vs. store-bought baby food: pros and cons
[36:28] Whether babies need special “baby yogurt”
[41:25] Introducing foods from the nine major allergen groups
[46:20] Which babies are high-risk for allergies and how to introduce allergen foods safely
[50:45] Why food allergies are more common today
[52:10] Strategies for supporting picky or sensitive eaters
[57:56] Whether it’s okay for a child to skip a meal or go to bed without dinner
[59:21] When to seek help from a feeding specialist
[1:06:55] Setting up mealtimes to encourage adventurous eating
[1:08:10] When weight gain concerns require medical guidance
[1:12:17] What to do if you feel you’ve “messed up” feeding and now have a picky eater
[1:15:20] How family connection at the dinner table improves eating and bedtime
[1:21:22] Language that helps—or hurts—during mealtimes
[1:33:55] Services Solid Starts offers and who can benefit

Learn more about Solid Starts on Instagram or at their website

Solid Starts discount code: use code SOLIDBEDTIME20 to receive 20% off your first year of an annual subscription at https://solidstarts.com/app/ (code valid through 12/31/26)

Order your copy of Solid Starts for Babies: How to Introduce Solid Food and Raise a Happy Eater

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Scroll down for a full transcript of this episode.

219. [ENCORE] Introducing Solids and Developing Adventurous Eaters with Kim Grenawitzke

Allison Egidi: I’m really excited for you all to join me for this conversation with Kim Grenawitzke from Solid Starts. Solid Starts provides parents with tools to help them introduce solids and navigate struggles like picky eating.

Kim is their senior feeding and swallowing specialist, and she’s a mom of two littles who are four and two years old. If you’re looking for advice around introducing solids and language to use around eating with our kids who are a little bit older, in order to help your child develop into an adventurous eater, this episode is for you.

And I just want to give you a heads up that Kim shared so many great nuggets of advice and education that this was by far the longest interview I have ever done. So it might take a couple of listens, but I promise you that it is worth every second. And before you dive into this episode, I want to let you know that the Solid Starts team followed up with me and created a special discount code just for our listeners.

You can use the code BEDTIME20 to receive 20 percent off the first year of an annual subscription to [00:03:00] the Solid Starts app when you start your membership at solidstarts.com/app. We’ll put all the details in the show notes, but I wanted to give you a heads up about this great discount code before we dive in.

Well, hi, Kim. I’m excited for us to finally connect for this conversation after we had to reschedule because I got sick. The first question that I always like to ask my guests is what inspired you to pursue your vocation and to be part of this business?

Kim Grenawitzke: Absolutely. I love that question. So when I was growing up, and I’m actually going to go back this far.

My dad used to say to me, the job that you will have probably hasn’t been invented yet.

Oh my gosh, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UVA used to say that when I worked for him. Yes.

Really? Okay. Well, my dad was born in Virginia, so maybe there was a little connection there. But, uh, and, you know, I went to college, I studied history, I studied communications.

I really had no idea what I wanted to do. And I started exploring health care options. I was just kind of lost as many, you know, 18, 19 year olds are. And I ended up seeing a child working with an occupational therapist through a family friend I was just observing. And the therapist had said to me, you know, I love my job because I just get to help kids be kids.

And that kind of clicked for me. Wow, this is a really cool, cool world to go into. And one thing led to another. I ended up going to OT school. And of course I said to my dad, like, OT has been around for hundreds of years. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And, uh, I ended up working in the hospital and really fell in love with with babies and and specifically feeding because it was one thing that we all do every single day without fail multiple times a day and it’s such a heavy activity and I and I know that sounds weird, but it’s not just about the food in our bellies.

It’s about the connection with the person at the table. It’s about the relationship. It’s so much more than just the food that we serve. And then I really got into this feeding role. And of course my dad’s like, Well, you know, there probably haven’t been feeding therapists for a hundred years. And we laughed about it.

And maybe, maybe not. The role of a feeding therapist has been around. But, then one thing led to another. And here I am on Uh, a feeding therapist for a Instagram channel, right? And developing content for millions of people to, to see. And although my dad has passed away since, now I can actually say, You know what dad, you were right.

Teaching on social media or blogging, providing health communication on social media was absolutely not invented at the time that we were talking about when I grew up. And it’s, it just kind of brings it full circle that I’ve always cared about the connection that we have with our kids and with our family members.

I, my love language is definitely quality time. And I think being a feeding therapist pulls all of that together. It pulls the science that I love so much. It pulls the occupation of eating and mealtimes, plus that concept of sitting down, sharing a meal together, sharing stories, building a relationship over food, and so that’s kind of why I love pulling that together in one way.

I love that, and as you’re describing your feelings around it, it resonates with me so much because sleep is very similar in that we need to do it every day. Our kids need to do it every day, but it’s bigger than just sleep. It, there’s connection and relationship and, and it can feel very heavy for some people.

And for some children, and I, I think it’s this way with feeding, it comes easily. And then for some kids, it really doesn’t come easily. And then that’s when it can really feel heavy. And I often say to families I work with, there are three areas that can feel very heavy, that we have to deal with daily at some point in our children’s life, and that is sleep, eating, and going to the bathroom.

Yep. And we cannot make our kids do any of them. All of those things. We can only set them up for success in those three areas, and I really feel for parents when they collide. Yep. Oh my gosh. Which often happens.

Yeah, and I have, I have one daughter that’s highly sensitive, classic orchid child.

Everything’s a little bit harder for her. She’s four now, and she just, you forget her pajamas for pajama day and they’re in the car, they’re not even at home, they just were, you know, not brought into preschool and the world is ending. Yeah. And my two year old just kind of flows in the breeze like a dandelion and that’s how sleep was for her, that’s how eating was for her, and my four year old still doesn’t sleep through the night and really struggles and had a much more challenging time at the table.

But it just has to do with who she is as a person and we still set up the environment very similarly for both of them, but they’re just different human beings.

I always say my kids are my greatest teacher because similarly to you, my kids are polar opposites. One is highly sensitive, struggled with sleep.

She’s the whole reason I have the sleep business. And the other slept through the night at eight weeks. Sleep comes really easily to her.

Now they were flip flopped on the eating. My more sensitive child was a great eater out of the gate. Uh, my more natural sleeper, laid back child was the pickiest, but I’m sure we’ll get into that.

So, um, I just love, this is why I love to hear how people got into, to the work that they do. So, when you and I connected a couple weeks ago, just to chat about what direction could we take this conversation, you mentioned the power of language and energy around feeding kids and that really resonated with me because particularly when we talk about the two, three, four year olds, I am always talking about the power of language as it relates to sleep.

I think it’s really important. So I definitely want to dive into that. But before we get to the language piece and kind of that older age group, I do want to touch on the basics of introducing solids because I think that’s when a lot of people find you. And I told you right before we hit record that I just had a client tell me that she was super excited she had gotten to 80 foods by using your app and her child was about 12 months.

So when do you currently recommend starting introducing solids? Because even my kids are only 18 months apart. And I remember when, I can’t remember the order of which one, but one of them, they said six months. And then by the time, 18 months later, I had another one. They were saying four months and it really threw me for a loop on the difference in recommendations.

So I’m curious what you all recommend as far as an age to start to introduce solids.

Absolutely. So, it’s a blessing and a curse on our end. We are a multidisciplinary team of people who really like to chase the why. So, these recommendations come out four months, six months, and you actually were to ask a pediatrician, why is that the recommendation?

Most really don’t know. It’s, it’s given to them on a handout. It’s, it’s, It’s talked about at a conference, but there really isn’t a lot of information out there ast o why we make these recommendations. So we, of course, took it upon ourselves to dig and to dig and to dig and find out what is out there that tells us when we should start solids and why.

So this comes down to the question of why do we start solids? And yes, we start solids because there are some nutritional components that your baby starts to need, but more importantly, we’re teaching them to chew. Okay. And we’re teaching them to transition from a single texture, milk, to a wide variety of textures that we eat every day.

Because the goal is not to teach your baby to eat purees, the goal is to teach your baby to bring, to come to the table and eat the same foods that your family loves. Now, when we think about the skills for eating and also the potentially, the potential need for new nutrition, those things collide with developmental skills that your baby is showing around six months of age.

In most babies, around six months, they start to need more iron from food. This is a little bit complicated because depending on whether they’re receiving all breast milk, breast milk and formula, or only formula, their iron needs are going to be different. Their iron needs are also different depending on your iron levels during pregnancy, some how long they were, how long they were actually, or you were pregnant with them.

If they were born a little early, they’re potentially going to have higher iron needs and everyone’s body processes iron differently. So unfortunately, there’s no blanket statement that says this is the day that your baby needs iron from food. What we know is that somewhere around six months, babies are going to start to need more iron from their diet than they had from their milk feeds before.

Around six months of age, they also have the ability to sit with support. They’re able to hold their head and neck upright, and when they’re sitting there, they’re able to use their hands to bring things to their mouth. And on top of that, they’re interested. You bring your six month old to the table, they’re watching you eat, they’re trying to figure out what you have on that spoon, they’re reaching for items, they’re showing cognitively, hey coach, put me in, this is really exciting, I’m wanting to do this.

They’re so driven at this age to put things in their mouth. So this developmental readiness, aligns with a time where your baby also has some changing nutritional needs. So that’s why we like to say we’re looking for signs of developmental readiness. Which is around six months. Now, are there some babies at four months that might show these signs?

Absolutely. In my 15 years, 16 years of practice, I’ve never really seen one that was a young, that was an actual four month old, but some four month olds are really strong. You know, you never know. Most show these signs around six months, and some a little bit later, closer to seven. My, my first daughter was born at 36 weeks and she needed a few extra weeks.

I think we started when she was six and a half months. My second daughter, super strong from the moment she was born. She started closer to five, I think it was like five months and a week. But the signs that we’re looking for, again, are that ability to sit. So if they were to be in a high chair, are they the leaning tower of Pisa?

