Picky eaters & how to get them to eat

Intro

 Welcome to Sense by Meg Faure, the podcast that’s brought to you by Parent Sense, the app that takes guesswork out of parenting. If you are a new parent, then you are in good company, your host Meg Faure, is a well-known OT infant specialist and the author of eight parenting books. Each week, we are going to spend time with new moms and dads just like you to chat about the week’s wins, the challenges and the questions of the moment. Subscribe to the podcast, download the Parent Sense App and catch Meg here every week to make the most of that first year of your little one’s life. And now meet your host.

Bailey: Hello and welcome to everyone joining us for another episode of Sense by Meg Faure, I’m Bailey Georgiades, a media personality, podcaster, and mom of two delicious little boys. I’m here with our very own parenting and baby guru Meg Faure, how are you, Meg?

Meg: Yeah, very well Bailey, so good to see you again, and to hear you and to be on the podcast with you again.

Bailey: Now I always call you the guru because ever since I have done this podcast with you, I feel like my parenting has improved at least 50% almost to the point where I said to my sister, the other day, who’s actually expecting, oh, I wish I had known what I’m sharing with you now so that I could go back and redo things. Not enough to have though, I am really enjoying our chats and learning so much and today I’m hoping that you can help with the subject that is extremely close to my heart and actually brings me heart palpitations and anxiety, and that is picky eating. What can we do about this? Why won’t these kids eat? And I just want to share very quickly my experience; I’ve got two very different little boys. George was slow to warm and the Lexy was my social butterfly, and now I’m having the complete opposite where George has become a social butterfly, and eating absolutely everything, eating me out of house and home and trying things that I could not have told you would’ve happened at a year, two years old, and now my two-year-old is on the beige diet and all he wants is bread, pasta, chip and if I get a carrot in, I am the happiest mom in the world.

Meg: It’s incredible how different they are and it will probably swing in the teen years where one will eat; it will swing all the way around. So, it’s so funny, but it’s a hugely frustrating thing and it’s so random, you know some little ones become really picky, but there are ages at which most babies actually do go through picky stages, and there’s one kind of around 9, 10 months and there’s another one in the toddler years, and it’s quite common for little ones to become a little bit fussier and pickier at those ages, even though they actually have really been quite good feeders all along.

Bailey: So how do we avoid picky eating?

Meg:    Yeah, I mean in order to think about avoid it, I think it’s important to just recognize what causes it and you know, there are a couple of different things that can cause picky eating. One is their innate sensory personality and you mentioned the sensory warm personality, that’s an example of a little one who really doesn’t like anything new. They don’t love novelty. They like things that are predictable and moms, if you haven’t listened to Bailey in my episode on the sensory personality, do go back and listen to that because it reveal so much about your little one’s sensory personality. So, the first thing that causes picky eating would be the sensory personality that you get some little ones who really are much more feisty because they’re much more sensitive orally or they’re sensitive to smells, or they just a slow to warm up and they don’t want to engage with novelty and if you don’t  want to  engage with novelty feeding, you can imagine would be quite a thorny area, especially weaning.

The second thing that kind of impacts picky eating is early experiences and when I talk about early experiences, I’m talking about all the way through from pregnancy through to weaning. So early experiences have a very big impact on how little one it takes to food. So, your diet in pregnancy, the flavors were transmitted through to your baby in the amniotic fluid and so your little one kind of gets wired for eating certain flavors or gets used to certain flavors, and so we know that little ones who, whose moms eat curries and very flavorful food during pregnancy tend to be slightly less fussier and the same goes for breastfeeding because of course, when you breastfeeding the flavors go through your milk as well, and so a good exposure to a lot of flavor early on is a good thing. It actually does prevent picky eating, and likewise, the time of weaning actually has an impact.

So, if you wean your little one very late, you kind of start to enter into that phase where you’re adding a lot of novelty at a time when they start to become resistant. So, I mentioned at the beginning that around nine months, lots of little ones become a little bit picky and that’s because at around about that age, that kind of openness to engage with new flavors and new food starts to dissipate a little bit and so they start to become a little bit more hesitant about what they’re going to eat, and so that’s why we do say wean a little bit earlier.

