The holidays are right around the corner and while they are a time that should be filled with joy and family traditions, for families of children with feeding challenges this can also be a time of increased stress, worry, and frustration for parents and children alike. The good news is that the holidays offer endless opportunities to foster our children’s love of food and help them to learn about new foods in a non-threatening way. Here are some ideas for helping your child not only get through holiday meals but enjoy the experience and expand their interactions with new foods in the process.

Taking the Stress out of Family Gatherings

During the holidays many of us get together with family to share in special meals. Large family gatherings and meals can be especially challenging for children with sensory and feeding difficulties. The sensory experience can be overwhelming and may lead to meltdowns if their needs are not recognized and addressed. When our body is bombarded by sensory input without a way to accurately process that input, it goes into fight or flight mode and our digestive system takes a back seat while the body focuses on getting through the experience. It is important that we are aware of our children’s sensory arousal and are offering them strategies to make the experience more comfortable. Family gatherings are NOT the place to try to get your child to eat green bean casserole for the first time! Here are some strategies to decrease the stress and make gatherings a pleasant experience.

Social Stories: Social stories are a great way to talk to a child about activities that are coming up and prepare them for big events. Start reading a social story about your holiday plans a few weeks in advance to give them time to process what is coming.

If your child does not handle changes to routine or travel well, consider having family come to you.

If you do need to travel to a relative’s home, talk to them about having a quiet room where your child can retreat to if they need a break from all of the activity. Bring some favorite toys and activities with you to make your child feel more comfortable in the new environment.

Consider dimming the lighting to decrease the sensory input that your child is trying to process. Dimmed lighting can often help with calming an upset child (or an overwhelmed adult!).

Be aware that the smell of all of the various foods combined, while it may smell delicious to us, may be overpowering for our kids who are highly sensitive to smell, which in turn decreases their appetite.

Likewise, the sight of all of those unfamiliar foods on the table may be visually over stimulating for your child. Consider serving the food in another room and having your child sit on one end of the table instead of in the middle so that they are not surrounded by foods that they are not yet ready for.

Depending on the severity of your child’s aversions, having them eat prior to the large family gathering can reduce the pressure of eating with so many new foods around.

Often when we are with extended family or friends we have higher expectations of our children’s behavior than we do at home. Be mindful that children are not made to sit for long periods of time and engage in adult table talk. If your child has finished eating after 20-30 minutes and everyone wants to stay at the table to talk, allow your child to get up from the table and engage in a quiet play task while the grown-ups finish.

If it is going to result in a meltdown, do not use this time to encourage your child to try new foods. Make sure they have some of their preferred foods available and allow them to eat those at the family meal.

If your child is ready for it, they can take a small amount of the new foods and put them on their plate without the expectation that they will eat them all. If they are not ready for this step, don’t push it!

One of the best ways to get your kids to ultimately eat a wide variety of foods is to expose them to foods in a fun, no pressure way. The holidays afford so many opportunities to learn about new foods without any pressure to eat them, allowing children to build a positive relationship with food.

String popcorn: what a great tradition that seems to have gone by the wayside in recent years. Not only is your child learning to interact with food, they are getting to work on their fine motor skills as well! Add cranberries for increased exposure to new foods.

Make cookies: have your kids help by adding the dry ingredients, cutting out shapes with cookie cutters, rolling the dough into balls, decorating the final product, the possibilities are endless! Here are 19 Christmas cookie ideas for making with kids.

Create holiday themed art using foods: get your kids involved in making arts and crafts projects for teachers, grandparents and friends using foods in place of traditional art tools.

Make stovetop potpourri: this is such a fun activity that allows kids to work with aromatic dry ingredients. These make great gifts for teachers and therapists when packaged in individual plastic gift bags and smell so nice when you cook them on the stove in a pot of water.

Bring your kiddos into the kitchen and have them help with the meal preparation! If they are not ready to touch the foods being prepared, have them help by holding the bowl, reading the directions, or stirring the pot. Kids especially love when they get to use kitchen utensils. These kid safe knives are a great way to get them involved!

Give them some left over dough from cookies or pie crust, cookie cutters, nuts, or whatever other toppings you’d like and let them go to town building their own pies and cakes.

Have your kids help to arrange a veggie platter to take to a holiday party. Look at this cute Christmas tree veggie platter. Remember, they do NOT have to eat the veggies (but if they do want to try a bite we won’t stop them!)

Remember above all else, this is a time for building memories with your family. Focus on the activities that your children enjoy, there will always be time to work on the hard things later.

Holiday Feeding Recommendations

As the holiday season approaches, parents are faced with excitement and nerves. While it is a fun time of the year where kids can spend time with their families, it can be a stressful time for children with special needs. Some things to consider during this holiday season are how to help prepare your child for transitioning between different holidays and giving them an idea of what to expect. As we all know from this year, transitioning can be very hard especially for those kids who need a little extra help understanding changes to routine. Here are some strategies to help your child throughout this holiday season:

This is critical for those who thrive off of routine and visual cues. A visual calendar can be very helpful in preparing the child for transitioning and helping them anticipate what is coming next. There are plenty of visual schedules to chose from. You can make it yourself, buy it in a retail store or online. You can customize your calendars with pictures of holiday characters, the child doing the activity, or a countdown until a certain date so they know what to expect. Get the child involved in making the calendar through taking pictures and allowing them to decorate it how they see fit.