Are they able to hold their head and their neck upright? Can they bring their hands to their mouth? And are they showing interest in food? Again, most babies will show these signs somewhere around six months.

All right. So right away I’m thinking, what about the outlier that shows no interest in food?

Because I had one of these children. Absolutely. And so when that six month window comes and your child is totally capable of sitting in that chair, put stuff in their mouth and has zero interest in the food at the table. Do we forge ahead?

Yes, you forge ahead by modeling. It’s not our job to make our child eat, but it’s our job, it’s our job, just like you mentioned before, to set up the environment, to show them that eating is a place that, or just something that’s fun and it’s something they want to do. When your baby first comes to the table, they’re not putting foot in food in their mouth because they’re hungry. They’re putting food in their mouth because they’re curious and they want to learn.

Babies learn by putting things in their mouth, whether it’s toys, their hands, you name it. So when your baby first puts food in their mouth, it’s not because they’re thinking that food’s going to fill their belly. They have no idea that that even can occur yet. They’re putting it in their mouth because their parents is putting it in their mouth or their siblings putting it in their mouth.

And they’re like, that’s really interesting. I want to try this too. So if you have a five, six, seven month old baby, that’s really just kind of not into it, hold them on your lap while you eat. Carry them in the kitchen when you’re cooking. When you’re at Costco, go taste, go to the little taster stations and have them watch you eat.

Humans are incredible in the way that we have mirror neurons. So, our brains fire equally as much when we watch someone else doing an activity as when we do it ourselves, so our babies are watching us and they’re watching us to learn. And when they watch us over and over and over again, feed ourselves, put food in our mouth, enjoy meals, they also start to develop that curiosity and desire to do it.

Now if your baby’s 7, 8 months and is really just showing no interest, that would be something I might want to bring up to their healthcare provider. Typically, with modeling and showing them that meals are a really positive environment, they’ll get there.

But sometimes there are underlying medical conditions like reflux or constipation or other GI related things that make the baby not want to eat and not want to put food in their mouth. That is a smaller subset of babies, but they do exist, and if you just, if your parent instinct is saying something’s not right here, it’s not clicking, bring it up to your medical provider and they can get you the help that you need.

That’s great. Can you explain the just basics to your approach to introducing solids? So it sounds like you want the child to take the lead. So just tell us a little bit about the basics to your approach.

Absolutely. So when it comes to most things in child development, we let our kids figure it out on their own.

We give them the environment to lay on the ground. We put toys on the side so they’re motivated to roll. We put toys in strategic places to encourage them to figure out how to sit up. We don’t make them sit or make them play or make them hold on to objects. We let them lead their development every step of the way.

But then feeding comes around, and historically, parents have wanted to take control of this. Hold the spoon, put the food in the baby’s mouth, encourage them to eat. And if we were to dive into the research on why this happens, at the end of the day, it was a marketing. It was a marketing situation. Um, There were, baby food is a is a new thing.

It’s only been around since the early 1900s. Um, and baby food is not something that our ancestors, you know, thousands of years ago, used to have little jars of baby food. Um, but when baby food became a product, it became a product, it obviously flew off the shelves because of its convenience. It helped, at the time, women get out of the kitchen.

It helped women have other time in their life to do things with their babies, with their families. And convenience absolutely has its place. But if we think about how babies learn to eat, sucking puree off a spoon does not develop chewing skills. What does develop chewing skills is using reflexes to practice these motor patterns over and over and over again.

So in the same way a baby has a reflex in their hand called their palmar reflex, you touch their, their hand and they grab your, your finger, which of course we all feel like our babies are holding our hands, but it is also a reflex. That, that reflex is there to help them learn to grab things. We also have reflexes to help us build chewing skills.

So those reflexes are the transverse tongue, which moves your tongue to the side, and the phasic bite, which moves our jaw up and down. In order to make those reflexes do those movements over and over again, they have to be touched. They have to be stimulated. Those reflexes are stimulated by touching the side of the tongue and the gums.

Now if you were to think about, putting puree on a spoon and giving it to you or giving it to a baby, they’re not touching the side of their tongue and they’re not touching their gums. They’re just kind of slurping that puree on the spoon It’s a very similar motor pattern to what they’re doing from a bottle or the breast, right?

So we want to help encourage the baby to actually touch those sides of the mouth where those reflexes are needed so they can practice those movements over and over and over again The easiest way to do that is with finger food. But even if that doesn’t feel comfortable to you, you can still achieve that by letting your baby feed themselves.

So, not only does that stimulate the reflexes we want to help them build skill, it also gives them the lead, lets them take control, and lets them do it at a pace that feels right for them. So our approach, no matter what, is to help baby take the lead with their feeding from their first meal. If you’re feeling like purees are the way you want to go, that could mean putting the food all over their table so they can dip their hands in and put their hands in their mouth.

Because if they put their hands in their mouth, they’re likely going to go to the side, touch the sides of the tongue, get the tongue moving a little bit more, they’ll probably do a little bit more biting. You can also fill up, fill up a spoon with a, with a puree or even yogurt, guacamole, things that you love too, that you are potentially eating yourselves, hand that spoon over and let baby go to town.

Same thing, the spoon’s most likely going to go in on the side, they’re going to munch on it a little bit, they’re going to move their tongue over to get the food, they’re still practicing those skills of, of moving the tongue and the jaw in a way that they need to build their chewing skills. And they know, oh, I get to do this, I get to be in control of this.

This is my activity that I get to do. And when I’m done, I can communicate that I’m done and we can end the activity. Now if you’re feeling like you want to skip the pureed food altogether, you can start with whatever kind of finger food feels best,fun to you. I tend to recommend to people to pick something that feels culturally or culturally relevant or important to your family.

My older daughter’s first food was pineapple because we were in the middle of the pandemic and I felt very isolated and alone and I was working in the hospital and it was obviously scary and we just didn’t really know what was going on. And the first time I felt her move, I was eating pineapple. And It kind of was that first moment of, like, normal pregnancy feeling for me.

A lot of my prenatal visits were video visits, and I wasn’t getting to go to all the prenatal classes that everybody gets takes, you know, it just didn’t, it didn’t, wasn’t the same experience. For, for good reason, of course. But that was my first moment of feeling like, Wow, this is, this is what this is supposed to feel like.

Um, my husband and I had also gotten married in Hawaii. My family had lived there for a long time, so it just kind of felt like this really cool intersection of things that were important to our current life and my family’s history. And so her first food is pineapple.

Which already I’m thinking to myself, that seems odd.

It’s kind of hard. It wouldn’t be easy to chew. I have so many questions. Yeah.

Uh, so we, it was a long, thin strip of pineapple because a six month old, in order for them to pick something up, it needs to be relatively big. They don’t have the ability to use their fingers to pick up small stuff just yet.

That tends to show up closer to nine months of age. And so it was a nice big strip of soft, ripe pineapple. And she could pick it up with her hand and bring it to her mouth and just kind of munch and suck on it. Now, keep in mind, she wasn’t putting it in her mouth to eat. She wasn’t putting it in her mouth to fill her belly.

She was putting it in her mouth to learn about food. And the videos we have of her are so funny because it was a little sour and a little sweet, and of course, the juice kind of spurted out of her mouth a couple times, and she, it shocked her, and what we were doing there was sharing a food, I was eating the same thing, she was practicing moving her gums and, or moving her tongue around and chomping with her gums, she participated for five or six minutes, and then we took videos and photos and laughed and cleaned up and moved on with our day.

Now, the goal to making food safe for a six month old, if you want to jump just into finger foods, is most importantly, you want to make sure that it’s big enough that they can hold it. The research tells us that self feeding decreases choking risk. This research actually started in nursing homes because they found that nursing home residents, older adults, were choking more when they were being fed by nursing assistants.

And so they started comparing groups that were feeding themselves, and they had much less choking episodes. This research has been replicated in populations of patients with developmental disabilities, and it’s also been replicated in pediatrics. And from a neurological standpoint, it makes sense.

When you’re feeding yourself, your brain says like, Oh, I’m bringing something to my mouth. Get ready. I know what to expect. Okay, I’m putting something in my mouth. Okay. And your brain gets an educated guess of what that thing is. When they’re touching it, is it soft? Is it hard? Is it squishy? Is it wet? So their brain’s taking this information to tell your mouth, This is what I think this is going to feel like.

So when they put that food in their mouth, their brain is prepared to do something with it. Interesting. Yeah. So you want it to be big. You want it to either be soft,so you could take your fingers and smush it. With a pineapple, it was a very ripe piece of pineapple, nice, juicy, ripe pineapple. So like pressure with their gums could smush it.

Or we also like really resistive foods. So if I wanted to, I could have cut all the pineapple off and just given her the core. Would she have gotten any food in her belly whatsoever? No. But it would have acted as a teether, kind of like a teething toy. We love these because they stimulate those reflexes beautifully, but they are unbreakable.

And they’re not going to fall apart in baby’s mouth. So for someone that’s feeling a little bit nervous, that’s a great place to start. Another cool area of research, and I could probably, I could talk way too much about this nerdy literature out there, but, is the concept of motor learning, and it tells us that practicing a skill, you, you build more skill when you do something, when you actually practice the, the activity as opposed to doing the, the, the building block skills.

So could I also build the same chewing skills with a toy, for example, we’d be stimulating the reflexes and she would be moving food, moving the toy around in her mouth. Sure. But the research tells us that she will build better skill when doing it with food, and that’s because food is varied every single time that pineapple touches her, her mouth, it might be a little bit more slippery.

It might be a little bit more juicy. The texture is slightly different. Every bite of food changes. So there’s a physical therapy researcher I love named Karen Adolph, and she talks about how babies learn to learn when they’re experiencing these activities. So when they’re putting food in their mouth, they’re learning how to be flexible.

