Regardless of the time of year, meals shared with loved ones are an incredible opportunity for connection, socialization, laughter, and delicious food. However, for many neurodiverse children, mealtimes can bring big feelings and new challenges, especially around the holidays. Changes to mealtime routines, new textures, unfamiliar smells, and busy gatherings can make eating feel stressful instead of joyful.
As a Board-Certified Behavior Analyst with a specialty in feeding, I have found that Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) provides helpful tools to support your kiddos at mealtime. These three tips, when practiced over time, help children feel curious, engaged, and even adventurous at the table.
1. Honor Your Child’s Assent When Presenting New Foods
Assent means that your child is showing that they want to participate in an activity. This might be through communication (e.g., “This is cool!” “Yes, mashed potatoes sound yummy,” etc.) or by showing you with their cues or body language (e.g., showing curiosity by moving toward or investigating a plate of food, smiling or nodding their head, etc.). Some initial steps to honor assent while also providing opportunities to try new foods might include:
A. Exposure without the expectation of your child eating it initially.
- Present foods that are special to your family during the holidays. You can place foods within view, offer opportunities for them to help you cook or prepare meals, or even just the aroma of holiday yumminess are great ways to expose your child to holiday foods and traditions, while not requiring them to eat the foods if they are not willing at that time.
- Don’t forget to try again! Research tells us that repeated exposure to foods facilitates greater likelihood they will try those foods in the future. Exposure gradually reduces the aversive reaction to food through a process called systematic desensitization. Properties of the food (i.e., what it looks like, smells like, tastes like, feels like) become less stressful over time. Additionally, children experience learned safety when food experiences do not result in non-preferred consequences (e.g., physical guidance to eat), increasing their willingness to try that food again in the future.
B. Provide Choices
- There are so many ways to incorporate choices during meals. Allowing your child to make choices, vocally or non-vocally, gives them autonomy and control of their world and likely makes trying new foods or less preferred foods a bit easier. For example, you can provide your child with a choice of seating, which plates and utensils to use, placement of foods on the plate, and which foods (and how much) to serve.
- During a holiday meal, this might look like:
“You can sit at the big table here or over at the small table.”
“Which is your favorite today, the Mickey plate or the Bluey plate?”
“Do you want green beans or mashed potatoes on your Mickey Mouse plate?”
C. “No” is okay!
- Honoring your child’s communication, even “no,” teaches them that their voice has meaning and helps them feel safe and confident during mealtimes. As a parent, you have the choice to discontinue the meal, try a different food, take a break and come back, or change up the presentation (e.g., choose a new plate, a new place to eat, etc.). You can also use this as an opportunity to teach functional communication, such as “I’m not ready yet” or “Snowman plate, please.”
2. Break It Down into Small, Achievable Steps Celebrating Success
Eating a new food involves many small skills: looking at it, smelling it, touching it, tasting it, taking a bite, and eventually eating a full portion. You can make eating fun by shaping these steps gradually.
A. Start where your child is already successful and build from there.
- For some children, this might mean just starting with sitting at the table or being in the same room with the family for a short duration, without offering new foods. For other children, you might begin with sitting at the table with preferred and non-preferred foods in close proximity.
- Start by offering small amounts of food, honoring assent as discussed above.
- Let your child lead the way and as they build their skills, offer encouragement and praise for each step.
- Offer known and preferred foods along with less familiar ones.
B. Break it down: “First, Then” Contingency.
- Present clear and attainable instructions, setting your child up for success. For example, “First try one bite of turkey, then pie!” or “Let’s smell potatoes, then have your juice.”
C. Reinforcement, reinforcement!
- Provide loads of positives for big (and small!) steps forward. Let your child know you are proud of them, offer extra goodies and fun following flexibility and participation in holiday routines and eating. Also, be sure to offer time away from the big group, pressure of eating, etc. which might facilitate your child to regulate and then return to the setting and be more successful.
- It might also be helpful to offer non-contingent access to a favorite items to help establish this new meal context as something positive and safe. For example, you might ask if your child wants to bring a favorite stuffy to dinner or maybe play some of their favorite music in the background.
D. Select new foods that are similar to foods in their current repertoire.
- For example, if your child enjoys carrots, try presenting sweet potatoes since they are similar in color, texture, and sweetness.
Try to lighten your load too by going into holiday meals without set expectations about your child’s eating. Holiday meals are about so much more than food, so do your best to find those wins, whether big successes or small steps of growth.
3. Focus on Connection, Not Compliance
The most meaningful progress often comes from compassionate connection, not rigid expectations. The goal isn’t for your child to “eat like everyone else,” it’s for them to feel confident, autonomous, and participate in their own way.
- Building trust during different, and often stressful, times is incredibly important.
- In many cases, especially holidays, spending time with loved ones is the most valuable aspect, not necessarily eating the food. If we pause and reflect on past holiday dinners, probably what shows up as the most important memories are the moments we spend together, not what foods we ate.
- Positive meal associations will set the occasion for more positive meals. Meaning, if you can establish a positive tone for your holiday meal, whatever that means to your child and your family, your child will be more likely to participate and grow in the future and generalize new feeding skills across other meal contexts (e.g., birthday parties, school lunch, etc.).
The Takeaway
Holiday meals can be wonderful opportunities to nurture not just your child’s feeding skills, but also their confidence, connections, and joy. By using ABA principles with a compassionate, assent-based lens, you’re helping your child build lifelong positive associations with food and holiday routines.