Another thing that impacts picky eating is if you’ve had a prem-baby, and so prem-babies are very often fed with a nasogastric tube, and when you feed your little one with a nasogastric tube, they end up with some sensitivities around their mouth. So, oral sensitivities and often with just kind of almost like a PTSD, like a posttraumatic stress thought about things going into their mouth and into their tummy, so prem-babies can be picky eaters, and then little ones with food intolerances also often are picky eaters and if they have had a negative reaction, whether it’s an intolerance or even an allergy to food, they become much more adverse to actually trying new foods and then you’ve got too much milk in the diet, which is another thing that impacts picky eating and that’s a classic one in the totally years and we can unpack all of these as you want to, but feeding a little one too much milk in their diet, particularly after a year of age, they’re not going to  want to eat food because they’re getting all their calories from milk. They’re not getting all their nutrients from milk, but they are getting all their calories from milk and so if you have kind of unrestrained breastfeeding in the toddler years and your baby kind of snacks on and off your breast feeding all the time, or has five bottles at night, well, of course they’re going to be picky for food during the day and then the last, the last couple of things are illness can cause picky eating and we often find that little one, they’ve had a snotty nose, they’ve been bunged up, they haven’t wanted to eat, they kind of have gone off their food and then they’re better and then they remain picky and that often happens with illness as well. Or if there’s been a food that they’ve eaten that actually made them ill, for instance, my daughter once had Sago pudding and it made her really sick, but really it was off I think, and she cannot see Sago pudding now. So, those kind of associations with food.

And then of course finally, the toddler things can actually impact on picky eating and that’s things like needing autonomy and just pushing back or being too busy to eat, and that happens with our social butterflies. So, there’re kind of impact six or seven things that really do impact on picky eating and you can see how varied it is, and how many different things can impact on picky eating.

Bailey: And I love that you haven’t gone well, mom, it’s your fault.

Meg: Exactly

Bailey: Because we take it on, we often think, oh my gosh, what have I done wrong? Did I not? I mean, I shouldn’t have had a more varied diet in my pregnancy and I can’t go back and change that now. So, what do we do? I mean, we always worry about their nutrition. Are they growing properly? Are they getting enough of the right minerals and nutrients? What should we be doing if our little ones are maybe eating five to six of the same foods, Groundhog day, and maybe even leaving out whole food groups?

Meg: Yeah look, I mean you’re right. We do take it on as parents particularly moms, we look to ourselves always like what have I done wrong? and even for me, I mean, I look back at my first born, he was picky when he was little and I look back and I go well, it must have all been me, but of course it probably wasn’t all me, but that is what we do as parents. So, in terms of your question around, what do we do if our little one is having a very limited diet, so they are kind of just eating just whites and it’s very often you call it the beige diet. It very often is that kind of white and beige foods, kind of the fried foods, the highly processed foods, the carbohydrates and the dairy, that’s really what sets in that beige stroke white category. So, a couple of things around that.

So, the first thing is around everything to do with picky eating, my recommendation is not to become too hysterical about it, and it’s quite an important reason, particularly for us as a type mums, I certainly was, I like the control, I like to know what was going in, I like to tick the boxes and so when they didn’t take in their food, I became more and more anxious. So, the first thing is just to take a step back and not be too worried. And, you know, I think it’s important to recognize that little ones, first of all, don’t need a huge amount of food. So, they don’t need to eat a massive amount in order to survive. In fact, for survival, all they actually need is one tablespoon of food per meal of each meal of every day per year of their life.

In other words, if they’re two years old, it’s two tablespoons for breakfast, two for lunch, two for supper, two for snacks in between and of course that’s not enough to really thrive on, but that’s enough to survive on. And you know, that for me was a message that somebody told me when I was panicking about James’ eating and it really made me relax and the minute I relaxed thinking, okay we’ve done the two tablespoons he went on an eight more. So, one of the first things is not to worry too much, not to get too hysterical, not to try and control it because actually your anxiety can exacerbate the situation.

The second thing is to look at the whole week, like, don’t just look at that one meal where they’ve only gone in for the beiges, but have a look across the week and try and see whether or not across the week there’s been some strawberries that have gone in, or maybe some one piece of broccoli and try and look at your whole week. So just judge your week rather than the one meal. And then if you really are finding that they’re taking in only really one food color, as an example, or one food type, then you do want to start to move them towards more variety and there’s two ways to do that. The one is that you always want to offer exposure. We often talk about a baby and a toddler needing sometimes 14 exposures before they actually take the food. So, an exposure can be just all your sensory exposures, seeing it, or just smelling it or just touching it and then throwing it on the floor or actually putting it in their mouth and spitting it out or actually tasting and swallowing. So those are five different exposures and some little ones need like 14 exposures. They need to see a food quite a few times before they’ll actually touch it or smell it and so on. And so having exposure is important. So that means that when you’ve got your beige diet on the plate, put some carrots on as well, put some broccoli on as well, put some straw on as well, even if they’re not  going to  eat them, just have them on the plate so that they can visually see them, maybe the next time they’ll touch them, maybe they’ll put them in their mouth, spit them out and then eventually eat them. So, exposure is the first thing that you do want to do.

