Picky Eater? Why Your Parenting Style Didn't Cause It | Katie Kimball

You know, for most of human history, kids ate what the family ate. There weren't separate meals, endless snacks, or negotiations over every bite. Katie, are we accidentally creating picky eaters?

Yep, we sure are. We sure are. I mean, James, what parent holds their newborn and says, man, I hope he's a picky eater? Like, not a thing. It's not something that we're trying to do. This is a new phenomenon, you know, new in the last 100 years for a number of reasons. I think the culture is making it a lot easier for parents to exacerbate picky eating tendencies because we have sort of this helicopter parenting. We need to keep our kids safe. We don't want to cause too much conflict. And so we're allowing the kids to drive the plane a little bit at the table. You know, we're maybe giving them too many choices. choices where we need to remember we're the adult, we're the parent, and we should be making more decisions. The culture and food marketing is also making it so much easier for parents to short-order cook, right? 150 years ago, if a kid was like, I want a different meal, Mom, what is she gonna grab? You know what I mean? Like, she's worked for hours braising this roast in the oven. Like there isn't a bag of chips that she can just go open. So those, like, I just, our modern world is making it easier for parents to slide down that unfortunate slippery slope. And I also believe that physiologically, like the onslaught of chemicals on our body, the onslaught of everything that our poor kids' bodies are having to fight in the environment because of the way the humans have, you know, kind of misused our world. It's increasing sensory sensitivities. It's increasing our anxiety. It's decreasing our resilience. And all of that is sort of a soup that can be the genesis of picky eating. And I think we'll talk about some of those bits and pieces, but the good news for parents is the research shows that your parenting style can't actually create a picky eater. You can't. So that's like, oh, like that's kind of a balm to the soul.

Can you dig into that? What does that mean? Because that's, that's interesting. So you're saying your parenting style can't create a picky eater?

It's, yeah, it kind of, it actually kind of surprises me. And I have to just keep going back and like rereading this research that whether, you know, whether you're authoritative, authoritarian, or laissez-faire parenting, the picky eating will happen at the same rate. So it's not the way in which we parent. The kids are presenting something in their bodies that's giving them a propensity for picky eating. Now, I have definitely seen parenting decisions that exacerbate the picky eating, right? So you can't create a picky eater, but I do think you can exacerbate it. But that's good news too, because that means if you remove whatever decisions you've been making that exacerbate the picky eating, you can also help your child get out of that pit.

Yeah, that one, I have to admit, that kind of confuses me because I thought the current gen— our generation really, or whatever this age range, is the way they are is because a lot of us were kind of pressured when we were younger and like, you can't leave this table until you've cleaned your plate. And there was this kind of expectation or stress put on us that there's starving people out there and you need to, you know, not waste food. And so that's why so many parents are lenient now and making multiple meals. So, but you're saying that wouldn't matter, that the pickiness would still happen either way.

That's what the research says. I know, like I said, it surprises me too. But if we think about like, you have to finish your food, children are starving, like dial back 150 years, that feels old school, right? Like that probably was the way parents parented their kids 150 years ago when we didn't see as much picky eating. There's something else going on. We're such complex beings, right? So there's dozens of reasons why we're seeing more picky eating. Like I said, we can't create a picky eater, but we can exacerbate it. And so the level of picky eating that we're seeing, the intensity of picky eating, parenting plays a role for sure, but it's not the genesis.

Wow. You're blowing my mind right here because I guess I have for so long, I thought, well, it's created by that parent response. So what is the hypothesis of picky eating, then? Is it, is it the, the other 2 things you mentioned? So it's exacerbated by behavior, but then is it the, um, you had mentioned the chemicals in our food systems, and then you also mentioned marketing. Is that what they're saying, those 2? Are they saying those are the primary reasons, or?

