This week sees the launch of the inaugural Fussy Eating Awareness Week as an award-winning Registered Dietitian with over 20 years of NHS and private practice experience of working with families has taken matters into her own hands, to try and help tackle the challenge that makes so many households unhappy.

During Fussy Eating Awareness Week, Sarah will be sharing a range of tools and techniques she uses, which are scientifically proven to support the development of more positive Food habits with easy step by step activities and advice over a 5 day period.

• Day 1 –  ‘Out with the old’ – Say goodbye to mealtime mantras that are doing more harm than good- Being aware of how you were raised around food as a child ‘Kickstarting generational change for happier healthier kids’
• Day 2 –  Success Steps to help reduce stress & mealtime struggles ‘Turning the tables on stressful mealtimes’
• Day 3 – ‘There IS another way’ – Introducing new positive habits – Best practices, based on science – not culture ‘Introducing positive feeding habits’
• Day 4 –  ‘Let them eat cake’….managing sweets, treats and snacks
• Day 5 –Your next move & Q&A – which new approach is for you?

Access to Sarah’s expertise will be free but as an extension of her impact, Sarah is hoping to make a difference and is asking that people who join her make a voluntary donation to The Trussell Trust https://www.trusselltrust.org/appeal/ who support a nationwide network of food banks, providing emergency food and support to people locked in poverty.

Sarah is also working to try and help distinguish when fussy eating is ‘just a fad’, a normal part of child development, and when it is something more serious and she wants to help provide more support for education and healthcare providers to enable them to identify this.

Statistics show that up to 50% of children may be described as picky eaters during childhood and problematic feeding behaviours are frequently associated with high levels of maternal distress and mealtime conflict (de Barse et al., 2016; Harris et al., 2018; Jarman et al., 2015; Trofholz et al., 2017).

Recent data from The Children’s Nutritionist’s survey (of 144 parents) found that 95% of stressed parents said that if they could wave a magic wand, they would use it to have their child eat a wider variety of foods.

Driven by her own story of struggling to feed her son, despite her many years of clinical experience, Sarah, a frustrated healthcare professional and Parent, personally sought out the best advice from across the globe to help her understand what was at play with her son’s fussy eating. Learning from the most highly qualified specialists in America, who Sarah then trained with, she has delved into the Psychology of child development and eating Psychology and feeding therapy to help initiate breakthroughs, both in her own situation and with her clients. Sarah is currently reaching around 130K people each month with her expertise and knowledge via her online platforms and hopes that this dedicated Fussy Eating Awareness Week will enable her to reach many more. 

Sarah said; “I am on a mission to spread this knowledge, which is still largely untapped, much more widely, to bring tools and techniques to the table to help reduce mealtime stress. I’ve created this awareness week to spread my knowledge on an even bigger scale and help as many people as possible.”

As well as parents and family members, Sarah is also using this awareness week as an opportunity to reach out to the professionals whom parents turn to for help – the frontline health professionals and education providers, who are not specifically trained in this area, yet are expected to support parents who are struggling. She is working to share her specialist knowledge with them too so that they can create a positive ripple effect with families in their communities.

With her years of experience, Sarah is also in the process of creating an accredited course for healthcare providers, such as; Health Visitors, GP’s, Dietitians and Nutritionists… and education providers; such as; nursery and pre-school staff… to ensure that fussy eating is recognised as an area that they are required to be trained on, to ensure more frontline health workers and education providers are prepared to deal with these challenges in the best manner.

Sarah continues: “Children can be fussy eaters and education and health professionals are not equipped to support them. They don’t get the right education about HOW to feed children, only WHAT food parents should be offering. Parents get fobbed off with ‘it’s just a phase’ or ‘they’ll eat when they’re hungry’, but actually some children don’t. Strategies can make the situation worse, like providing rescue meals so children don’t go hungry, only offering food that parents know they’ll eat, re-presenting rejected meals as snacks later on. These are being advised by our frontline health workers – and they don’t work!

“”Phases” can last a very long time, causing children to have narrow diets, be at risk of nutritional deficiencies and lead to unhappy family mealtimes and I believe we need to tackle this head on. I feel passionately that; Health Visitors, GP’s, Dietitians, Nutritionists and also education providers, such as nurseries, should be armed with the information on the HOW part of feeding. These professionals are on the front line and need the right information to be able to support families effectively. They need education on positive food parenting, child development, and how mealtimes should be carried out in order for children to grow up having a healthy relationship with food.”

Sarah is also passionate about helping to cut the ties of generational eating habits, having seen that often the children’s behaviour is fuelled by our own ingrained unconscious beliefs and habits from our childhoods around what mealtimes should look like. She believes that sayings like – ‘if you don’t clear your plate there’ll be no pudding’ and ‘if you don’t eat your tea you’ll be having it for breakfast’ and ‘we’re not leaving the table until you’ve eaten that broccoli’ are all stress evoking, creating dangerous negative emotions around food and potentially fuelling later in life mental health challenges around food and weight management.

Instead, Sarah is on a mission to share with us what science shows is the best way to parent around food and she hopes this will go some way to combat the misinformation that exists around how to deal with fussy eating and the desperation tactics that some parents resort to. Sarah said; “Making back up meals, bribing them to eat a vegetable, and tricking them with hidden ingredients only further fuels the fire and these approaches can cause further problems for the children as they grow up, and their relationship with food into adulthood can be affected”.

To get involved parents can register https://childrensnutrition.co.uk/fussy-eating-awareness-week/