And then the next thing that you do want to do is something that we call food chaining, which is where you actually start to expand their repertoire food by staying with certain qualities of a food. So, let’s say for instance, they love mashed potato. So, it’s white, they love the mash, they’re happy with that texture, but they don’t like butternut cubes. It’s for example. So now we want to get them onto butternut because now we want them to taste some bit of carotene lets says, you know, coming through the butternut. So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to stick to one quality in potato that we can make a cake in butternut and that’s the mashed part. So, you start off with a mashed potato but then you add in a little bit of butternut and you mashed that up together and slowly but surely moving them towards a new flavor by keeping the texture the same, and then as soon as they’re taken to the butternut, you can give them mashed butternut, and then once they’ve taken to that, you can then move on forked mashed butternut instead of more smooth butternut and then eventually onto butternut cube. So you can see that you’ve kind of changed them along, linked it all the way across until they’ve own a whole new type of food.

Bailey: I think this is absolutely brilliant to know, and one thing that really surprised me is you saying that there can be 14 exposures, and I think where the anxiety comes in is I will put something down on his plate that I know he’s going to love and then I’ll introduce something new, but the food wastage just kills me. So how much patience and perseverance do we actually need before we can turn these bad eating habits around?

Meg: Yeah. The food wastage is what freaks us out. So, a couple of things around food wastage, what you make up, don’t serve that all up so that you can actually put some back in the fridge, you know, for the next meal that you can do that. So just serve very small portions and that’s actually a good tip as well because it’s the ones actually, you know, like many of us as well, when you overwhelmed with the pile of food, you don’t know where to start but if there’s just a few little pieces on the plate, then you know where to start. So don’t serve up too much and then I think it is a matter of actually taking anxiety where always offering them one more. So that little phrase; one more mouthful, one more piece is a really good idea.

So let’s say you’ve served up a plate of a couple of broccoli florets and a little bit of chicken nugget and then some mashed potato and they’ve gone in for a little bit taste of each and then they said it’s enough and you think, gosh, this isn’t even two tablespoons of food and he’s two years old, you know, he’s truly got to have more. You would then say one more, and if he says no, or pushes the food away or pushes the food out of his mouth, then say, okay, no more then and take the food away and throw that away, unfortunately, but hopefully you haven’t dished up too much, but the key now is not to let him graze before the next eating opportunity.

So, remember little ones from six months old, have five eating opportunities in a day, excluding milk. So that’s breakfast, lunch and supper plus mid-morning snack and midafternoon snack. So, if you break down your day, that’s pretty much eating every two and a half hours during the day. So, there’s always a new eating opportunity. So, the piece of advice there was, you’ve taken the food away, you’ve persevered just by asking once more, have one more mouthful and then at the next eating opportunity, you’re going to have something that’s really nutritious and that’s where snacks become very important, snacks shouldn’t be a packet of flings, a packet of popcorn and kind of unhealthy food. You need to make sure that your snack opportunities are really healthy opportunities. So, if you’re going to serve your little one a muffin, let’s say for example, as a snack, then try and make it a homemade one or make it a carrot muffin or make it a whole grain brand muffin, don’t go in for the vanilla fairy cakes because they are not going to have the same nutrients.

So, make sure that your snack opportunity is actually pretty much like a meal opportunity, and if you’re doing that five times a day, then you can just relax because if they have very little one, then they can wait for the next, the important principle that I will just add in there is that you have to protect the appetite for the next meal opportunity and that means not too much milk during the day and absolutely no fruit juice and I think that’s a very important principle is that sometimes we think, oh yes, they’re only having five solid meals in a day and they’re not grazing in between, but in between those they’ve had quite bit of milk or even worse fruit juice, and so fruit juice is a big, big no-no because that will disrupt sugar levels and it will disrupt appetite and we know that fruit should be eaten, not drunken. So, you know, in between those meal opportunities, it should only be water.

