Once you understand – and begin practicing! – the parenting script, you may find yourself stumped on how to implement it in response to common mealtime meltdowns! Below, we’ve outlined a few of the most common scenarios that arise – and provided an example of you might respond to it! 

Even the best parents lose their temper from time to time – and there’s not one of us who doesn’t feel intense shame when we do! And while we all ought to extend ourselves a bit more compassion for being the humans that we are, one tool that will help during intense moments is a set of parenting scripts. 

Growing Independent Eaters takes an interdisciplinary approach to weaning, which is a fancy way of saying that we believe families are best-supported when they are supported by a team who views their child as a whole person, rather than merely numbers on a growth chart. That’s why families who wean with us get an entire team of professionals to support them. Here’s who they are, and what they do. 

When weans are not progressing the way that we hope, and there are no medical issues (constipation, compromised swallow, illness, etc.) that seem to be complicating that progress, the likely culprit is pressured eating. 

Because pressured eating always leads to less eating. 

Families make their lives work in a variety of wonderful ways! Some have a parent who works at home to take care of the kids, while the other works outside of the home; some have two working parents with childcare (in-home, out-of-the home, or a mixture of the two); some have just one parent who holds it all together. And all of these families worry that the dynamics that come with securing and maintaining childcare could hinder their child’s ability to wean successfully – but that has not been our experience!

There are a lot of techniques that parents, therapists, family members and caregivers employ when trying to get a child to eat. Unfortunately, as well-intentioned as those methods may be, they are, at best, unsuccessful, and at worst, counterproductive, resulting in even more adamant refusals or more exacerbated meltdowns than we saw at the beginning.

Most parents have a love/hate relationship with their child’s feeding tube: on the one hand, the placement of the tube was traumatic, and all of the side effects (vomiting, reflux, beeping machines, and more) create so many exhausting and irresolvable issues. But on the other hand, the tube creates a sense of control and predictability in the midst of difficult medical complexities, and allows parents to feel confident that their child is getting what they need. 

“Do I follow DOR (Division of Responsibility) and risk my child not touching anything of what I offer? Or do I give my child what the food they want just to ensure that they eat something?" 

This is the hardest question that parents face when they’re thinking about what DOR is and how it might help their children learn how to eat!

I genuinely believe that the vast majority of parents do the best that they can to advocate fiercely for their little humans! In a past blog, we talked about “Three Accidentals Ways We Foster Picky Eating,” and in this one, we want to brainstorm a bit further about the ways that we might accidentally foster picky eating habits. 

Division of Responsibility (DOR) gives the job of deciding “what’s for dinner” to the adults! And that’s great – until you have no idea what to offer your new and learning eater. And that’s where “The stoplight method” comes in!

The most common question we hear in the post-wean stage is, “but are you sure this is safe?” Most often, this question comes from parents whose children are settling into being fully oral, without tube support, in the stage where this new “eating life” looks really different than the life they were living on full tube feeds. For most parents, the unpredictability of oral eating can lead to some significant panic, and if we aren’t careful, sometimes that panic can cause parents to jump the gun to resume tube feeds unnecessarily.