Well, when I talk about picky eating, I talk about the 5 Ps of picky eating: palate, pain, pressure, power— or sorry, palate, pain, processing, pressure, and power. And so, those first 3 are physiological presentations. And, this is where parents, a lot of times, we don't understand where to look, we don't understand how to seek patterns in what our children are doing at the table, or even to think maybe it's not about the food, right? That's the title of my TEDx talk, Picky Eating Is Not About the Food. And, I think that is a curiosity opener, is why it's been viewed over 300,000 times because people are like, that doesn't make any sense. How can picky eating not be about the food? How could it not be about the parenting? Because sometimes it's physiological. And so we've got children who are struggling. When I say palate, it's in the mouth. Their tongue might be too weak. Their chew might be inappropriate, not strong enough. Their jaw might be too weak. The way that they swallow has formed differently. Is this part of our modern world? Yeah, a little bit because we're giving kids, babies, all sorts of things to put in their mouths that we didn't give them 100 years ago, right? We've got these food pouches that change the way the mouth receives food. And if you think about a baby who's maybe receiving a lot of food through these food pouches, they're continuing the sucking motion into toddlerhood that really belongs in babydom, right? And they're not chewing. They're probably on purees a lot longer than they ought to be. And so, the shape of the mouth is actually changing. We know we have a lot of kids who are mouth breathing, and so that raises the palate. It just changes the way kids are able to chew and swallow. So, I'm thinking of one family I worked with, the 6-year-old girl would hold food in her mouth, right? So, she would eat the food, she'd chew it, and then she would just push it against the roof of her mouth. And, of course, the parents are like, this is so annoying, just swallow. Right? You're seeing it as like a bratty, stubborn, subversive behavior. She just had a weak tongue. Her tongue couldn't sweep the food easily to the back of the mouth to swallow. Isn't that wild? We think it's about the food. We think it's about the power struggle when really there's just something wrong in the mouth. You know? So that's one, like that's one. And then pain is the second P. And so we think about undiagnosed food allergies. And this is too where like the onslaught of chemicals. in our world is affecting the way kids feel. We know statistically 10% of kids are constipated. That number's gotta be way higher because of all the parents who don't know their kids are constipated. So they're not in the 10% reported. There's a lot going on. We know a lot more kids and adults these days have symptoms of disease. And so are we living at sort of this low baseline level of pain that we think is normal? My daughter is actually a really good example of this. In 5th grade, we did a food challenge. We removed dairy For a month. And about 2 weeks in, she had this moment where she thought, she tells me the story now, she thought, oh no, I don't even wanna tell mom what's going on because I think what this means is I can't handle dairy. And she loved cheese and ice cream and yogurt. She loved dairy. What had happened was she suddenly realized that at the end of gym class and after going upstairs, she could breathe. So, she had lived her whole life assuming that all the other kids had a lot of trouble getting a deep breath after gym class. She thought it was normal, but that was the presentation of how dairy interacted with her lungs. And so, to this day, she's 18 now, that was 5th grade. To this day, if she accidentally eats a little bit of dairy, she knows for at least 3 days she won't be able to catch a full breath, but she thought it was normal, right? And so, does that affect Eating, if you're in like this kind of low level of pain, it does. Because when your body kind of hurts, it's hard to like think about putting food in your mouth. And then the third physiological P is processing. And this is sensory processing disorders. You know, when in history did we have tagless shirts and seamless socks and headphones for kids who are overstimulated by noise? You know what I'm saying? We are seeing a huge upsurge. In people who are unable to handle the sensory input of modern life. And anything that's going wrong in your senses, whether you're over or under processing any sense, it doesn't have to be in the mouth, but of course it can be texture and taste and smell. But any of the senses affect your eating because eating takes all of your senses. So if one's messed up, you're, you're going to struggle to access food. So again, it looks like it's a food problem. It feels like it's a pressure problem and it can be, again, pressure's huge, can definitely make picky eating worse. But if your kid's body is saying no to food from the get-go, that's something you have to dig down to the root cause. And like I tell parents, like, put your detective hat on. How can we look for these patterns and think what might be saying no in my child's body to this food? And how can we work with that and root it out?

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Yeah. Better than just take one bite.

Yeah.