Interlude

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Bailey: You know, Meg, when we started this, when I just see the words or hear the words, fussy eating, I immediately feel triggered and anxiety, and just going through this podcast with you, my shoulders have not become earrings anymore. They’ve actually dropped and I feel like it can breathe out sigh of relief because you’re right with five to six eating opportunities, your child is not going to starve itself. So, you get to control what they eat and they get to control how much they eat, which is really important.

Meg: Yeah, and that’s such an important principle. In fact, in my book Weaning Sense, which is the book I mean, if mums are battling, they need to go and get hold of Weaning Sense, it is available on Takealot and on Amazon

Bailey: Best book ever, I’m jumping in, sorry it’s scary.

Meg: It is a best seller, it’s done really well, and I think it’s because it’s just so accessible for moms. But in one of the chapters, we talk in the Weaning Sense book, we talk about Collab weaning and the B of Collab actually stands for baby friendly weaning. So, we are focused very much around what works for the baby as opposed to baby lead, which is baby lead weaning, which is a whole food that you give to babies from six months. But baby friendly weaning means that we want babies to regulate their own appetite, and in that chapter, we talk about what sit in a mom’s domain of control and what sit in a baby’s domain of control, and you’ve mentioned one of the things that’s in the mom’s domain of control and that’s the what, and actually it’s the what, where, and when that the mom should control.

So, the what is: Yes, no fruit juice, no empty calories, make sure it’s whole food because you don’t want to spike blood sugar levels. The where is in the highchair, because you want to have a location where you actually are feeding a baby, not chasing them around the house. So, when a meal is finished, a meal is finished and the when is of course, the five food opportunities in the day, plus the appropriate amount of milk and you need to be very measured on that and if a mom takes care of those properly, if she really does do that part properly, the baby can control the how much, there’s almost no babies. It’s a very, very rare syndrome where a baby can’t control their appetite or eats appropriate amounts either too much or too little, It’s very unusual babies by and large are intuitive eaters and will control their quantities.

Bailey: Fantastic. Now, as always, we have people sending in their questions via your social media. There’s a question that’s come in from Laura. She’s a vegetarian, her husband is a meat eater, but doesn’t eat chicken. Her toddler on the other hand only eats chicken nuggets, flings rice cakes, and hot chips. She refuses fruit veggies or anything like that. She also started on plain rice cereal as a first food and Laura wants to know where to from here, help.

Meg: So, lots of lovely principles actually in that question. So, I’m going to start and go through step by step. So, the first thing is that Laura’s a vegetarian, her husband’s a meat eater, won’t eat chicken. So, one of the things that I do say to moms is don’t be too picky yourself because, and we often see this where we’ll have a mom who is, you know, like neglects or cuts off entire food groups, or is, you know, doesn’t eat in front of her family because maybe she’s got an eating disorder herself and we really have to have kind of normal food eating processes in front of our children for them to actually see what it’s like, and we must enjoy our food and so it’s quite important that, when parents are thinking about feeding their little ones and why the little ones picky try not to leave out whole food groups, of course, moms of vegetarian, dad is a meat eater. That’s fine. The baby is seeing both, but it’s just something to have at the back of our mind is that how we eat is how our children will eat as well.

Now, this little one is obviously on what we have already referred to as the Bejo white diet, only eating chicken nuggets, flings rice cakes, hot chips, very typical, and then doesn’t eat any of the fruit veggies or anything like that. So, what’s quite interesting here is that Laura started a baby on rice cereal and you know, we often see this Bailey where little ones who started on rice cereal and very bland diets early on actually are quite selective eaters, and in particular, in years gone by when we used to recommend weaning at six months of age, if you wean onto rice cereal at six months of age, you basically lost that opportunity for explorative eating because explorative eating when babies are really open to lots of variety, kind of that outdoor sort of closes eight to nine months, they become a little bit more narrow, and so this other one in particular could have had that opportunity where there were actually only eating rice cereal, didn’t get wide range of flavors.

So, the moms who are listening now, who haven’t weaned, this is an example of why we don’t wean onto rice cereal and why we don’t delay weaning because otherwise we can end up with these beige diets. So, what I would be saying to this mom is a couple of things. The first thing is that you can actually re-wean your baby. I did this with actually an influences in South Africa a few years ago, where she had a very picky four year old and we re-wean her four year old, so she got hold of the Weaning Sense book, and she took her four year old through the process of introducing all of the different foods and it was, and she documented it.

