Eat what is offered

#taste#eat#food#plate#meal

Most children arrive at the table with a finished picture of the meal in their head, and that picture rarely matches what is on the plate. The visual support below helps your child meet what is served without the difference taking over dinner.

A boy holds a plate and lifts a forkful of food to his mouth.

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Boy tasting the food

A boy holds a plate and lifts a forkful of food to his mouth.

About this visual support

Before the plate even reaches the table, many children have decided what should be on it. When something else appears, the protest is rarely about taste; it is about the distance between the picture in their head and the one in front of them. Eating what is offered therefore asks for something fairly big: letting go of your own version of the meal at the exact moment hunger has made patience shorter.

Visual support helps by moving the expectation out of the head and onto the table. If your child sees what is being served before sitting down, the surprise is gone and only the food is left. A concrete way to do it: let them look at the pictures while you set the table and point at what will be there, so the expectation can change before the plate lands. Offer a small choice inside what is served, such as how much or which part first, because flexibility comes easier when something is still theirs to decide.

The Routined app lets you show the meal of the day in pictures straight from your phone, and the first fourteen days are a trial that costs nothing.