They’re learning how to come up with a solution for any type of food, not just that specific food. So, um, every time they experience picking up food and putting it into their mouth, their brain is figuring out, Oh, this is how something wet moves. This is how something a little bit more firm moves. Oh, this is what happens when I push my gums down on it.

They’re just building skill at this point to figure out how to eat.

Uh-huh. That’s so interesting. And as you’re talking, uh, my oldest is 11. I guess she’s nearing 12 now. And, I know I said she took to food easily, and then of course you forget what you forget in a decade. But it came back to me, and what she took to easily was flavor.

And I did all homemade baby food, and I did purees, but I mean I put spices, and I just put everything in these purees, and she was very receptive. But as you were talking, I thought, oh my gosh, how did you block this part out? She had a terrible gag reflex. Ah. So as soon as we gave her food to put in her mouth, I remember the first thing I think I, I think it was the first, I was trying to think as you were talking, was it a, a pea or a cheerio, but it was some little small thing and I cannot remember if I put it in her mouth or she put it in her mouth. Um, it appeared to me as a new mom that she was choking and then she vomited. And I thought, well, okay, that’s weird.

And the thing came out, whether it was the pea or the cheerio, and then there were multiple incidents. So eggs, I tried eggs, scrambled eggs. And so I thought, Oh my, and it was very scary because it’d be like this. And so at one point she was gagging and gagging. I called 9 1 1 and then she vomited. I mean, it was very stressful to me.

I can’t even believe I forgot it until you were talking. And so I eventually did take her into the pediatrician. I’m like, well, she’s eating great with all of her purees, she’ll eat anything I make, but she’s choking and my pediatrician does happen to have an interest in nutrition. I’m curious now to ask her if she’s been exposed to you all.

And she went and got a cheerio or a puff or some little thing and she said, all right, let’s, I don’t think she’s choking, but I want to show you. So what I’m going to do is we’re going to get this in her mouth. And when she’s gagging, I want, she like had me sit at an angle. She’s like, I want to look in her mouth.

I think we’re going to see it on her tongue. I don’t think it’s going to be down where she’d be choking. And sure enough, there was this thing sitting on her tongue. And she’s like, this is a texture issue. And, you know, we’re going to have to forge ahead and you just are going to have to get comfortable that she’s going to vomit sometimes.

And she’s going to do this. And I have lost memory if we ended up letting her take charge or all I remember is we got comfortable with there was lots of gagging. There was quite a bit of vomiting, including at a couple of restaurants. And then she really turned the corner and then she like took off like a rocket. And she would feed herself and we could take her anywhere.

Um, But I kind of forgot about that. And so everything you’re saying is making total sense with how we introduced it and maybe it wasn’t this way and she is a more sensitive Um person and so the texture and it’s she still is sensitive to texture. Like she will verbalize. I always joke she loves olives, she loves blue cheese. She loves all these unique flavors. And then there are certain kind of foods that you would think are a given and she’ll say the texture of that does not work for me in my mouth. Yeah. It’s not even the flavor. The texture makes me want to throw up. I’m like, ah, fascinating.

You know, and I, I love that you brought that up because I like to think about gagging as the brain’s way of saying something’s not right.

So when your baby is bottle and breastfeeding, and for those of you that had any struggles with bottle and breastfeeding, you may had a baby that even gagged on, you know, the on the breast or gagged on a bottle nipple too, but gagging is the brain’s way of saying, nope, don’t swallow that and don’t choke on it.

I don’t want it anywhere near the back of my throat. When we gag our airway, our breathing tube actually closes because in the event that you throw up from gagging, your body doesn’t want vomit to go into your breathing tube. So when you gag, it’s a rhythmic bottom up contraction of your food tube to push things out.

And your airway closes down for a quick minute. Now, when all your baby is used to is breast milk or formula, and sucking it to swallow, they know how it moves, they’re familiar with the flavor, they know how, they’re familiar with the temperature, their, their brain gets it. But then you transition to food, whether it be big pieces or purees, because a lot of babies gag on purees too.

The puree goes in their, in their tongue and it spreads all over their tongue and their brain’s like, what the heck is this? Gag. I’m not supposed to have it. I’m not supposed to have it. Get it out. Or they have a little piece of food in their mouth and their brain goes, wait, this isn’t right. This isn’t right.

Gag. I need to get it out. So one of the things that we love to do for babies that are super gaggy, especially those that are gagging to the point of throwing up, is work with those food teethers like the pineapple core. Another one we love is a mango pit. You can do a spare rib with all the meat cut off.

Um, something that’s hard that will not break up that they can bring into their mouth. They can physically remove it from their mouth and it provides lots of touch and pressure input to the inside of the mouth. All of that touch and pressure helps the brain say, okay, I get this. This is making sense to me.

I can understand how this moves. And that helps the gag reflex dampen a little bit. It helps the brain make a connection to what’s going on in the mouth because we can’t see it. Like, when we’re learning to move our hands and our body, we have visual feedback, right? But we don’t have feedback of what’s going on inside our mouth.

But that touch and pressure gives that to our brain. So, if you have a baby that tends to be really gaggy or is struggling with small pieces of food, those bigger pieces can be really helpful. When your older kids are learning to catch a ball, they learn to catch a beach ball first. Because we are able to figure out how to get our, and I am not an athlete, so I can barely catch a beach ball now. But you, you learn to get your arms around a big thing. Your body learns to do big movements first. If you were to try to catch a golf ball, that thing would hit me in the face immediately. That small timed motion to get my hands around a small ball is challenging.

We learn to chew the same way. If we give big pieces where their tongue gets to do sweeping motions and their brains getting lots and lots of information, then when we move down to smaller pieces, their brain’s like, Oh, I know how to do this. I know how to move the food to the side to chew it. I’ve got this.

This is. This is normal. I know what I’m doing here. And the big flavors are also giving lots and lots and lots of sensation to the brain to say, Do you feel that? Do you taste that? Your brain is learning from everything that goes in its mouth.

That makes so much sense. Gosh, as I’m sitting here I’m thinking, This is exactly why I created this podcast.

To help parents find resources and solutions. And this is the, I would have benefited so much from Solid Starts when I was feeling lost and anxious and not sure what to do and food and eating was a priority of mine and still is as a parent. And I just, I’m so excited that this is a tool and that people will listen to this episode and hopefully have never heard of you and come your way. So love it. Um, I’m curious your thoughts on homemade food versus store food. So you, you brought this up a little bit of how the origins of, of baby food, which I’d never really thought of. Um, and I’m curious your thoughts on that now.

Store bought foods are great for convenience. And I think everyone has to consider what their life looks like and how much time they have, what their financial resources are because store bought foods are not inexpensive. Um, and we have to decide what works best for our family. Now, if you want to go with purees, that’s an option. And full disclosure, when my two kids come home from school at, you know, at three o’clock and they’re both crabby, I take a pouch out of the fridge and give it to them while I’m trying to, you know, get my house organized.

In my mind, those are where I use these things from a convenience perspective. You know, we’re, we’re, I’m trying to get my two year old to sit in the cart at Target so I can get my shopping done, absolutely buying a pouch and giving it to her to keep our day going. But I also know that those foods are very homogenous.

They’re blended with very, very high, um, or they’re blended and, and they’re, liquefied with very advanced technologies that basically remove every single lump and bump in those foods, which can lead to challenges with children managing more varied textures, kind of like what you were describing with your oldest.

So the cool thing about, if you want to go down a pureed route, if you’re doing homemade foods, they tend to have a little bit more lumps, bumps, you know, a variety in them. The other thing that I like is that it’s much more likely that you’re going to make something at home like mashed avocado that you’re also going to eat, as opposed to the stuff out of the jar.

I don’t know many parents that really want to, you know, take a bite of that jar of baby food with, um, with their baby. But it’s probably more likely that you’ll eat some of the mashed potatoes that you’ve made for your baby as opposed to the stuff that comes out of the jar.

And like how we started this conversation, those mirror neurons and that modeling of eating is so very important that when you are serving
foods that you’ve made at home or just foods that maybe you’ve made for dinner and have modified to be safe for your baby, you’re getting that modeling aspect of them watching you eat the same foods.

So if buying food off of the shelf is what you want to do and that works for your family, that’s great. There’s no reason to not do it. You can smear those all over the table and let them finger paint and use their hands to bring them to their mouth. You can also use them as dips. You can use them to mix into other foods, like squirt some of that puree into oatmeal to give it some more flavor.

There’s a variety of ways that you can use them. Um, even, um, by pulling in family foods and using those purees. Purees are also typically provided by WIC, so some of the um, low income nutrition programs many times will provide uh, purees. We actually have a completely free guide of how to use those purees as well to, to supplement what your baby’s getting, but there’s definitely a time and place for it and you just have to make the decision of whether it’s something that you want to do, but I don’t want anyone to feel like you have to buy baby food.

Um, the other thing I’ll

Or that you’re committing a crime by using it.

Exactly. Or that you’re committing a crime by using it. It’s completely your choice. Um, I will tell you though, you don’t have to buy the baby yogurt. Regular Greek yogurt is less expensive and exactly the same thing. It just doesn’t say baby on the label.
Um, the, it’s just one of those things that you can do if you want to, but don’t feel pressured to do it. And if you do want to, go for it.

And the baby food topic is another one that makes me chuckle in the sense of my own parenting journey, because there are so many things where I went into parenting, sleep falls into this category too, thinking, this is definitely how I’m going to handle this.

You know, before you have kids, this is how I’m going to handle it. Um, And food was one where I’m going to make my own food, and I’m not getting processed baby food, and I was really on my high horse, and I did crush it with my first. I made all those foods, I sent her food to daycare, I was like, It’s super, and it went well other than the gagging, but the puree, she took down like a champ.

And then my second came around and you know, my ego was pretty big and I was like, yeah, okay. I got this. Um, and at this point now my other one was over the gagging and things are going well. And so I get going on my purees and she had zero interest. She did not have the gag issue. Um, she literally would just spit it out.

