The No-Cry Picky Eater Solution: Gentle Ways to Encourage Your Child to Eat - and Eat Healthy [Paperback]

Another wonderful resource for parents from Elizabeth Pantley. True to her style, she is encouraging and supporting of parents who are struggling, frustrated, and exhausted with the food battles of our little one.

The No Cry Picky Eater Solution covers two "major" areas - the first, how to ensure your child is getting the nutrition they need (with excellent charts on what this is for various age groups - realistic charts that can actually be implemented), the second area, how to increase your child's repertoire of foods they will actually eat.

For the first point, Eliabeth provides ways to increase the nutritional value in what your child will currently eat by hiding healthy items in currently "acceptable" foods, by slowly transitioning into healthier choices (adding 1/3 whole wheat pasta to the standard box of macaroni and cheese), as well as a whole section of recipes (supplied by various authors) on how to add more nutrition to what you are baking or cooking... including wonderful catchy names for these foods - Lord of the Apple Rings & Pink Potatoes.

To the second point... how to increase what your child will actually eat. Elizabeth provides very helpful information on how children develop their sense of taste, how this is developmental and not established at birth - this leads to a different way to conceptualize what the "battle" is actually about and how to approach it. This area was our biggest challenge in our home... we had done the "sneaky" approach of getting nutrition in our son (now 4) but wanted him to "want" the asparagus and other "healthy choices".

Over the last three weeks, we have implemented and used some of the techniques - in the very large section on Tips, Tricks, & Tactics (nearly 70 pages) and have honestly been surprised at the positive results - tasting foods of different texture, shape, colour as well as using this while on vacation which Elizabeth addresses how eating out with children is another separate challenge. An example she uses in the book is how the grilled cheese sandwich at home looks very different at a restuarant... armed with her suggestions, we tested this theory with our son, ordering the always rejected grilled cheese sandwich from the restuarant and used some of her suggestions and amazingly, he not only tried it, but "chose" that he liked it and ate it.

I highly recommend this book to parents who are exhausted, feel they have given up or are about to, and who just want mealtime to not be approached with anxiety, stress, and fights.

Thank you Elizabeth for another wonderful book that is already producing results in areas we had nearly given up on!!

This book has a bunch of practical advice that is worth trying out. However, it flaunts statistics and nutritional studies in a misleading way.

It keeps presenting snippets of studies under the heading "The Shocker!!!". *But* it does it in a misleading manner. It reports that "more than 40% of children do not always eat breakfast". First of all, you need to define "not always". Second, other studies have shown that the probability of skipping breakfast increases with age. This statistic probably over-represents teenagers, and is not relevant to the age group at hand.

The book also repeatedly implies causation when all that is shown is correlation. Teenagers who have family dinners have less sex. I highly doubt that family dinners are the primary cause. More likely there are other factors, e.g. socioeconomic status, family composition, cultural values etc.

Then, the book encourages parents to aspire to feed their children a diet that is not attainable by most adults. Low-fat cheese?! Give me a break. Just today the New York Times had an article on how difficult it is to produce good-tasting low-fat cheese. Also, the book is down on salt, but actually, the jury is still out on salt. A meta-study of many other studies showed that salt does not have much effect on health. So why make food less tasty for already picky eaters by pushing nutritional dogma that is slowly being debunked? Isn't it more important for children to learn to eat a variety of foods rather than stressing at this stage (when high-fat is OK for most healthy, growing kids) about eating out of the health-food section?

The book also seems down on eating out, but the unspoken assumption is that this means going to a fast-food restaurant or an American sit-down chain restaurant. However, if you live in an area with ethnically diverse dining options, and dining out is financially feasible for you, this is a great way for your kid to try lots of new dishes (in one sitting, if everyone orders something different) without your having to sweat over cooking something from scratch only to have it be rejected by your kid.

Finally, it would be nice if the book justified itself when it offered conflicting advice (it's ok to have many different approaches, but can they be referenced to each other?). First it's, 'don't put food on your child's plate, let them put it there themselves', and then 'don't waste time, have the food already on your child's plate before they are seated'. The book also spends some time acknowledging how many kids like their food separated, and then the very first recipe is fried rice with everything mixed together. I'm looking forward to trying these recipes, but it would help if there was more of a selection for 'segregators' (you know, the kids who reject a dish if it has even a speck of green in it).

I love Elizabeth Pantley, but I still felt a little bit of anxiety before opening the book. I braced myself thinking that I was going to read about how I was doing everything wrong in terms of trying to feed my picky eater - I'm not strict enough, I hide veggies in other food, it's all my fault he's so picky, etc.

Instead, the book was comforting to me. It places no blame on the parents and instead chalks picky eating up to biology. It urges flexibility, which was VERY validating for me to read because I know that with my generation kids were frequently forced to sit still and clean their plate, something I never felt was fair. All of the tips in the book are totally reasonable (nothing impossible or even stressful) and they work well for my family.

The book also does recommend "hiding" healthy foods in other foods and includes some recipes that made my mouth water. I haven't tried them yet, but intend to soon.

Pantley's approach is nonjudgmental, helpful, and like her other books - gentle. This might be my favorite of her books.