What if feeding our kids didn’t have to feel like a test we could pass or fail?

Registered dietitian and Kids Eat in Color founder Jennifer Anderson joins us to talk about raising capable, curious eaters without getting trapped by nutrition trends, food guilt, or rigid rules.

We explore:

• picky eating,
• growth and weight concerns,
• food advertising,
• introducing unfamiliar foods,
• and why the “best practice” isn’t always the best fit for the child in front of us.

Jennifer also shares ideas from her new book, Feed Them Well, for helping kids care for their bodies while enjoying food.

Come rethink what it means to feed our children well.

Show Notes

Parents are surrounded by food rules.

Start solids this way. Never serve that. Buy this ingredient. Avoid that one. Make sure your child eats vegetables. Don’t pressure them to eat vegetables. Watch their growth chart. Don’t make them self-conscious about their growth chart.

No wonder feeding kids can feel less like lunch and more like an exam.

Registered dietitian Jennifer Anderson, founder of Kids Eat in Color and author of Feed Them Well, offers us a much more humane starting place: curiosity.

Trade certainty for experimentation

We love a formula because a formula promises us an outcome. Follow these steps and your child won’t become picky. Feed these foods and your child will be healthy.

Actual children have other plans.

Research can tell us what happened more often within a particular population. It cannot tell us exactly what will happen with the child sitting at our kitchen table. That means we can use good information without turning it into dogma.

Try the strategy. Watch your child. Gather information. Adjust.

That isn’t inconsistency. That is responsive parenting.

Look at patterns, not isolated foods

It is easy to become preoccupied with whether an individual food is “good” or “bad.” A more useful question is what our child’s diet looks like over time.

Did they skip vegetables today? Fine. We can offer some tomorrow.

Have vegetables disappeared for months? Now we have information worth responding to.

Could bedtime snack use a little more fiber? We can work on bedtime snack without reinventing breakfast, lunch, dinner, and every snack in between.

Small changes count.

Let food be food

One of the greatest gifts we can give children is freedom from the idea that eating reveals their moral character.

Cake doesn’t require a lecture. Vegetables don’t need to confer virtue. A child’s body size is not a report card.

Sometimes the most nourishing food is also the food a child is willing or able to eat. For a child struggling to gain weight, calorie-dense foods may be medically useful. For a child going through chemotherapy, the food that stays down may be the right food for that season.

Context matters.

Curiosity belongs to the adults too

When dinner becomes tense, we can ask ourselves a few questions.

Why does an unfinished plate bother me so much?

Was I taught that wasting food was unacceptable?

Do I fear certain foods because of my own history with dieting or body image?

Our children aren’t the only people bringing feelings to the table.

The more we can separate nutrition from shame, anxiety, and control, the more room we create for children to develop what Jennifer calls an embodied independence: the ability to enjoy food, inhabit their bodies, notice what those bodies need, and make thoughtful choices for themselves.

That may be the long game.

We don’t need children who follow our food rules forever. We want young adults who can feed themselves with flexibility, pleasure, good information, and confidence.

And that begins with something delightfully ordinary: paying attention to the child in front of us.

Resources

• Don’t miss out on the special pre-order bonuses for Jennifer’s new book, FEED THEM WELL! It comes out on Sept 8th, so be sure to order your copy before then. You’ll find all the details on Jennifer’s website: https://kidseatincolor.com/feed-them-well-book/
• Registration is open now for Playing with Poetry: Discovery and many other Brave Writer classes!
• Start a free trial of CTCmath.com to try the math program that’s sure to grab and keep your child’s attention
• Find our favorite readalouds and nonfiction in the Brave Writer Book Shop
• Visit Julie’s Substack to find her special podcast for kids (and a lot more!) 
• Purchase Julie’s new book, Help! My Kid Hates Writing
• Melissa’s books make great readalouds—and there are Darts for The Prairie Thief and The Nerviest Girl in the World. 
• Find community at the Brave Learner Home 
• Learn more about the Brave Writer Literature & Mechanics programs
• Subscribe to Julie’s Substack newsletters, Brave Learning with Julie Bogart and Julie Off Topic, and Melissa’s Catalog of Enthusiasms
• Sign up for our Text Message Pod Ring to get podcast updates and more!
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Connect with Julie

• Instagram: @juliebogartwriter
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Connect with Melissa

• Website: melissawiley.com
• Substack: melissawiley.substack.com
• Instagram: @melissawileybooks
• Bluesky: @melissawiley.bsky.social

Produced by NOVA