Hallie Bulkin emphasizes that parents are the experts on their own children and should advocate for their needs even when others don't understand. She uses concrete examples—bringing a packed lunch to a Michelin-starred restaurant, relying on granola bars and fruit while traveling—to normalize imperfect feeding routines and reassure parents that short-term deviations are survivable and routines can be resumed afterward.
So here's the truth. You, my friends, are the expert on your child. Your job is to advocate for their needs even when other people don't understand. And so if that means bringing that packed lunch to a Michelin star restaurant while everybody is ordering the tasting menu, so be it. Even if that means, like, you got the PB and J coming out of your purse and people are like, staring at you like, what are you doing, lady? Who cares, right? If your child ends up surviving on granola bars and fruit all week, that, my friends, is survivable. Like, you can do it. When you get home, you can return to your routines and continue the feeding journey from there. Because let me tell you, like, we, no joke, will eat our way through lots of different places that we travel to. And it's definitely not balanced meals all the time. Like, half the time we'll be like, oh, we probably. We haven't had a vegetable in like five meals or in a few days. Like, we probably should give the kids some, like, green beans so they, like, they continue to go to the bathroom. You know, it's like half the time we're like, oh, whoops, yeah, we haven't really had any greens or we haven't really had. And listen, like, that's life.
What I Was Missing in Feeding Therapy: ARFID, Airway, and Myo with Samy Hernandez