She would not take in any of my homemade food. And I don’t remember what age it was where finally, probably for all these reasons you mentioned about developmentally their needs, the pediatrician said, She actually needs to be eating some form of food right now. And so I’d like you to go buy some baby food and see.

And I was like, really? That seems so stupid. But okay, fine. So I went and I bought this baby food and I will tell you the first thing I did was take a taste of it. And I was like, this is disgusting. And it’s so bland. And whatever. Loved it. She loved it. Devoured the very first jar I opened, took it down. I don’t know if it was the smoother texture, if it was the bland flavor, she ultimately did become a very picky eater.

But she loved baby food, and I literally had to ditch the homemade food. And it was one of those times where over the first few years of parenting, my mantra had to shift. I had to get off my high horse. Yep. To, I reserve the right to change my mind. Totally. And I would have loved to feed her homemade baby food, but I was working full time.

Um, she was going to daycare. She was refusing to eat. The pediatrician told me she needed these baby food. nutrients and uh, she would eat baby food. So as much as it made me sad, that worked for her. I still don’t understand why she would want that. Um, but that’s what she wanted.

I mean with, with my first, it was again, it was in the pandemic.

We were like, my husband and I were both were I mean, I was working in the hospital, but only a few days a week and then taking clients from home the other days, and he was fully working from home. So we had we had all of the time. And in hindsight, it’s funny to say we had all the time, but we were trying new recipes all the time.

And my my daughter was exposed to all kinds of fun stuff. You know, come second baby. We’re both working out outside of the home and trying to figure out our child care situation, and everybody’s sick, and there’s a toddler that’s sick, and then the baby’s sick, and you know how all that goes, and I’m, and my second daughter definitely had like very, you know, Mondays were pasta, Tuesdays were like, you know, it’s so much more rote, but it’s just, that’s where we were in our life at that time, and you’ve just got to roll with it, you just, you know,
every, it’s,

You do the best you can with what you know at the time and the circumstances.

Yep, exactly.

So another area that I think as someone who’s prone to anxiety, um, in addition to the choking anxiety around food, I think another big anxiety point is around food allergies. And before I dive into your thoughts on that, another question that I often have in my head, but I haven’t asked an expert is, Why when we were growing up food allergies weren’t so much a thing and then now it is so prevalent.

So I’m curious if you have thoughts on that and then also just your general approach to what you think parents should know about food allergies as it relates to introducing food.

Absolutely. So, I do want to start by saying I am not an allergist. Um, I, I’ve had the incredible privilege of working with really intelligent, unbelievable pediatric allergists throughout my career.

So everything that I’m going to share with you is based on my knowledge from them. Um, and food allergies can be very scary for a lot of families. And I think it’s helpful to know that most babies and children will actually not develop a food allergy in their lifetime, but it is important to introduce those foods to help prevent food allergies.

So I’ll circle back to your other question kind of as we go through this, but there was a groundbreaking study called the LEAP study that came out that showed that when babies were introduced to peanut protein, their risk of developing a peanut allergy significantly decreased. And I’d have to look it up, but I think it was upwards of 85 or 88 decrease in risk.

So the studies were, were showing essentially that introducing peanut early, so when baby shows signs of readiness, and maintaining peanut in the diet a few times a week through age 5 significantly decreased the risk of children developing a peanut allergy. This research has been replicated, and it’s very strong specifically for peanut, dairy, and egg.

These three allergens. Allergists today are recommending introducing all of the top nine allergens, which are, and let’s see if I can get them all out here, peanut, dairy, egg, tree nut, soy, sesame, tinned fish, shellfish, and wheat. Um, tinned fish and shellfish allergies are a little bit less common. It’s the research is not really as robust in those areas and most shellfish allergies specifically develop later in life.

So if you’re going to focus on any, try to focus on the other seven. Um, but the research is very supportive in introducing these foods early. So when baby shows readiness and trying to keep them in the diet as often as possible, the research in the studies, they introduced it to, or they kept it in the diet two to three times a week.

I think that would be just, you would have to meal plan for forever to make that happen with all of the allergens. So our allergist that we work with says do your best to get it in there once, twice is even better. Some of them are easy like dairy and egg and um, even a lot of kids love nut butters, but some of the other ones are a little bit more challenging.

So you do your best, you keep them in the diet to decrease the risk of food allergy overall. Now, the other thing that comes in, comes up here is that for most babies, you can introduce allergens safely at home. You don’t need an EpiPen. You don’t need any sort of, you know, you don’t have to sit in the emergency room parking lot.

You don’t have to do it at your pediatrician’s office. Most babies can do it completely safely at home. Um, our allergist recommends starting small. So starting with even as an eighth of a teaspoon, it doesn’t need to be a big amount of something like mashed up scrambled egg or you can do peanut butter and thin it out with a little breast milk or formula.

You can put it on your finger, you can put it on a spoon for baby and you expose them to that allergen and then you wait about 15 or 20 minutes. Most food allergy reactions are going to show up within the first few minutes of having the food. Now, there are some types of reactions that happen later, up to two hours after consuming it, but generally speaking, the reactions are going to happen pretty quickly after, after you have the food.

You want to introduce food allergens a few days in a row. So like if you start with peanuts on Monday, you want to give a little bit on Tuesday and a little on Wednesday as well. You, you can increase the volume. So say you start with an eighth of a teaspoon on Monday, Tuesday, maybe you give a quarter of a teaspoon and then Wednesday you give a teaspoon.

And if you’ve done it a few times and baby hasn’t had a reaction, typically speaking, you can consider that well tolerated. You can consider that that allergen is okay. There’s an old recommendation that you have to introduce foods, one food every three days. And you weren’t allowed to do two foods at the same time.

There’s no, so there’s no, I’m surprised you didn’t hear that. That was a really big one. That was 10, 15 years ago. Like one food, wait three days and then introduce another food. There’s no scientific reason why that was recommended. Um, and the only thing that, that people can, or that the medical community has come to, to say about that is probably just the fact that they do want to repeat allergen exposure.

But if you want to give, if you want to give peanut in the morning, great. You can give them a mango pit five minutes later. You can pair peanut with cucumber, whatever you want, you just don’t want to give two allergenic foods together at the first, first few exposures.
That makes sense. So you, you separate your allergens, but you can do non allergenic foods with your allergens.

So that’s something I hadn’t even really fully contemplated, but there are this handful of foods that you really are prioritizing as the potential risk items. Right. Right. Which is why it makes total sense you could introduce more than one food if we’re not doing two because if there is a reaction you’ll know what it’s from.

Exactly. It’s going to be from that most likely.

Right. And then if you’ve already introduced peanut and they’ve had it three, four, or five times, then yeah, you can mix yogurt and peanut together be when you’re introducing dairy because you already know that they’re tolerant of the peanut. There is one group of babies that the research is very supportive of starting these introductions early. And high risk or babies that are at high risk for developing a food allergy should no matter what talk to their pediatrician and potentially a pediatric allergist before starting introduction anyway. But if your baby is high risk for developing a food allergy, the recommendations actually to start introducing peanut egg and dairy at four months of age, and that shows more potential for decreasing their overall risk factors.

So the two things that you’re looking for for high risk is if a baby has moderate to severe eczema or if they have an existing allergy to another food. It used to be believed that having a sibling or a parent that had that allergy also put them in the high risk category, but the research is not supportive of that.

But if your baby does have pretty moderate to severe eczema or you already know that they have maybe cow’s milk protein allergy or something you found out through your breastfeeding or formula journey, that would be a time where you’d want to talk to your health care provider and say, Hey, should I talk to an allergist?

Should I? And, in all honesty, get on the wait list to see an allergist because it’s, that’s the reality of the situation these days. Um, because they probably will recommend getting allergens introduced early. And you may need to have that allergist in your back pocket to, to talk to them and tweak your program as you’re going.

It’s interesting you mention the genetic piece because my father in law, I joke now, allegedly, allergic to shellfish. He might actually be, but I’ll get to that in my story. And then my husband is allergic to shellfish. And so for me, I don’t even know that I asked the pediatrician, but I’m thinking, wow, my father in law, my husband, I don’t have it in my anxious body to introduce shellfish to my girls.

So I never did. And there’s a little part of me that was like, I love shellfish, but like, it’s not the worst thing if you live your life without shellfish. And then my oldest started to say, I’d really like to eat that shrimp. I could see you eating that. You know, I’d like to eat it. And so I was so anxious.

I said, I’m going to get us on the wait list for the allergist. And now we’ve waited so long. I know I did you a disservice. So let’s get in. So we go in. And he was lovely. And he said, tell me, tell me more. You know, he was curious. Why do you think this? I said, well, my father in law and my husband, he goes, well, I Really?

Um, does your husband eat, I think what he asked, octopus? Does your husband eat octopus? And I said, yes. He goes, that’s a shellfish. And I was like, what? And he’s like, does your father in law eat octopus? I said, yes. He’s like, shellfish. And I know there’s two types, whatever one that one’s. And he said, okay, first of all, I’m going to do the testing.

We’re not going to mess around. We’re going to do the, testing and make sure she’s not because you’re here. Um, and then we are actually going to have to introduce it in a way. Because you’ve waited so long, even though she’s not. And so we did, and she ate shellfish. And then he really gave me a good pep talk for my daughter who’s just 18 months younger. He’s like, you are going to go home today and you are going to introduce the shellfish and similar to you, he’s like, it’s going to be a little bite and then it’s going to be another little bite. And then there’s another one. And he’s like, I just want you to get over this hump.

The chance of her being allergic is not very high. And if she is, you will have time for the distance to this hospital. And so he’s like, you don’t have to bring her and you can do it. So I did. He talked me into it. But then as I was leaving, he said, do you want to send your husband? I said, I do. So my husband went in.