Social stories can be very helpful especially with children who have a hard time with changes and children with autism to understand what is coming next and how to prepare his/her body for it. You can ask your therapist for specific social stories and customizing them to fit your child’s needs. The social stories can range from holiday social skills to holiday dining etiquette.

While the holiday season can be very fun, it can also be overwhelming to those who have sensory processing disorders. While a feast with family is calming and relaxing for most, it can send some children into a “sensory overload”.  Having scheduled quiet time to allow your child to decompress from the extra activities and external stimuli that can be overwhelming (i.e bright lights, certain scents, loud noise/music, etc) can be a great way to include them and also allow them to get what their body needs. Also, having supports such as ear plugs, headphones, and a quiet room to retreat to can be great options to prevent them from  becoming overstimulated. For those who are “sensory seekers”, we recommend that you find activities that offer the child to move/carry something heavy or eat chewy/crunchy food to help calm their system down. Also, allowing the child to have “movement breaks” can help reduce their sensory seeking behaviors as well. Listed below are several options for sensory strategies to use during the day to help keep your child calm and regulated.

We hope these strategies help and that you have a wonderful holiday season,

Mallory Goettl MS OTR/L and Ellen Snyder MSOT OTR/L

Decreasing Stress Around the Holidays

The changing season brings joy for many. With the holiday season approaching, there are many activities that can engage your child! Occupational Therapy activities do not have to be difficult or time consuming and can have an array of benefits including: practicing fine and visual motor skills, exposure to food play, increased sensory input, and just having fun! 

Given the nicer weather, this is a perfect time to take your child outdoors and participate in various sensory activities! For example you can go on a sensory walk and look for something bumpy, flying, yellow, loud, to jump on, to run to or to climb. Or you could participate in some messy play such as, making art with flower petals, grass, sticks, leaves, etc. You could also create a mud kitchen or play with wet chalk. The possibilities are endless, but all sensory activities help your child in so many ways including building their cognitive, social, emotional, and language skills. 

After having fun outdoors, you can bring excitement inside with these two great activities attached above!

Fall Activities - Occupational Therapy Blog

Even under normal circumstances, returning to school can be stressful for parents and children alike. Transitions, uncertainty, and change in general are just plain hard. Returning to school under the restrictions of COVID, however, only exacerbates the worries that parents and children are experiencing.

For children there are some helpful things parents can do to help. Putting into practice some or all of these strategies can help alleviate some of the fears and anxiety that surround this dreaded annual transition.

Easing Back to School Fears and Anxiety

To improve someone’s spirit by giving them hope or confidence.

To every mom, dad, grandma, granddad, aunt, uncle, brother, and sister – we see you. Challenging would be the optimal word to describe our current situation. Routines have been thrown out of the window, changes of scenery depend 100% on weather or the amount of gas in the car’s tank. Your support system has become distant and virtual, nonfamilial human touch is nonexistent and it is you and your child 100% of the time. Explanations aren’t always easy and fear of the unknown can lace every breath. As you manage laundry, meals, cleaning, tantrums, bandaids, questions, disrupted sleep, school work, medications, messes, and rainy days we’ve asked you to add teletherapy to the mix.

While this may seem easy, it is in fact far more difficult than either party could have ever anticipated. You now rely on our instruction and we rely on your skill. You’ve become a PT, OT, SLP overnight. We ask you to feel the subtle differences while positioning, manage fear and vomit with feeding, reduce frustration with difficult motor tasks, and if that is not enough, we ask you to do that even when not in our virtual treatment room. It can feel overwhelming. A daunting task. You don’t want to tell us you didn’t do it. You may struggle with feelings of guilt for just making it through the day without giving a thought to the extra things we’ve asked of you. You may be just barely holding it together.

Let me tell you, WE ARE PROUD OF YOU! On top of the fears, heartbreak, struggles, and emotions you already manage as the parent of a child with special needs, a pandemic has been added to your plate. But you are excelling! You wake up each day. Your child is fed. Your child is happy. And you are able to do that day after day.

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to travel abroad and interact with the forgotten children of an entire country. Here is an excerpt from my journal during that time:

The difference that keeps me going and provides my passion is the difference between forgotten and loved. At the end of the day, your child is loved. Your child has a roof and 4 walls. You refuse to let your child be an outcast and we come along beside you and fight for them too. Each precious face and beautiful set of eyes is loved.

Did you accomplish the whole to-do list for today? No. Did you devote 10 minutes to the home exercises we talked about? No. Are there toys on the floor? Yes. Piles of laundry? Yes. That’s OK! We see you doing your best during these challenging times. We come alongside you to encourage you. You can do this! You are doing this!

From Our Experts

Holiday Feeding Recommendations

Decreasing Stress Around the Holidays

Fall Activities - Occupational Therapy Blog

Easing Back to School Fears and Anxiety

Parents, we see you! You are not alone.