It was an amazing kids and her little one actually then started to join more foods, and so my first piece of advice to Laura is to go back to the Weaning Sense book, and the Weaning Sense book is fabulous because it just weans food at the right pace and with the right new nutrients coming in and so that’s what I would do, I would first of all, re-wean her baby. The second thing that I would do, which I’ve mentioned earlier today is to food chain. So, to offer things that look like, and you know, when you look at that list, chicken nuggets, flings, rice cakes, and hot chips, those all have a crunchy on the outside. So, her little ones going in for more crunchy kind of, we often see that with the fried food and so I would do the same with other vegetables.

So there’s a lovely recipe in the Weaning Sense book, which is for vegetable fritters, you kind of grate up beetroot for red, and you grate up carrot for the orange, and you grate up, you make a spinach and potato version for the green and you make some really brightly colored vegetable fritters, and what’s great about that is that you’re replicating that kind of fried food texture, but you’re doing it with new flavors and colors, which is really important.

So, the food training could work quite well for this little one as well and then very importantly, with this little one, you’ve got to make sure you’re offering only nutritious food and one of the things in that list are flings which is a type of crisp and chip for people who are overseas and I would drop that all together. In fact, I’d get rid of that in the house together and I would really focus in on only having nutritious food going on the plate because when you’ve got empty calories, you’re filling your little one up in terms of their caloric needs, but you’re not giving them the nutrients and that’s problematic.

Bailey: Fantastic. So, with that knowledge and knowing that rice cereal, isn’t a good idea. The last question comes in from Jessie who wants to start weaning, but does not know where to start, and she says, realistically, she’s probably not going to make her own baby foods. So, what are good things to look for in shop bought baby foods?

Meg: Yeah, this is absolutely great question and it pertains directly to picky eating. I don’t know if you’ve ever gone for that, those old fashioned baby foods and glass jars, where not to mention any brands, where you kind of dip your finger in and you taste it and with your eyes closed, you cannot identify what the flavor is and actually it’s pretty much disgusting. In fact, some of the flavors replicate animal food in my opinion. So, it’s just revolting. So, imagine weaning yourself onto that shop bought food and weaning your baby onto that shop bought food. You then can understand why when you start to present things like carrots, they reject carrots because the last time they tested something that was orange, it didn’t taste like a carrot and actually it was maybe a bit bitter and they really didn’t enjoy it.

So, the very first principle, when you are looking for shop bought food, is it needs to taste really, really good and you must actually want to dip into yourself. Now, if I think about there’s a store in South Africa called Woolworths for instance, they have some fruit baby food and my little ones where like, I love that I would kind of dig in while they were eating as well and so if you feel like digging in, then it probably is really good and flavorful and actually last year we developed a baby food range called Weaning Sense on the basis of my book, which is sold through You Cook in South Africa and I think Checkers as well. So, look out for Weaning Sense and what we specifically did there was we made the food really taste like adult food and like proper food. So, for instance, there’s a Marshmallow and Risotto that the little ones absolutely love. Now, when you taste that Marshmallow and Risotto, it’s got lovely time in it as well. It’s really, really flavorful.

Bailey: Meg, does that come in adult size? Sounds delicious.

Meg: It’s very yummy. I mean, there are so many yummy flavors. There’s also Carrot Oat Porridge, which is just unbelievable. So there, you’re getting vegetables in with the oats porridge for the morning and it’s got some cinnamon in it. So, what we do is we, we put the flavors together really carefully. So that’s your first principle that I want to share with JC and all moms looking for shop bought food is it’s got to taste really good because it’s got to be something that you want to dig into as well. So that’s your first principle.

The second principle is that you need to be very cautious around what actually has gone into the food, and the easiest way to do this is to flip it over onto the back and have a look at the ingredients list, now in South Africa and some other countries, but certainly in South Africa, the legislation around food labeling is really, really rigorous, and that means that what is in that food has to be labeled on the back of that label. And so what should you be looking for? You should look for first of all, as few ingredients as possible. So when something says it’s a carrot cake porridge, which is what we have in the Weaning Sense range, it will literally have oats, water, carrot, and cinnamon as an example. So it’s got to be really, really just a few ingredients.

The minute you’ve got more ingredients and especially ingredients that you don’t recognize and particularly numbers, you want to throw out altogether that food. So, you wouldn’t pick up a food that had something like modified starch because if I said to you, oh, please, would you dish me a plated modified starch, you’d look at me blankly like what the heck is that? So, if you don’t know what it is, if you can’t picture it, then do not feed it to your baby, and if there’s a number on the back and that means there’s preservatives in, you need to take that out as well.