Now at this point, he had had some allergic reaction as a kid that led them to diagnose him with it. Um, so he did have to do the very extensive testing, but he’s not allergic to it. Oh my gosh. See? And so we joke, like, I’d probably, my father in law isn’t either, but he’s 80 and my husband’s always like, don’t bring it up.

Not going to change that. This is not worth it. And I’m like, he’s missing out on all the things. Um, so he, but what he said is it’s also not genetic. So the reason he was kind of suspect about my husband immediately is he’s like, this is not a genetic allergy. So the chance of them both being allergic is pretty slim.

Yeah. I don’t know. Um, so I found the whole thing super interesting, and now both of my kids, they eat oysters. I love that. Yeah.

Well, and to circle back to the question you initially asked, like, why does it feel like food allergies are everywhere now? Oh, right. Right. Right. And, and the, um, from what we know, it’s because there was a period of time where the medical community was telling families to not give kids allergies until way later into childhood.

So babies and toddlers were not getting exposed to these allergens, and allergy numbers completely skyrocketed. And then the LEAP study came out, which actually started in Israel, because one of the very common first foods for babies in Israel are something called Bomba, which are essentially peanut based little puffy snacks.

And the rate of peanut allergy in Israel was quite low. And so that’s kind of where this, this theory came out of like, maybe we’re not making the right recommendations here because the food allergy numbers have just absolutely gone the allergist that we have on staff is she’s like, I hope that I put myself out of a job I hope that we get these allergens introduced appropriately at the right time to the point where no one needs me anymore because allergy rates have dropped so low that I’m not even necessary, you know we know that that’s probably not going to happen in her lifetime, but that’s not so interesting All right, really took a lot of time on that.

Everything you said is so interesting. So I do want to touch on language around older children’s food. So let’s talk about the toddlers and the preschoolers and sometimes, you know, it can be so tricky with that group. They’re also very opinionated and they’re verbal and I had a very picky eater.

It’s very annoying and stressful. And so let’s talk about your general kind of approach to feeding this age group for the group that has become pickier.

Yeah. I first want to, to put it out there. I, I talked about my highly sensitive kid. I’m not, and I’m going to talk about my approach here, not from the sense of like, I’m a clinician telling you.

Um, I want to say I used these strategies in my own home. I experienced the absolute frustration of having a child that would scream and cry and push their food away. I’ve been there. I’ve been in your shoes. And I still maintained the same kind of environment. And use the same approaches with her. Um, so I just want to make everyone, I want to make sure that everyone knows that I’m not, this is not a do what I say, not what I do situation.

This is, this is something I experienced myself and I know that these strategies work because my four year old loves to eat whatever now and is very exploratory. But it is very normal for toddlers to refuse foods that they used to love. It is very normal for toddlers to throw food. It is very normal for toddlers to not want to get in the high chair.

It is very normal for toddlers to spit and to cry and to scream and to request a nurse instead of eat, to only want snacks, to only eat one thing on their plate and push it away. All of that is very normal. If your child is doing those things, take a deep breath and say, this is my toddler’s brain development.

This is not me. My toddler’s being toddler y and they’re being toddler y because they’re supposed to. They’re learning how to be independent. They’re learning to have opinions. They’re learning what happens when they scream and cry. They want to see how their parents are going to react. They want to know what, what boundaries are around them.

They’re learning preferences. This is all about what’s happening inside their brain. So, we as parents, which I, again, I [00:56:00] know how frustrating this is. Especially when you are at low capacity and you’ve had a long day and you’re just like, just freaking eat. It’s like I’ve been there.

And you have this fear about your child going to bed hungry.

Yep. Yep. And you have this fear a lot. Yep. And you have this fear.

And, and I’d be interested to, to hear your take on this too, because when you look at the research, like it’s not really strong correlations between full, like between toddler eating behaviors and sleep.

A hundred percent.

And I know that you, like, were afraid.

And it was funny, with my first I never cared about her refusing food because she woke up a hundred times a night anyway so I’m like you can eat or you can not eat, it doesn’t matter, like, literally it never even crossed my mind, because, for her, her sleep has always just been so challenging, um, until we got our adenoids out and things were a little bit better, but, the, um, but I can totally understand that fear of like, oh, if they don’t eat dinner, they’re going to wake up and I’m going to not sleep, and then my whole house is going to be a disaster tomorrow because nobody sleeps.

But if we can, we can control a few things. We can control what we serve, and you’ve probably heard this before. We can control when we serve it. And then the thing that I want to bring here that’s most important is we can control how we show up at the table. So we can control if we show up open minded and curious and we can control whether we keep ourselves organized and calm when our child decides to lose their shit.

And if we remind ourselves that their behaviors are their communication, and they’re saying to us, this is too much for me right now, or they’re saying, this isn’t what I expected, or I want something else, or I’m disappointed, I thought I was having pizza, whatever it is, their little brains can’t communicate those words to us, so it comes out as, no, yucky, throw, push, and if we try to approach these situations with empathy and connection first, a lot of times we can work through them.

So, if you have your kid, if your toddler sits down and they’re screaming and they’re crying and they’re pushing their food away and they’re saying no, the first thing I recommend that you do is you connect with them. Buddy, I see that you’re upset about this. This isn’t what you wanted. Acknowledge them.

And sometimes just that acknowledgement, they’re like, oh, you hear me. Not always, and sometimes it completely continues to, to spiral. But starting by helping calm the situation is going to be your best bet. There is no way you’re going to get through to a screaming toddler while they’re screaming. In the same way, there’s no way you’re going to get, get through to your screaming husband when you’re fighting either.

Right? Like we all have to like calm the nervous system first. So if there’s a way that you can help your toddler calm down, that’s going to be the first step. A lot of times I recommend bringing them to your lap. I know having your child on your lap when you eat is really challenging for a lot of people, but sometimes that extra connection and love and support can really help calm down the situation.

The next step that I recommend is offer them a choice. Can I bring you a dip? What can I bring you that would make this better? What about a sprinkle? And hey, a sprinkle can be cheese, a sprinkle can be sesame seeds, or heck, it can be real sprinkles. Who cares? Is there something that we can offer to make this more fun for you?

Like, what, do you want to pick a topping? Do you want to pick a cool plate to use? Give them some sort of control of the situation. That might improve it, and it might not. And that’s okay. And you have to be okay with your toddler making that choice. Now, a lot of times we hear, but what if they don’t eat?

And this is the most challenging thing for the mom in me to say. But it’s okay.

Yes, that’s what I tell parents all the time.

There’s only so many things we can do to help them. We can offer a side dish to go with it. You can offer the cool utensil, the sprinkle. But it’s not our job to start a orchestra with our food and play with our food and turn it into toys and, you know, start a three ring circus around food. It’s our job to create a really happy, calm, mealtime environment where we eat our food and our child can choose to eat or not.

So, if your child still chooses to not eat, like as hard as it is, remind yourself this is their choice. I can always offer them a bedtime snack. I can also always bring out their dinner again, which is typically something that I do with my own kids. If they refuse, I’m like, that’s cool. Your belly’s not hungry right now.

I’m going to sit here and, and enjoy my food. And when it comes back to that relationship piece, if the table is a place they want to be because you’ve made it fun for them and it’s become a place where they’re feeling connected and, and joyful with their caregiver, they may still want to stay there at the table with you.

And if they stay at the table with you, they might eat a little bit. And maybe they won’t. But just reminding yourself it’s, it’s okay if they don’t eat this meal. Now, if your toddler’s refusing every single meal, and they’re dropping foods left and right, and there’s really nothing that can, you can do to interest them in food, and there’s no forced feeding happening, and, something just feels off, there are people out there, there are feeding therapists out there that can help with this. And sometimes it can be a sensory issue. Like you were talking about with your child. Sometimes there’s a variety of other underlying issues. Maybe they don’t chew well and they’re afraid of putting food in their mouth because their chewing skills aren’t really up to snuff.

There’s a variety of things that we can problem solve to figure it out. But in most, in a lot of scenarios, toddlers just need some boundaries around, um, This is a nourishing food that I’m bringing to the table. I’m not bringing something, you’re not bringing something wild and crazy that they’ve never seen before, that’s a scary, you know, that’s not moving on the plate.

There’s no reason that they can’t eat. And if they choose not to at the time, it’s okay. But showing up with yourself organized to be like, my child may have opinions on this. And that’s okay. They’re allowed to feel disappointment. They’re allowed to feel hunger. And I want to cap this off with one other thing is that. Something that I find parents doing a lot that sets them up for failure is saying things like, Oh, my child won’t eat that. Or, Oh, my kid’s not going to like that. Your child can never learn to like a food that they aren’t offered.

And or they ate it once and didn’t like it and it becomes your narrative.

Exactly. Oh, she doesn’t like that. And it’s like, Oh, we’re in play. We’re further planting that seed. We’re watering it. Exactly. You’re watering it.

And again, mirror neurons. So when we are saying, Oh, you’re not going to like that. They’re saying, Oh, mom says, I’m not going to like that. I’m definitely not going to like that.

I’m not going to try that. That’s not going to and so I like to encourage families to have a growth mindset of saying you haven’t figured that one out yet. Try to remind yourself that we can learn to like a wide variety of foods, and it’s completely okay that we have preferences. Everyone has preferences, and the goal is not necessarily for your toddler to eat every single food under the sun.

But you do probably want your toddler to be able to go to grandma and grandpa’s house and find something that they can eat. You want them to be able to go to a party and be able to pick things that’ll work for them. You want them to be able to eat a dish at a restaurant and be like, I don’t love this part and I can use my fork to push it over, but I like this food over here.

It’s, it’s teaching this flexibility around food that we all would benefit from. At the table and honestly, the flexibility we all need with our thinking in life. Yeah.