Yes. So we definitely want to move away from that because we can't follow through. Really? Like, if you, if you say that, if you say, just take one, you have to take one bite before you leave the table, or if you're like pleading, right? Which parents really ought not be begging their kids, just take one bite. What happens when a stubborn child or a child with a food sensitivity that we don't know about says no? And they continue saying no. Like, if we walk that all the way to the end, the only choice for the parent to follow their own rule that they just set up, you have to take one bite, is to force-feed a child. And in modern society, we just don't do that. James, I got to tell you, I have said that probably 1,000 times and I've never had anyone say, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the parents should force-feed the child. Yesterday, the podcast host on the show I was on was like, oh, I was raised Latina in the 1970s. My parents did hold my nose and put food in my mouth. And I was like, oh, oh. Okay. So that's the thing. But I'm guessing most of the parents who are listening to you in the year 2026 are like, yeah, that's kind of disgusting. Like, I'm not going to force-feed my child. Therefore, you can't say it. Rule number 1 of parenting, do what you say you'll do. If you can't follow through, don't say it at the beginning. And I also think in this day and age, like, that's a little bit old-school parenting. You have to clean your plate, especially starving children in Africa, all that stuff. That's like our parents' generation, what they would say to us. What What our generation is generally accidentally doing is we're trying to flip that. We're trying to make it more positive. So we say, eat 3 bites of broccoli and you get your dessert. That's still pressure though. It feels positive. It's still pressure. Even praise, even saying, oh, good job. You ate all your soup. It's still pressure because we are judging the amount that goes in the child's mouth. And that's not our job. Unless we're willing to force-feed. So, if you're not willing to force-feed your kid, you need to be hands-off on the amount they eat. You should choose variety. You should choose what they eat. You should choose when they eat and where they eat. This is called the division of responsibility. It's not something I created. A sociologist named Ellen Satter recognized that that's the parent's job. What, when, and where. That's it. The child's job is to choose whether they eat at all and how much. And it's when we cross those lines that we cause big problems. So anything you say that has to do with the amount of food going into your child's mouth, not your job. So that's something that we want to be hands-off.

How do you know when a child is picky versus genuinely struggling with a food?

Well, we want to look for patterns. And so I tell people, like, if you aren't a pattern seeker, if you're not someone who loves doing puzzles and, you know, like unraveling mysteries, Find someone who is, you know, grab a friend who's a data geek and be like, can I talk to you about like what my kid is eating and see if you can see some patterns? So for example, one pattern you might see is kids who can't handle food that's hard to chew, raw vegetables, what we call real meats like a grilled chicken breast. They'll eat a chicken nugget or a sausage or a hot dog. Basically, it's pre-chewed meat, right, James? That's like it's been chewed up for you. They can eat softer foods and maybe they can eat crunchy foods like chips and crackers because those are more meltable. But they can't handle those hard-to-chew foods, that you might say, oh, that's really interesting. Maybe we should get a physiological workup from a speech-language pathologist or an orofacial myologist and see if everything's working well with the mouth, the jaw, and the tongue. That would be one pattern you can see. If kids are really drawn to a food, like, or a food group, especially like gluten, and dairy. We've got a lot of parents out there who'll say, oh, my kid's a carbetarian. All they want is the pancakes, the rolls, the cereal. Sometimes if you do have a food sensitivity, the gluten proteins or the dairy proteins that are leaking through the gut and they cause a weird sort of almost opioid reaction that causes you to be drawn to the very food that hurts you. Again, super strange. So I would tell a parent, if you've got a kid who just feels like they're addicted, to either gluten or dairy or both, see what happens if you remove it from their diet for a week. And if they have any changes in their behavior. A pattern that would say that it might not be as physiological, but it might be more psychological, it might be more of a power struggle issue between you and the child is if you're seeing power struggles everywhere else too, right? You're not only having issues at the table, you're having issues about— Homework, friendships, screen time, bedtime. If the power struggles are everywhere, right? That's a pattern in itself that says, okay, now mom and dad, it takes two to power struggle. So if you can pull back and stop, the opposite of just take one bite is my favorite, most important, shiny, flashy phrase that every parent needs in their pocket. And it's very simple. It's just— You don't have to eat that, right? I want all kids everywhere to hear from their parents, this is what's for dinner. You don't get to go get something else, but you don't have to eat this. You may. You don't have each individual item. You don't have to eat that. And so that gives the children the agency and the choice and the ability to really create a relationship with food without the relationship with their parent getting in the way. Does that make sense?

Yeah, because now that's resonating with me. Like the other stuff, I'm like, this is different way of thinking. But now I'm really okay. That piece resonates with me in the sense that that's the control as parents you're in a sense offering that we have. So we have the control of what food we bring into the kitchen. We have control over what food is on the dinner table. Being mindful of that being a little bit of that detective and making sure that the foods kind of are supporting if there is a physical thing going on with their kid that they are, they're not, um, making that harder, but you're actually supporting the kid's palate or whatever, you know, whatever that might be. But for the most part, you're controlling what goes on that dinner table. And then you're simply saying what you're saying, you don't have to eat this. If you don't eat it though, there's no other food. Like, are you like, how strict does the parent be post that? Because that's where it gets a little messy, right?

