Things You Learn in Therapy
Things You Learn in Therapy
Is this NORMAL?? PICKY EATERS --> My Kid Hates Broccoli; My Sanity Hates Cooking Three Dinners
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Exclusive access to premium content!Dinner shouldn’t feel like a daily standoff. We take a hard look at picky eating—what actually matters for a child’s health, what’s driven by social pressure, and how to lower the stakes without giving up on growth. As a licensed psychologist and professor working with kids and parents, I unpack a simple decision tree: first, check health and development with your physician. If growth is good, maybe the “problem” isn’t medical at all, and that realization can reset everything from your mealtime tone to what you take personally at family gatherings.
From there, we get practical. You’ll hear how to design reinforcement that works in the real world: choosing motivators your child truly values, sizing rewards so they feel attainable, and defining a clear “one bite” rule that earns points without turning dessert into a bargaining chip. We also explore the power of meaning and relationship for elementary kids and teens. When you explain why a small effort matters—like taking two bites of grandma’s spaghetti because it’s her love language—you invite dignity, not defiance. That invitation often opens the door to slow, sustainable change.
Finally, we set firm, kind boundaries that protect your energy and your child’s autonomy. Expect respectful language about food, stop cooking multiple dinners, and teach a reliable backup option the child can make. You might be surprised how quickly pride replaces protest when kids gain real skills. By the end, you’ll have a calm framework: prioritize health, tune motivation, lead with connection, and hold steady boundaries. If this conversation helps, share it with a friend who’s tired of the dinner battle, subscribe for more practical psychology, and leave a review so others can find us. Got a topic or a question—maybe “Is this normal?”—email Beth at MakeWordsMatterforgood.com.
www.bethtrammell.com
Hello, listener. Thanks for tuning in. I'm your host, Dr. Beth Tremot. I'm a licensed psychologist and an associate professor of psychology at Indiana University East, where I also direct uh the Master's in Mental Health Counseling program. And on today's episode, this is the fourth of four episodes. Um, within this series, I'm calling Is This Normal? So we've covered other topics in the past: worry, nightmares, and lying was our first episode. So today's episode is about picky eating. And this episode may take you in a direction that you didn't necessarily think I may go, mostly because there are a lot of different approaches to help manage or adjust or change a child's behavior. And the same thing is true for adults. And so I'm gonna present a few different ideas here around picky eating because there really isn't a one-size-fits-all approach here. Um, and frankly, that's true for most things that happen with our kids. So the first thing I want to say about picky eaters is that maybe their piciness is okay. And for some of you who are already like, no, this is not gonna work for me, just stick with me for a second. So our physicians are trained to tell us how to know when our kid's physical health is not okay. And so if your doctor is concerned about your child's weight, physical health, their pattern of eating, then we probably should be concerned. But for most physicians, as long as they are growing well, they are kind of meeting the milestones that we want them to meet, most physicians aren't getting super worked up about picky eaters. Now, if you've got a kid who won't touch any single fruit or any single vegetable or any of the major food groups, right? Dairy, meat, any of those things, then your physician may be more concerned. But what I've found is that most physicians are like, hey, if they're growing and they're doing all right, then it's okay. They'll eventually grow out of it. Or maybe they won't. How many of you know adults in your life who don't eat a ton of vegetables or they don't eat a ton of, you know, fill-in-the-blank kind of foods? So the first thing to realize is if your physician isn't worried, maybe their pickiness isn't as significant a problem as you originally thought. You know what I find is pickiness is something that in our culture, we sort of are like, what's wrong with your kid? Why won't he eat everything? Or what's wrong with her? Why won't she just try something new? And the truth is they don't have to. I mean, that that really is the truth. So this pickiness issue may be about us as parents and our desire to have people think our kids are good. It may be our desire to have people think that we're being a good mom or dad or parent, right? Because at the end of the day, they may grow out of it. Or they may not. And as long as they're still healthy, it may be okay. Now, if your kids are young, like a preschool age, and you can try to continue to introduce new foods to them, to broaden their scope of things they can put on their plate, great. And I want you to know that I'm not a dietitian, I'm not a physician. What I am is a person who understands how kids operate and I understand how parents operate. And so I'm here to tell you that the first thing to consider is their pickiness a problem to their physical health? And if it's not, then maybe we should pause and decide why their pickiness is a problem. Because if it has to do with the thoughts and desires of other people, it's the comments that happen at Thanksgiving, it's the repeated questioning of you know the babysitter or the grandparents or the daycare. If their pickiness is not a problem to their physical health, it may be okay. So the first thing is decide whether this is a problem in the first place. Now, if you say, you