Yeah, so my second, the one that wanted the baby food, um, became a very picky eater and I was at a business conference and met an occupational therapist who specialized in picky eating and ended up working with her and it was game changer and looking back on it now, I think part of it was my energy shift and between her and the pediatrician who I mentioned did have an interest in nutrition and some additional training, they had also really reassured me that it was okay for her to go to bed without dinner. And so that was a hurdle for me, even though she’d been sleeping through the night since she was eight weeks. She was a great sleeper, but I think your maternal instincts and how society has trained us, you know, we, I grew up in the clean your plate club, which I’m very anti now, but, um, so I really struggled with that.

But I think it, what really helped her was the shift in my energy and, and, then also there were, of course, a lot of tools I got, but, um, family style of like it. She was older. She was not like a little toddler by the time I found this person. But really, she I think only had 12 foods she would eat at the time.

And so, um, she, family style, like she had to put stuff on her plate, but she didn’t have to eat it. Um, was an approach that worked well for her. And she always had a safe food because she has so few foods she would eat. Um, and she always had that safe food, but I didn’t even do any of the extra, like, She really didn’t like sauces or dips, but I didn’t even jazz it up.

And then we just sat there and I changed my language like sometimes, because I’m a very adventurous eater now, but I grew up in a house that wasn’t. Um, I would say, do you know, I didn’t like brussel sprouts until your dad cooked them this certain way. And now I, really like brussel sprouts. Connection.

You’re connecting. Yeah. So they were kind of intrigued, both of my kids were. And so we would talk about all these things I didn’t eat that I didn’t like or I thought I didn’t like. And then I remember the pediatrician telling her at one wellness visit when she asked like, how are we doing with the eating?

And we were making progress. She, at the time, at one point she would eat no protein. So she had started to eat some meat, and I don’t know what she asked her about. And she said, And I’m not going to get this quote right, but do you know your taste buds change X amount of times over your life is what she was telling Ainsley and she said, so Um, you don’t like something right now, because she’d said, like, I don’t like that.

She said, well, you don’t like it right now, won’t it be so interesting when you’re curious to put it back on your tongue in a week, a month, a year, if it tastes any different? And there have been so many times, uh, I’ll tell you where she is now at the age of 10, but so many times where she would put something in and she goes, oh, mom, I think my taste buds changed.

It kind of tastes good. I kind of like it. And slowly, but surely, she started to acquire more foods. And maybe two years ago we were in France and I really wanted to go to this Michelin star restaurant. And at this point I would have said, she’s an adventurous eater. And obviously we didn’t have a babysitter.

So I said, girls, what do you think? Think you could do like four and a half, five hours at this restaurant, they don’t have any sort of kids options, like you’re going to have to go all in. And they said, Yeah, we’ll do it. And so they were, I don’t know, eight and nine, maybe. And we went in and you could just tell the look on everyone’s face in that restaurant was like, Oh, these people are the worst.
And we sat down, I’m telling you they tried hague, they will tell you now all these things they tried. And the chef ultimately did not serve them the 15 courses and he did bring this a delicious, a little less crazy dish, but then they tried bites of all of ours. They’re like, we want to try every round.

And ultimately this chef came out, he had an eight year old and he came out of the kitchen. He said, everyone’s talking about your kids in the back. Like we’ve never had kids come in here. And how did you do it? Because I can’t get my eight year old to eat what I make. And it’s just interesting. I share this story because what I tell parents is don’t give up.

When parents say my kids won’t eat anything, I say, let me tell you, my daughter went to bed and she still does at the age of 10, sometimes she goes to bed without eating dinner. She has zero interest in it. She skips many meals. She had a point where she could only eat 12 foods. And once I got professional help, once I got help and guidance and the tools I needed, both around my mentality and my approach, and I just stayed the course and set her up for success. I don’t think all kids will end up liking going to a Michelin star restaurant, but we can only hope she just like took off like a little rocket and now she takes a lot of pride in it. And it was not because I’ve jammed it down her throat. Right. I just set her up to be more curious about food.

It’s kind of the approach we take. Like, won’t this be interesting to see? Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s this you’re you’re approaching things with curiosity. And I love this because you’re talking about how you’re like, I want to go to this Michelin star restaurant because I’m so curious about what the food is going to be like.

I want to taste it. I want to experience it. And if we’re thinking about forcing our kids to eat things, that’s not a positive experience, thinking that these foods are fun and nourishing and connecting. That’s a really negative off putting experience. So if you just think about it from like the, you know, the gestalt of it, if you’re trying to have an adventurous eater that loves mealtimes and food, the environment has to be set up for that.

And I completely understand the stress that people are under especially if your child is underweight, or they’re struggling with weight gain, or you’re having, you know, the pediatrician, as opposed to being supportive like yours, is lecturing you about how your child needs to gain weight. And I absolutely hate that the first thing that the pediatrician does at every visit is weigh the child, and it’s almost like your, your success as a parent is dependent upon what that scale says.

And that, I mean, that happens from day one of going, I mean, even day one of pregnancy, right? You’re watching your baby grow. And, we can’t control how much they weigh. Only they know what their belly feels like, only they know how much that they can put in it, and only they know what feels right to them, and if looking at that food makes them feel sick, or makes them feel pressured, or just makes them feel bad, forcing it in is not going to change those feelings of, of bad.

Right. Yeah. And, but for those of you that are struggling or have kids that are struggling with weight gain, my heart goes out to you and I really hope that you do have the opportunity to get hooked up with a good dietician, with a good occupational therapist or speech language pathologist that can help you problem solve what’s happening.

Because no matter what, we can’t make them sleep, we can’t make them poop, and we can’t make them eat.

Totally. And it’s interesting you bring up the weight. I hadn’t even thought about that. But that was, I have very petite children, which really perplexes people because I’m 5’8 and my husband is 6’2. But I have a very petite mother and grandmother and sister.

So it does run, and my husband has a petite sister. And so my oldest, um, was 5th percentile. She’s now in puberty and has, um, It’s rocketed up into like the 40th percentile, um, but forever so tiny. And not just short, lean, like see the ribs, tiny. And but she was my good at eat anything. Once we got over the gagging, she was a very, um, good eater.

And I served her, I’m kind of a nut about food, so I served her a lot of stuff. So for multiple years, they finally stopped, probably three years ago. The pediatrician, who I do love and helped me in a lot of ways, she would say, I’m going to ask you a question and your mommy can’t answer. What did you eat yesterday?

Can you tell me everything you ate? And I knew, I’m like, I know you’re asking because she’s like the skinniest human on earth and you think I’m not feeding her. And so she would say, I never, I could picture the room we sat in with one day she goes, Oh, okay. I had, um, two avocado. I ate the whole jar of olives.

And she just rattled off, she ate more than I would eat in a day. She rattled off all the, and the doctor said, all of that in one day? She was, yeah, yesterday was one of those days I was just really hungry. Mm hmm. And the pediatrician looked at me and I said, I don’t starve her. She eats. She’s not the other one I do have concerns about.

The other one doesn’t eat. This child is just a tiny human.

And we all, we all come in different shapes and sizes. And like there’s, there’s this perception that like you’re supposed to be a certain percentile. Yes,

yes. And she is just, she’s still very lean. She’s grown some, but she’s just very lean. But there was that moment of like, they’re judging me that my person is tiny.

And it was, but at that point, you know, I had already worked with the occupational therapist. I really had confidence around what I was feeding my kids, but it is tough. And I do think there are parents who feel very judged for their children. Um, and she wasn’t dropping, she was staying on her fifth curve.

So it wasn’t like she was failure to thrive, um, which I know is a whole different can of worms, but, um, there was that kind of, I think, concern, maybe legitimately. So I do think pediatricians should ask questions. So I didn’t take it too personally, but it was like, no, no, she eats fine. She’s just not going to gain a pound.

That’s where her body is.

That’s where her body is. And, and as you know, especially for girls, the talk, the talk about weight, in general and body image and how we internalize that starts really early. I think there’s research that, that’s looking at even toddler girls specifically having opinions about their bodies as early as three, four or five.

And so how, especially medical professionals talk about weight in front of them is so important.

Yeah. I’m curious here before we wrap up, for the parent listening, so there’s part of me as you’re talking and I’m thinking oh, I wish I’d come, I don’t even know if Solid Starts was around 11 years ago, but, you know, I wish I had known about a resource like this and I had these resources and I would have introduced food differently, and so I think we all have that narrative.

Um, but I’ve ended up in a good spot in the food department. But to the parent listening that’s thinking, Oh, uh, I already, I mishandled it. Um, what is your advice to that parent? They’ve got this picky eater. They’re already listening to us and thinking, I don’t do any of those things Kim mentioned. What is your advice to them on where to start, what to prioritize?

Help that parent realize it’s not too late. They did not mess up. Here’s a place to start.

Yes, repeat that. I did not mess up and my best advice to you is to tell yourself every meal is another chance. Yes. Every single time we come to the table, it’s another chance. And circle back to what we first started talking about.

Your number one goal, no matter what’s going on with your kids eating, is to make the table a place they want to be. So before you focus on them learning to eat new foods, before you focus on them building chewing skills, before you focus on expanding their flavor repertoire, the table needs to be a place they want to be.

They need to feel safe there. They need to feel loved there. They need to feel in connection with the people at the table. We all learn best from people that we trust. You could probably think back to high school. You know, the teachers that you trusted and that you felt connected to, those are probably topics and areas that you still probably love and read about today.

If the table is a place of connection, you are going to make progress. So before you think about anything else, you think about what can you do to just reset your table, have your child pick the music that you play during dinnertime, come up with funny games that you can, like, like we always ask at our table, like, who did you help today?

That’s like one of the questions that we ask at our table. Like come up, come up with the question that you can start your meals with to help your kids want to be there because when they get to be teenagers, they’re probably not going to want to be there at all. But let’s try to remember that eating is not just about the food. Eating is also about nourishing your connection with your child. And if you can get that set up, the rest of the stuff will fall in line. So most of us, I think almost every parent can do that because we love our children so deeply. And if you just focus on what can I do to connect with my child at the table today?