It does. It does. And that's why there's a whole book, right? Like the Picky Eater Playbook has all the plays for all of the different things that the kids are going to throw at you. You're like, okay, now I have an answer for that. When, yes, when the kid's like, well, can I just go get a PB&J? Like, I'm gonna go get some yogurt from the fridge, which I love that this is everyday ancestral. Again, 150 years ago, could the kids say that?

There was no fridge for some, you know, back to go too far back. There were no fridges.

Well, exactly. And there's not an apple sitting there and there's not a banana and there's not packaged snacks that they can pop into. You know what I'm saying, right? And so, when we look like you do, we look back at what our ancestors ate. Let's look back at how our ancestors ate. They ate at specific times, they ate what was available, and then the food was gone. It was done. And so kids didn't have— kids and adults alike didn't have the opportunity to just go get something else. So I do push parents to be very strict. That you choose what is served because if someone in the household is a nutritionist and no one is, but the parent has the fully formed brain and, you know, we've been through 7th grade health class, like we, we understand how to balance a meal much better than the 8-year-old child who really just wants that mac and cheese or really just wants that highly palatable bag of chips.

Or even the 15 or 14-year-old who's, because we're dealing with that. She doesn't want to eat, you know, or she's coming in at odd hours because of her new schedule now that she's in high school. Um, she gets done so much later than when we eat, and then she's coming in and she's just kind of like eating very random foods, like ground chicken with just a little bit of lettuce on top and then drizzling mayo. And then I don't know, it's just, it's like she's creating finger foods. At least it's all food that's real, but it's still like, I don't even know what it— I wouldn't— I don't even know what to call it. It's bizarre.

At least, yeah, at least it's real food. I say when, when kids are coming in at different times, and yes, high school, it gets crazy and When she can drive, it'll be even worse, just to let you know, as far as like not seeing her as much at dinner. But we, I mean, we always just still say like, this is dinner. Like if dinner's been put away, it comes back out. You know, if she's coming home half an hour to an hour after dinner, like we usually try to leave that food out. That just happened to us last night too. Our sophomore in high school got home at 8 o'clock and we had eaten at 6, but we were like, when are you coming home? Like, should we leave food out? So he still ate. The same meal we ate. And I think there's like a little bit of a philosophical structure to that that I call Team One Meal. And when we all eat the same meal, even if it's at slightly different times, it shows family unity. It's really saying to the kids, like, we are family, we eat together, we clean up together, we do things together. And when we allow kids to eat a separate meal, it's kind of saying the opposite. It's saying we are fractured. You know? And so even if, if like, so for kids who are really, really struggling and parents might hear Katie Kimball say, oh, eat, just serve the same thing, eat team one meal. And they're like, nope, like that is not gonna happen in my household. Child will have a complete meltdown, you know, she will run away from the table. And so there, there may need to be a transition period where you continue to make mac and cheese or the frozen pizza or the chicken nuggets or whatever the short order cooking had been. Mm-hmm. But you serve it to everyone. And you as the parent should take a bite of that mac and cheese on your plate. You don't need to eat it. Same as the kids. You don't have to eat that. But just to demonstrate that this is a unified activity. Family dinners are family dinners and everyone is served the same thing and everyone takes a little bite of everything on their plate. They don't have to eat it, but they need to be exposed to it because that exposure of getting, you know, a bite on your plate and maybe as you serve those, you know, mashed potatoes, your knuckle knocks into the side of the pot. That's really important for those kids who are struggling to have a relationship with that food. If you don't have a relationship with a person and you never hang out with them, you're never going to build a relationship, right? So, if you don't have a relationship with a food, you got to hang out with that food. It's got to get on your plate. You got to pass the dish at dinner and get that aroma and the smell of it at least so that the kid has a chance to build a relationship with that food. If we're always feeding them the same thing that they want, Like they'll never expand their palate because they don't have an opportunity to.

You mentioned your book is a playbook. So does it, does it talk about when they're younger, you know, maybe introducing them to earlier parts of the process, like the meal planning, the grocery shopping?

