Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating: A Step-by-Step Guide for Overcoming Selective Eating, Food Aversion, and Feeding Disorders

In Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating, a family doctor specializing in childhood feeding joins forces with a speech pathologist to help you support your child’s nutrition, healthy growth, and end meal-time anxiety (for your child and you) once and for all.
 
Are you parenting a child with ‘extreme’ picky eating? Do you worry your child isn’t getting the nutrition he or she needs? Are you tired of fighting over food, suspect that what you’ve tried may be making things worse, but don’t know how to help?  Having a child with ‘extreme’ picky eating is frustrating and sometimes scary. Children with feeding disorders, food aversions, or selective eating often experience anxiety around food, and the power struggles can negatively impact your relationship with your child. Children with extreme picky eating can also miss out on parties or camp because they can’t find “safe” foods. But you don’t have to choose between fighting over every bite and only serving a handful of safe foods for years on end.
 
Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating offers hope, even if your child has “failed” feeding therapies before. After gaining a foundation of understanding of your child’s challenges and the dynamics at play, you’ll be ready for the 5 steps (built around the clinically proven STEPS+ approach―Supportive Treatment of Eating in PartnershipS) that transform feeding and meals so your child can learn to enjoy a variety of foods in the right amounts for healthy growth. You’ll discover specific strategies for dealing with anxiety, low appetite, sensory challenges, autism spectrum-related feeding issues, oral motor delay, and medically-based feeding problems. Tips and exercises reinforce what you’ve learned, and dozens of “scripts” help you respond to your child in the heat of the moment, as well as to others in your child’s life (grandparents or your child’s teacher) as you help them support your family on this journey. This book will prove an invaluable guide to restore peace to your dinner table and help you raise a healthy eater.

Katja Rowell, MD, is a family doctor and childhood feeding specialist on a mission to support parents who worry about feeding and their child’s weight or growth. Known as “the Feeding Doctor,” she is a national expert on children, feeding, and the intersection of health and wellness. Rowell believes that helping children grow up to feel good about food and their bodies is the best preventive medicine there is. Described as “academic, but warm and down to earth,” she presents workshops to parents and professionals across the country. Rowell consults with a range of clients and writes on the importance of a healthy feeding relationship for online and print media. She has shared tips on how to bring peace back to meals through DVDs, TV, and radio, and is author of Love Me, Feed Me. Rowell makes her home in the Twin Cities, where she enjoys reading, camping, cooking (most of the time) for her family, and a husband who does the dishes.
 
Jenny McGlothlin, MS, CCC-SLP, is a certified speech-language pathologist specializing in the evaluation and treatment of feeding disorders for children from birth through the teen years. McGlothlin developed the STEPS feeding program at the Callier Center for Communication Disorders at University of Texas at Dallas, where she works with families on a daily basis to foster feeding skills that will serve a child for a lifetime.   Her passion is teaching children how to eat when they just can’t figure it out on their own, and McGlothlin has been inducted into the Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s Hall of Fame for her work in the field. McGlothlin has spent many years teaching graduate-level courses on feeding as well as early child development. She frequently provides feeding workshops for parents and continuing education seminars and webinars for therapists. As a mother of three young children, McGlothlin makes family meals a priority, and enjoys reading and spending time with her friends.

Foreword writer Suzanne Evans Morris, PhD, is an internationally recognized speaker and therapist for infants and children with feeding and mealtime challenges. With more than fifty years’ experience as a speech-language pathologist specializing in feeding development and disorders in children, she pioneered the development of feeding and mealtime programs in the United States. Morris is coauthor of three books: Pre-Feeding Skills, the Mealtime Participation Guide, and the Homemade Blended Formula Handbook.