know what, it is a problem, because in my family, you just can't live. You just can't live in my family if you don't try X food or if you don't eat X things, right? Then we may have a different idea, right? So here's the thing: we can increase the likelihood of children trying or engaging in new behavior by increasing the amount of reinforcement or increasing their motivation toward trying something new. This is no different than trying to increase their motivation for any other behavior, like flushing the toilet after they go to the bathroom, washing their hands, doing their homework. Any of these behaviors we want to see, we can use reinforcement and motivation to try to get them to do that. So decreasing the pickiness of our kids can fall in that same category. So you could use a reinforcement schedule that would encourage them to try something new. So every day your kid tries something new, we earn points toward going to the store to pick out something that they enjoy, toward, you know, reading a book together at night, toward watching uh an extra show before we go to bed, whatever it might be, right? So if you want to use reinforcement as means to decrease their pickiness, then you have to figure out one, what is it that they're gonna be willing to work for? So what is your kid into? What motivates them? What's something that they're gonna be excited to earn? And then you've got to find the right reinforcement schedule. So how many points do they have to earn before they can uh kind of get that reward, that prize, that whatever? Because if it's too far, if there's too many points before they earn the reward, they're not gonna be motivated. And that's where behavior plans often kind of go awry. So try to find that sweet spot of low enough that they're gonna see it's attainable, but not so low that you're heading to the store every three days. So the first thing is to realize is this a problem? The second thing is to potentially, if this fits within your style of parenting, to use reinforcement and motivation to decrease their level of pickiness. And maybe the last thing that I want to share here is that sometimes our kids can be motivated by our use of our relationship. And so this may be particularly true for our elementary age kids or even our teenagers. When we kind of pause to decide why this is important to us, right? So when you go back to the first part of what I said is, you know, why is this pickiness a problem or why does it matter to you that your kid isn't as picky? Write down some thoughts because what I want to encourage you to do is have a conversation with your child about this. Have a meaningful conversation about why it matters. And when you do that, essentially what we're doing is we're saying, This matters to me because of this thing. And because I love you, and because I want you to know that this matters to me, I'd love for you to try just maybe one thing a month. One thing a month, right? So basically what we're doing is we're we're explaining to our kid why it matters, and then we're inviting them to be a part of kind of resolving this instead of kind of using reinforcement or instead of using the other forms of motivation, we're using our relationship to say, this is why it matters to me that you eat grandma's spaghetti when we go there on Thursday. Because it matters to grandma, and while, you know, at the end of the day it maybe shouldn't matter to grandma, it does matter to her because that's her way of loving you. And so if you could just take two bites, that would mean a lot to me and to grandma. And if you can't, that's okay. I'm gonna love you anyway, but if you could, it would mean a lot to grandma. I said that that was gonna be the last thing I said, but as I was talking, I thought of one more thing that I wanted to share. It is fair to have expectations around our kids' verbal and or facial response to various foods. So if you're landing in the camp of, hey, look, my kid's pickiness isn't a problem. I need to just kind of get over it myself, you can still have expectations around, hey, when I um make broccoli, what I don't want to hear from you is constant complaining about how you don't like broccoli. It is okay to have expectations around, particularly for your older kids, hey, I'm not gonna make three different meals. If you don't want what's on the plate, then I'm gonna teach you how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Or I'm gonna teach you how to make this alternative food, but I am not necessarily going to be the one who makes different meals for you. You know, I taught my uh six-year-old how to make his own sandwich, frankly, because I had this same thing where I was like, I'm not gonna be um, you know, cooking meals for every single person. But something very interesting happened when he learned how to make his own sandwich. After he made his sandwich, the pride and joy in his little body was remarkable. I mean, he was like, mommy, look, I made a sandwich. So you may be shocked at how your kids actually respond when we give them the opportunity to come a part of this journey here. So there's a lot of um random thoughts there with this episode. So hopefully something here uh was helpful to you. And this is the end of this series for now, but if you have any additional questions, like, hey, Dr. Beth, is this normal? Please feel free to reach out. I'd love to hear from you. Uh, would love to cover more uh topics like this on the podcast. So my email is Beth at MakeWords Matterforgood.com. You can always reach out and share any thoughts. Any additional questions that come up for you, I'd love to hear from you. For now, we will uh kind of put a pause on this series for now, and next week we will tackle um more things that kids these days need to know. Until next time, everyone, make words matter for good.