Yes. So that's actually like the supercharging at the end. So the playbook works through a process starting with snacking. How do we speak? What are the words that we use? How do we start the meal? Then, the guts of the meal. What do we do actually at the dinner table? But, isn't that weird? Dinner's not till part 4 because there's so much that happens outside of the dinner table that's really critical to helping kids be ready to build that relationship with food. But then, yeah, right there at the end, it's like if you're doing all the right things, setting up the environment and your routines and your habits are amazing in the home, how you can supercharge it is to get the kids involved. Because of that exposure, because it's awesome, James. When kids are working in the kitchen, the pressure is gone. Like, there's no perceived pressure to eat like there is when you sit down at the table, you know, and maybe you're handed a plate of food. And if you've even been told once or twice in the past, like, you have to eat that, that stress could be carried with the child at the table, but it's not in the kitchen. And they get that, you know, as a chef, the sights and the smells and the sounds and all of that immersion. in the food. So, so it's like an inoculation almost for them. And then they can go to the table and be much more likely to take that bite on their own without saying, without the parent having to say, you need one bite.

In a sense, it's like moving kids from fear to curiosity.

Yes.

So how can parents, how can you support parents in getting their kids to be more curious, particularly if they're already way past the young age and they are in that 10 to 14 and they're still in fear.

Right, right, right. Well, and obviously, yeah, I love to say that from fear to curiosity. When you're afraid of something, when you're feeling nervous, when you're feeling stressed, all of those things shut down the appetite physiologically, which that's obviously the opposite of what we want. So for curiosity, first of all, the parents have to remove The power struggles. They have to remove their relationship from the kid's relationship with food. We want to use the language of exploration and we want to use growth language. So rather than saying, like, never let your kid hear you say, oh, well, he's a picky eater, or whatever, but we want to use growth language. You know what? You're just learning to eat. You haven't figured out how to eat soup yet, and that's okay. Like, your taste buds are still growing. Can you kind of hear that future Growth mindset. So we really want to use that growth language and make that part of the family culture so that the kids understand this is a process. Just like learning to read, right? If you've got a kindergartner and he's struggling to read, we don't like give up. We don't say, well, you know, reading's just not for him. It's just never going to happen. Like we don't. But for whatever reason, parents will sort of do that with vegetables. Yeah. Like she just doesn't like vegetables. I guess, I don't know. Like maybe she'll just go to college without liking vegetables. Like, no. No, like growth. We all can grow. And so when we talk at the table, we want the discussion to be positive. It doesn't have to be about the food, but it shouldn't be about parental stresses, school, academic stresses, social stresses, right? Do all of that. If you're like, the dinner table's a great time for any conversation if everyone is already eating well. You know what I'm saying? You can even talk about, so you can say, kid, how's school going? How was that test today? If your child can access. Food. If your child's struggling with food, no, don't do it. Don't do it. You gotta keep the dinner table conversation light. And if you do talk about food, it shouldn't be how much they're eating, if they're eating, blah, blah, blah, all of that. It's like, oh, this roasted broccoli has a little bit of sweetness, I think. Do you guys notice that? It can be— does that make sense? It can be about the food. Or like, oh, oh, I don't know, the baby carrots today feel a little slimy to me. Are they slimy to you guys? Like, I like it. I like it when baby carrots are more dry or whatever. Like, you can talk about the qualities of the food, but not value qualities, not how much you're eating, not if this is healthy or unhealthy. We just want to have, again, that curiosity so that we can have a relationship with food and keep it fun and light.

I'm sure there's no one-size-fits-all, but how quickly do, from your experience, do kids shift once parents Start making these adjustments?

Yeah, it can be as soon as the first day, but it also can take up to 2 years. The process of learning to eat has 32 steps and it takes 2 years. So if your kid got stuck somewhere in that process, you have to accept the fact that it might take 2 years to really get back on track. But most people will see some sort of change, some sort of like, oh, my kid Like willingly put that bite on her plate and she was always really resistant to that. Or my kid actually like put something, put peas in his mouth and he spit 'em out. That's a real story actually. One of the people I worked with said, he put peas in his mouth and he did spit it out, but I'm counting that as a win 'cause he didn't used to put peas in his mouth. So that's important too. Parents psychologically, we need to make sure that we do count any little step toward the relationship with food. As a win. It's not like— we don't want our goal to be he ate his whole meal. The first step is to make sure that the snacking isn't sabotaging the dinner. And so for some kids, that's literally been the problem. And the parents just didn't realize that like snacking so close to a meal or snacking after a meal was making dinner optional. And they say, oh my gosh, Katie, like I implemented eating times that were more structured. And then Like he ate his dinner, you know, he ate chicken for the first time in 6 months, stuff like that on the first, on the first day, just because he had an appetite. But then, like you said, that's not everybody's deal, but for some kids, that's all it takes.