What can I do to make the table a place my child wants to be, that will go leaps and bounds.

And that can help with sleep too, because it’s funny you say, who did you help today, did you get that from Adam Grant?

No, that was just a random, a random thing that we started asking my four year olds, yeah.

So I listened to Adam Grant years ago interviewed on a podcast.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Adam Grant, but he was talking about questions he asked his kids. He’s great. If you’re not familiar, you should start following him online. Um, he said he asked his kids, and I don’t want to misquote him, but, um, did you see today at school? Did you see unkindness? Were you kind?

And his flip on that would also be, did you see someone help someone? Did you help someone? And so he recently, this week, or last week, because I’ve been sick, I’ve lost track of time, had a post about new questions around resilience that I’m going to ask now that my kids are older. And I said, Oh my gosh, he had the kindness one, and then he added on to it.

But I encourage parents that are struggling with their, um, toddlers and elementary or preschool um, and elementary aged children chatting a lot at bedtime, wanting to unpack their day and to connect with them at the dinner table. Because I said we can not always fix all the unpacking, but we can start to get them unpacking the day by questions like, did you experience kindness at school?

Did you see someone be kind? Or were you kind? Or the helper question. Um, and. It was a game changer for us when I started it because it helped my kids look for kindness and it helped them look to be kind. So it started to get to the point, it took about, I’d say, I think one of mine was around four when I started, maybe 10 days of doing it, of them being like, no, what?

And I was like, oh my gosh. And I, but you know, I’m like, stay the course and then they started to come to the table with something and it gave it, it, led us in so many great directions and then it reached the point where they’d hop in the car and pick them up at school and they’d say, Oh my gosh, I did something kind.

Oh, I saw Susie do something. And it was so great, but it can help with sleep in the sense that we can get our kids starting to unpack some of those things that they sometimes think about right at bedtime and they’re trying to unpack when you’re like, oh my gosh we’ve got to turn off the lights So that’s interesting that that helps with the eating as well but it makes sense because now you’ve kind of come to the table ready to discuss something It’s bigger than just eating and

you’re putting your body in rest and digest, right?

You’re calming your nervous system. And the other thing I want to mention here, especially for those of you that have not four year olds, you know you’re talking about your 12 month old, your 18 month old. You’re like my kid can’t answer that question or they’re not going to understand. It doesn’t matter These are habits for you to get into and you’re going to do it over and over again.

We ask my two year old all the time, like, who did you help today? And she’ll like, blah, blah, blah, and say something about PAW Patrol. It has nothing to do with the question, but it doesn’t matter. The point is, is that we are asking her, we’re connecting, she’s connecting back with us. And now that’s a habit that we have every dinner.

That’s what we start with. In the next, you know, four or five years, they’re going to know just like your kids do it when they get in the car. Now, it’s just get in the habit of doing these things from the beginning and then they’re easy. They’re mindless. You don’t even think about it. You just know that you come, that everyone comes to the table and you’re immediately going to have this moment of everyone sharing about their day.

So, and so in that example of the two year old, because my kids were definitely talking and engaging when I started this, you so in our house, when we did it, we, my husband and I would share too. Um, and I was joking, took us a little practice to, to come prepared. Um, With the two year old, are you saying, well I helped or I saw, are you sharing yours?
How are, are we modeling the exercise?

Absolutely, so a lot of times my four year old will, will start with my four year old because she always has some, you know, silly story to tell about whatever happened in preschool that day and then a lot of the crayons fell on the floor. Yes, exactly, or you know, I found a bike helmet underneath the, just the most random things that your four year olds do during the day.

Um, and then typically my husband and I, or I will go and share something and then we’ll ask the two year old. And again, the two year old sometimes says something that makes sense. And other times she’ll like say that she helped her teacher wipe her butt or something, you know, you never know. It’s a random thing that comes out of her, but we always respond and we’re like, Oh, like, that sounds so interesting.

It sounds like you were really helpful today. Or, and we talk about food in the same way. Like if she, my, my two year old is, was, really has not had a lot of food refusal stuff. Knock on wood. Um, but if she ever does get a little bit pokey around food, like we’ll talk to her the same way. Oh, it seems like this doesn’t, this doesn’t look good to you tonight.

Like it sounds like I try to help her with language too so she learns to communicate these things. Um, and this, we started for, from the moment she started solids. Like if she picked something up at six months and she put it in her mouth and she made a funny face like, oh, my, my response was oh, you must not be so sure about that yet.

Oh, you’re learning about this yet. Or you’re learning about this today.

So you’re not saying you don’t like that.

No, even from the beginning. And my, and now my four year old will say things like, my tummy’s just not so sure it wants that right now. I’m like, okay, cool, I hear ya. And, and we’re, we’re helping them build language round tahese things, whether it’s about sleep or and my four year old with sleep will also say, like, my body just really needs you to help me calm down right now. Okay, cool. Thanks. Thanks for telling me exactly what you need. And we’re helping them build language around these things that they don’t have.

And, yes, it takes a long time. It takes a lot of modeling. It takes a lot of examples. But eventually it, every single time that you do it, it’s sinking in a little bit more. And then eventually you’re going to have an 11 year old that says something like, I really want to try that shrimp, Mom. It tastes, it looks like it tastes really good.

Why don’t you let me have it?

So. So. So, I want to, on the language piece, kind of finish with, are there two or three things you would say we should avoid saying? Because sometimes I find that most helpful. So it sounds like, and you’ve kind of touched on it, and then we just touched on it again, We want to avoid saying.

Oh, you don’t like that? This is why I always tell parents, like, don’t say, are you scared of the dark? Because you’re planting the seeds. They’re like, oh, are you scared of the dark? It’s like, oh, should I be scared of the dark? And so it makes total sense to me that you’re not going to say, it seems like you don’t like that or you don’t like that.

Are there other things when people say it that you’re like, don’t, let’s try not to say that.

This is a silly one. But I prefer if you use the word taste, not try. Taste is an exploratory word. If you say, what is this taste like? The answer is not yes or no. If you ask, will you try it? The answer is no. And also, try has a perception of like, well, if I try it and I like it, then do I have to eat it?

If I try it and I don’t like it, then what? If I try it, there’s just more heaviness to the word try. Taste is, what’s it like? Tell me about it. Does this taste like other foods you’ve had before? Is it spicy? Is it sweet? Is it soft? Taste is a word that encourages curiosity. And a lot of times for kids, they’re more willing to explore something if we’re not, try, try assumes you’re supposed to eat it.

Taste is I’m figuring this thing out. So I prefer using the word taste over try.

And so are you asking will you taste this?

No, I typically ask like, what does this taste like? Okay. Or like if I put something, say we’re, we’re doing something new. Um, we had artichokes for the first time recently. Um, like we steamed artichokes and, um, my two year old hadn’t had them before and she kind of was skeptical.

And I took the, I took a, a leaf and I dipped it in the butter and I, and I ate it and showed her how to do it. And I was like, to me, this tastes like, and I just used words that, that I, that related to me. And I was like, this reminds me of, you know, this reminds me of these flavors. It reminds, it feels like this in my mouth because that was helping her get an educated guess of what, what to expect.

And she doesn’t have, again, she doesn’t have a ton of language at two to tell me what she thinks it tastes like. But at least that was more exploratory and curious for her. And so that, again, that taste word, if you want your child to explore something, ask them what it tastes like. Or if it tastes like something familiar or, even you can give them words.

Do you think this is cold or hot? You know, it can be as silly as that, but just try it has a little bit, it may seem like semantics, but it might go, it’s going to probably work. It’s going to get farther than you think. Um, and then I think the most obvious one, and you kind of brought it up with the clean plate club, but it’s just this concept of just take one more bite.

Try, try not to encourage your children to eat past their levels of hunger and satiety. Our generation of parents, we all, a lot of us grew up in that, in that clean your plate club. Yet we also grew up in this really nasty, negative diet culture. And so I think we are all in this very uncomfortable back and forth place of I’m supposed to clean my plate, but I’m also supposed to have this unbelievably unachievable thinness that makes me more beautiful or better than others, which we know is not the truth.

But that’s that’s our lived experience. And the best thing that we can do for our kids is to help them learn to listen to their body and to have balance in their life. So. Yeah, all of us are. Many of us love cookies, right? And our bellies feel the best when we have a little bit of everything. So if we’ve had a little bit of fruit, we’ve had a little bit of chicken and yeah, we had a little bit of cookies, too, because cookies are delicious.

But our belly does the best when we’re balanced. We don’t have all cookies. We don’t have all, we don’t, we don’t have all strawberries. We don’t have all whatever it is, but it’s not our job to decide what their their bodies feel like. It’s our job to ask our children how their bodies feel like. So if you think that they haven’t eaten enough and they’re pushing food around, I would encourage you to say instead, have you checked in with your belly?

Is your belly still feeling full? Is your belly, is your belly or is your belly feeling full? Is your belly still a little bit hungry and model it yourself? Like I’m checking in with my belly. I still think there’s some room in there. I’m going to have a little bit more. Um, They’re not going to pick this up on the first time you use it, but the more you do it, the more likely they will be able to use those, that language, and for a while, they’re just going to be saying it, and it’s not going to mean anything, but eventually, that brain body connection is going to happen, and they’re going to be like, oh, my tummy’s rumbly, I’m hungry, I’d like to have some food.

And when you pour the Halloween candy out, they’re going to be like, Ooh, this is great, but I know that I ate something else today, so my belly’s not going to feel sick after I’ve had, you know, you’re, they’ll, they’ll be able to learn to be more intuitive what they’re eating. And that takes time. It takes a lot of time and practice.

And then when my kids eat a ton, which will happen sometimes. It’s like, whoa, they put more in their body than I could ever eat. Sometimes I’ve been with my dad, for example, um, and I’ll cringe when he’s like, good job, you ate everything on your plate. He’s like doing the whole thing. And what I try to say is, oh, it’s so interesting that you were so hungry today.