And then also things like fructose that have been added in to make things taste sweet. That’s really not good for your little ones. So, you need to really have a look at the labels and be very conscious about what you are feeding your little one. If you’re choosing to feed your little one shop bought food, and I mean on that, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with actually offering shop bought food, it’s just that you’ve got to make the right choices.

Bailey: Absolutely. Well, Laura and JC hope that answers your questions and if you ever have any questions for Meg, please get hold of her on her social media platform. She would love to be able to engage with you and this is what this podcast is for, all this amazing knowledge and to answer your questions, Meg, do you have any other tips?

Meg: Yeah, I think the main take homes from today are first of all, try and take the stress out of it because it is something where if you amp it up and you are too stressed about it, your little one is going to pick up on it and that sometimes means letting dad feed your little one or a nanny feed your little one that can make a big difference.

Second thing is protecting their appetite and that means spacing meals property, not overfeeding milk and absolutely no fruit juice. So there are really, really important principles, and then aside from all the other lovely advice that I’ve given around food chaining and getting the one to integrate repertoire foods, I do want to just add in that sometimes we get a little one who just goes through a phase where they will not eat, and this can happen because they’re teething or because they’re sick or because there’s a new sibling or because they’re two years old and they can, they can just resist food.

So when that happens and you followed all the principles and you’re tearing your hair out and you just don’t know what to do, that’s where there’s an opportunity for smoothies and supplements to come in and I think it’s important to, as we finish off, just acknowledge the place for that. So smoothies, first of all, are fabulous, particularly as dinner and I think we often think dinner has to be every vegetable, all the food groups, lots of proteins, carbohydrates, but dinner doesn’t have to be that, dinner can just be a smoothie and often that’s the time of the day when your little one is over tired, overstimulated, you’re at the end of your tear, you’ve just rushed in from a day of work and you actually just can’t even piece together a meal and that’s okay. You know, giving them a smoothie, particularly for the little ones who don’t eat dinner and resist in it altogether, is okay.

As part of that principle, you can actually look up in the Weaning Sense Book. There’s a great recipe for smoothie, which includes quinoa and spinach, but is wonderfully sweet because it’s got berries and banana and peanut butter in it. So, it’s really a very nutritious all in one meal. So having a smoothie is absolutely fine, and then sometimes we do recommend supplementation for little ones. So sometimes little ones become picky eaters because they’ve been in such a bad rat that on a nutritional level, there’s some macronutrients and macronutrients that they’re missing and so they’re actually, it impacts on their appetite and in this circumstance, I would first always seek the advice of a pediatric dietician and Kath Megaw, interestingly, who’s the pediatric dietician, who is the advisor on the Parent Sense App has joined us on a picky eating podcast and if you look inside your app, you’ll actually find a picky eating course as well that she’s running. So, it’ll be added in during the course of this year. So, it really is worth looking at Kath’s course and picky eating and maybe seeking out advice of a dietician, and she will then probably recommend if you’re not the one as a very picky eater, you can’t get it right, some sort of supplementation and then they’re lovely toddler shakes that we can bring in and there’s nothing wrong with that either. The risk in toddler shakes is that if they are taking in too many calories from them and some toddler shakes actually are way too fabulous. So, they end up having two or three in the day and then they’ve got no appetite. So you do need to make sure that you are giving the appropriate amount and that it’s managed by pediatric dietician preferably.

Bailey: Fantastic. Meg, I appreciate this so much. You’ve really taken a lot of anxiety out of picky eating, and I cannot wait to learn more from you next time. So thank you so much.

Meg: Thank you Bailey. It’s always such a pleasure to connect with you and to be with the moms on this platform. So thank you all and yeah, will see you next week.

Bailey: Bye

Meg: Cheers.

If you enjoy my podcast, I would like to share one of my favorite podcasts with you. The honest hour, Christina Mazak is mom to two boys and a third little boy on the way. She’s an American expert living in Cape towns, South Africa, since 2008, and decided to start sharing her experiences in parenting since 2017, having grown up in a dysfunctional family environment in her own childhood, which led to her adoption at the age of 10. Christina is passionate about finding purpose and presence in parenting, as well as exploring our own opportunity for healing and personal growth as we navigate the world of parenting our own children, Christina believes in ending the trauma cycle and that in parenting our own children, we can learn how to re-parent ourselves. So, pop on over to Christina’s podcast, the honest hour.

Thanks to everyone who joined us. We will see you the same time next week until then download Parent Sense App, and take the guesswork out of parenting.