Yeah. A hungry enough kid will typically eat more. Right. And the snacking is a really good point. What, what other good intentions are parents doing, but then backfires? And I would put snacking as one of those, like, them thinking like having all the fruit out on the, you know, on the counter and all that kind of stuff is helping the kids. But to me, that's a potential backfire. What are some other things that are a, I'm doing the best I can, I have the best intentions, but then it backfires?

For sure. Especially parents whose kids are struggling on the weight scale. They get really anxious. Like, oh, every time my kid says he's hungry, like I got to feed him. Right? Or every time she thinks, if she'll eat that apple, I have to give her the apple. But if we think about ancestral eating, again, we're not snacking in the covered wagons. You're sitting down and having a real meal. And if we just look at the way our body is designed, our body's designed to oscillate digestively between eating and then not eating. Because if stuff is happening at the top of the digestive system, if you're actively eating, then the rest of kind of the system pauses. And so if you're actively eating every half hour or every hour, your stomach's like, yo, like, I don't have time to do my job here. I need, I need a rest. And so we really do need at least 90 minutes. And for older kids, up to 3 hours where our digestive system gets a rest so that it can digest. And that will help. Your kids will feel better. They'll digest their food better. And they'll be able to come to the meal that you so lovingly created. with an actual appetite. And so, you know, there are people out there who will say like, just let them get hungry, then they'll eat. Duh, I solved the whole picky eating problem. That's not what I'm saying, but I'm saying you will sabotage the picky eating problem if the kids don't have an appetite, right? So it's just kind of step one. It's like, let's make sure the stage is set correctly for all the other good things you're about to do at the dinner table.

Where does the kind of transparency around the food fit in for you? Because there's some parents that are like, I like to tell my kids everything that they're eating. And then there's others that are like, yeah, I love, you know, sprinkling pluck on the food and not telling them there's organ meats in it, that kind of thing.

Yeah. You know, it can be a both/and. I think we want to be cautious about legitimately hiding food, like as, as a sneaky thing. I think there was a book years ago called The Sneaky Chef and it's like, ah, because if the child finds out And you've broken that trust, they're going to look at every single food you serve very skeptically. And that goes— now we're going from curiosity back to fear, right? So we do have to be very cautious. Do the kids need to know everything? Not necessarily, but we don't want to be hiding food like for the sake of hiding food, if that makes sense. And if a child were ever to ask, oh, like what's in pluck? You better tell them full and complete, full and complete honesty. But that doesn't mean that you can't like, you know, sprinkle pluck or some organ meats or mix, you know, broth powder or something into a casserole. You don't have to like FDA disclose every ingredient when you bring the food to the table.

Do you think the distinction is taste? Like if it's something that's going to potentially alter the texture, the look, or the taste, then that should be disclosed. But if it's not, then There's no harm, no foul?

It could be. I don't know if I would make it so black and white like that. It's more of if the child asks what this is, that you need to make sure that you tell them. And that's where having the kids involved in the kitchen is really good because then they can just see. It doesn't even have to be a conversation, right? So when I make meatballs, I do not tell my family I put shredded zucchini in the meatballs. But I'm also not gonna hide it. It is somewhat helpful for the picky eating relationship for food to potentially be hidden because at least you're getting like your gut bacteria are getting fed that food. And when they're fed that food, if it's good gut bacteria and they're happy, they'll actually give you more of a taste or a craving for that food. So that's really cool. But if it's hidden, the child is not actually creating a relationship with that food. So we need a both/and. Right? You'd need to like serve the zucchini so the child can see it as well, or let them know that there's zucchini in there so they at least know that they are building a relationship with that food for the long term for their life. So again, it's not a problem to hide food. It's definitely a problem to lie to your kids.

What does success actually look like with a pick eater?