It makes me so curious if you’re about to have a growth spurt, we’re going to have to keep an eye on it. And inevitably, my kids seem to like grow like in little chunks. And, um, their pants will get short. And then I’ll say, Oh my gosh, isn’t that so funny? Do you remember like 10 days ago you were eating so much, you were so hungry.

And I said to you, I wonder if you’re about to grow and look at that. Now you have flood pants. Yeah. And they’ll crack up. And so now when they’re so hungry, they’ll say, Oh, get ready. I’m about to get taller. They’re trying to compete with each other. Although the one has taken off. Um, but they were like the same size forever.

And I’d say, Oh, you might pass your sister getting ready to grow. But But I think even that shift about being thoughtful when they do eat a lot, whether they don’t eat or do eat, of controlling the narrative is important. Um, I’ve been on a health journey and I got very stressed when I did go on, I guess what I call a diet.

I’ve learned to, I don’t avoid the word diet anymore, um, for my autoimmune disease. And I cannot for the life of me remember what expert I was talking to, because it predates this podcast, and I don’t know if it was a client, and I said, like, can I pick your brain on this? I have a lot of anxiety around this very strict diet I’m going on and the perception my children will have and she said something that I thought was very interesting.

She said, I want you to let go of that. You can say you’re on a diet. Forget about society’s view on it. And what you want to do is explain what you’re doing. So I am only eating these foods because my body needs some time to heal and now I’m going to start to learn how each of these foods makes me feel going forward because my goal is to to be strong and healthy, and food affects how strong and healthy I feel, and It actually has been an amazing journey for my children, um, to do that, to, to talk through that.

And so we do sometimes talk about diets in our house. Like they’ll say, mom, is that in your diet right now? And I’ll say, yeah, I’ve been tolerating that well, I can eat that or, or I ate that yesterday. I’m not feeling very good today. And it’s been interesting to navigate trying to get over that negative view on food that I grew up with, but then also being on a, I guess, quote, diet myself and the language around that. But what I’ve learned is our kids pick up on this stuff so readily. Yep. Even if you’re kind of trying to avoid it. Like, that’s how observant they are. Uh, and it’s amazing. So I think the language around food, that’s why I wanted us to chat about it.

I’m so curious about it because it’s like a language around anything, they’re, they’re picking up on it and it plays a role in, in how their little brains are getting wired for better or for worse.

And I mean we just had Halloween so it’s just very like in the front of my, my thinking but I, when my littlest turned one, of course we had cake and like all the fun stuff and we let my three year old at the time just go for it and she ate so much sugary whatever and later in the day she had a bellyache and she like felt really yucky and so we try to use that as an example of like, Hmm, I wonder why your belly’s hurting.

Hmm, what did we eat today? You did have a lot of, you had a lot of sweets and stuff. Did we have anything for balance? And like we just tried to like talk her through like, I wonder if your belly’s hurting because you had a lot of crap, right?

Yeah. We’re not trying to put that on a pedestal or, you know, take it down from a pedestal or say she did something bad.

We’re just trying to connect the dots that sometimes when we eat a whole bunch of sugary stuff, our bellies might not feel great in the same way that your process, you’re figuring out certain foods right now make my body feel better than others. And I want my kids to love delicious cakes and ice creams and cookies and whatever.

And I want them to know that, hey, you eat however much you want. And there might be a situation where you eat a ton of that and your belly’s not going to feel great. Or your belly might feel fine. I don’t know. But it’s just trying to connect the dots that when we have a varied diet, we’re probably going to feel the best in the majority of situations.

Well, and I’ve always told my kids, that, um, what ultimately I settled on for when I feel the best, which I don’t always do, which is fine, um, is that I have a vegetable, a protein, a starch, and a healthy fat. And my younger daughter is more curious, funny that picky eaters become very curious about it, about understanding what falls into each of those categories.

And there are days where, let’s say she’s going to have to do her standardized testing at school. She’ll come down and she’ll say, I would like for breakfast, some spinach with olive oil. That’s my vegetable and my healthy fat. And then I would like an egg. That’s my protein. And she’ll like go through it and sometimes I’m like, but then I think, no, that’s great. She’s, and then she’ll say like, oh, I felt great all day. I wasn’t even hungry all the way to lunch. I’m like, isn’t that so interesting? Because when you balance it, I used to not have sweet potato in and then I’d be hungry. And then when the nutritionist had me add the sweet potato, I stopped being hungry.

And I thought that was so interesting. That was like the missing piece of my balanced meal. Now I will say my other daughter is like, y’all are nuts. Yeah, good luck to you. Where’s the Halloween candy? And so not all kids will, will go down that path, but I always with her, she’ll say, when I go to college, I’m going to eat all the things you don’t put in this house.

And I always say, I bet you will. And then one day, you’re going to come back to all of the things we talked about, because for better or for worse, that’s what we do as adults. We all come back to our childhood. And then maybe you’ll be interested in any of the things I’ve talked about food and maybe you won’t.

And we can only control what they eat for so long. Yeah. And then they go to school and then they go to their friend’s houses and then they drive themselves to wherever and all we can do is know that we gave them a really good foundation and we’ve taught them to listen to their body and we’ve taught them to hopefully make good choices and you know, that’s really all we can do.

Same with sleep. We can only control it for so long and then they’re going to go off and they’ll decide what kind of sleepers they want to be.

My four year old’s not going to sleep with me when she’s going to college. She’ll be OK by then.

That’s so true. It’s funny because people often say, um, Are you anti cosleeping?

And I said, no, I’m, I’m pro what works for your family and all things food, potty training, sleep. I don’t think there’s one right approach. It’s just the best approach for your family. And I joke that I’m one of four and the youngest co slept with my parents well into middle school, I think.

Don’t say that to me. I’m really hoping this phase is going to end.

And he turned out fine. He’s a lovely adult. He’s wildly successful. And they never let the other three of us sleep in their bed, and we turned out fine too. So I’m like, you know, everyone’s going to be okay. Everyone can take their own approach. Well, Kim, I have to tell you, I think this is going to be by far the longest episode we’ve ever done.

Sorry.

No, do not apologize. I’m sorry. I’m so appreciative of your time. I literally feel like I could talk to you for three hours. I’m already thinking like, could I have her come back to talk about something else? Thank you so, so much. I’m so grateful for your time and that we were able to connect and I know people are going to get so much from this episode.

Can you tell everyone how to find you or Solid Starts or if they’re curious what age, I do want to touch on what age group Solid Starts addresses. Like who’s your kind of ideal audience. Tell them a little bit about Solid Starts before we wrap up, so people know how to get to you.

Absolutely. So Solid Starts was created by a mom of a, actually a child who really struggled with eating.

And he’s now, he’s now a very happy school aged kid. Um, but he really struggled, and so

when she had her, when she had twins right before the pandemic, she had decided, I want to do something different. Um, and she pulled together a multidisciplinary team of experts. We have occupational therapist, speech language pathologist.

We have a pediatric allergist, a pediatric GI doctor, a pediatric dietitian, and we’ve all worked together to put together resources for families pre starting solids, starting solids, and through early childhood. So we have a incredible award winning app that you can download that will, either can help you look up foods and give you recommendations on how to safely cut and prepare those foods for your baby by their age.

And that app also has a guided experience for starting solids. So if you just want to, if you want to take all the guesswork out of it and you don’t want to think about anything and you just want someone to tell you what to do, Compass is our guided experience, which will say, Here’s a recipe for today.

This is how you prepare it. It’ll walk you through allergen introduction. It does all of that for you to get your baby exposed to tons of different foods before their first birthday. We also have a website that has a unbelievable amount of information on a variety of topics from everything from gagging to spitting to choking to stuffing food in their cheeks to food refusal.

You name it. We’ve got a really robust search bar. Just type in the topic and there will most likely be a really, really long, wonderful article there to help you. And then we also have resources specifically for toddlers, so dealing with this oh so fun selective behavior. Um, we have an entire guide that’s just about high chairs because getting your, your toddler to the chair can be a really, really big challenge.

Um, that we’ve got guides on toddler food refusal, on throwing, on other behaviors. On teaching your toddler how to eat risky foods because, you know, we do have to teach them how to chew things like grapes and nuts. So all of those, um, those resources are available for toddlers. And then we also have resources available for those of you that are dealing with the more challenging, what we consider picky eating or pediatric feeding disorder kind of behaviors where things are a little bit more than just typical toddler selectivity. Those resources are available on our website as well. So, um, our Instagram is at Solid Starts. You can always DM us or send us an email and we will try to help you or push you, get you in the direction you need to be.

But we really want to help families with all of those eating, eating issues starting from the moment you start solids because our goal really is to have children who love to be at the table with their families. Um, depending on when this podcast comes out, we also have our first book published coming out, um, published by Penguin Random House and that’ll be released on April 1st.

So, um, something you guys can look out for. It’s, it’s on pre sale on online right now, but, uh, really excited for that. And that’s kind of going to be the everything starting solids. So if anyone’s in that bucket, that’s coming out April 1st, but, uh, yeah, you can always find us on Instagram at our website.

Well, this is great. So I learned about Solid Starts from Dr. Stephanie Grice, who’s been on this podcast a few times, and she has said to me multiple times, I always tell people, my patients, get Solid Starts and listen to Allison’s podcast, and and so she said, you’ve really got to start to follow them because you guys are my two most recommended resources, and so I’m so I’m so glad she directed me to you, and I have learned a great deal today.

I will make sure that we link to everything you mentioned, including the book link in the show notes. And thank you again. This has been a treat, and you’re going to win the award for the longest podcast episode in three plus years, because I couldn’t stop asking you questions.

Well, our book, our book editor does say that we’re quite long winded, so, you know, it’s true. So, love to talk, you know.

Well, it’s all so good. So thanks. And I look forward to connecting again soon. So bye for now.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.