Success looks like they're curious about food. They're willing to try something new. The power struggles, the stress at the table. I think the biggest success number one is that the stress at the table goes down. And so that's what, you know, when I work with parents, we'll do like a 5-day challenge. And you can do this with the book. Like the book is written in 30 chapters, the Picky Eater Playbook. So you could read, they're very short, one chapter a day for 30 days. That seems a little intense. It's also in 7 sections. So you could do like one section, which is thematic a week for 7 weeks, that would feel probably a little better. But when I work with parents with this 5-day challenge, at the end of the 5 days, 85% of parents say their stress is reduced. To me, massive success because again, it's laying the groundwork for future continued improvements in the child's relationship with food. Because if everybody's stressed, nobody has an appetite. You know, so if you can remove that stress, massive success.

If a parent could change just one thing at tonight's dinner that would help their child build a healthier relationship with food, what would you have them do?

Well, it wouldn't be the dinner. I would start with that snacking and making sure that you've got 90 minutes to 3 hours between any snack and a meal, and that the snack isn't meal-sized. Okay. So for all kids, Unless they're a severe extreme picky eater and they are actually having weight problems, we want to make sure that the snack just satiates the hunger and allows the child, and then that you have that 90 minutes to 3 hours for the appetite to rebuild because anything you do with the dinner table could be sabotaged if you don't put that first step in place. So, that's step number 1.

Love it. One thing we noticed, because, and I love your point about, you know, become a detective, like, Like, don't just assume, like, look at the patterns. And one of the patterns we noticed was that everyone was really hungry right around 4:30, not 5. Like, we assume that dinner's at 5 or later, but everyone was just going crazy with snacks at 4:30. So what we did was we just moved dinner to 4:30.

Nice.

I mean, now we were fortunate and we could because we, you know, we're home early enough to do that, but it's like, That was absolutely a case of us kind of being detectives and noticing the pattern of not just our kids, but the whole family, all of our hunger.

Yeah. Sometimes parents have to be creative with moving around food or moving a snack, especially. Like, a lot of kids are getting off the bus maybe at 4:00, and if dinner's at 5:00 or even 5:30, there's no time for a snack, but we feel like there should be that afterschool snack. So yeah, sometimes you just have to get really creative on how to make sure that they're not overhungry and hangry and melting down. Although that is, so step 2 for me is to put out vegetables and there's a whole process, but in general, it's to put out vegetables first. So if I had kids who were hungry literally just a half an hour before the meal, I would probably just put out a veggie tray. And then that's, you know, that feels like a success too because for most picky eaters, they're having struggles with veggies. And so if veggies are the first thing that's hitting that wonderful hungry appetite, That's a win.

It's something easy to have on the dinner table ready to go once they get home. I love it. That's such a good tip. Well, final question. If you could wave a magic wand, bring back one ancestral practice, what would that be and why?

Parents and children working together consistently throughout the day in the home and having that side-by-side bonding and focus on just building Life skills and building relationships all day long.

I love that. Thank you so much, Katie. This has been really enlightening. I mean, you brought up so many things I've never heard of and really never looked at, you know, picky eating in the way you described it. Your book, everyone's got to check this book out. It's going to— it's available if you're listening to this after November 10th, but it's available. It launches November 10th, right?

Yes, but yeah, it's in preorder. If you're listening before November 10th, 2026, you can preorder, um, head over to raisinghealthyfamilies.com/pickyancestral for your folks and they can buy the book there. They can also get some juicy bonuses if we're still in the preorder phase.

Awesome. And then you also do like a kids cooking kind of summer camp, correct? What, can you share a little bit about that? And, uh, and I'm assuming people just go to the same website to learn about that too, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, get connected with me. We have a kids cooking class. We have a teen cooking class that's new this year in 2026. That's super cool. We have a chef teaching about 15 lessons. It's not you because you don't live near enough to me. That was a bummer. But yes, if a child of any age is ready to cook, we can help. And then we do a lot of life skills camps in the summer as well, where that blows out from cooking to gardening, finances, entrepreneurship, emotional regulation, anything you could call a life skill. We've got to work 450 of them in the vault in video form now.

Amazing. Well, thank you again for sharing your wisdom. We'll put all this in the show notes. Wow. It's time for us to bring the curiosity back to the dinner table. I love that because I always end every episode with reminding people to be curious. And so now be curious at the dinner table, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links, and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's eatpluck.com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.