About

Hello there! My name is Grace, I’m 43 years old, I have 9 year-old twins and live in Bedfordshire, UK. I started Happy Little Eaters to write posts and share information on how to improve mealtimes with your kids with the ideas and techniques I have learnt from child nutritionists and feeding experts.

Motivation for this blog
When my son was just three months’ old, he started to refuse his bottle. At 6 months, we became so concerned about his lack of milk intake, we saw a paediatrician. Then something very unexpected happened. Whilst showing the dietitian what my son would do when we gave him his bottle (head turning and refusal), he sat there on my lap and happily drank the whole lot!

Long story short; it turned out we had been putting too much pressure on ourselves (and our son) to feed him. He had developed an aversion to his bottle and just writing this is making me feel uncomfortable and emotional. I really struggled with feelings of guilt thinking back to all the times I was stressed out and kept changing the brand of milk, the teat and environment of where I would feed him to see if it made a difference. I would write down to the millilitre how much milk he had drunk. It became obsessional. But I don’t think this is an unfamiliar tale given how much it is drummed into new mums right from the word ‘go’ in hospital of the importance of regular feeding and your baby not dropping weight in those early days and weeks.

Wisdom from the top
As soon as I walked out of that paediatrician’s door, my shoulders dropped, I let out a big sigh and realised I simply needed to take a step back. I felt I’d been given permission to be liberated from the unnecessary pressure and strain I was putting on myself and my son at feeding times. To offer him his milk regularly but respect when he was full. He certainly wasn’t losing weight. Overnight, mealtimes felt easy and more fun.

I learnt so much that day; the fact that children have the ability to regulate their own appetite and know when they are hungry and full, the wonders of The Division Of Responsibility (where it’s the parent’s job to provide the ‘when’ and ‘what’ to eat, and the child’s job to decide ‘how much’ and ‘what’), the importance of the right language at mealtimes, the consequences of bribery and pressure and generally an approach to feeding that was unknown to me. After chatting to other mums in the following months, I soon realised that this information was not readily available and I wanted to do something about it so I started this blog to help others who were in the same panic-mode I had felt in those early days.

Onwards and upwards 
At 2 years-old, my son’s paediatrician diagnosed him with Selective Eating Disorder or ARFID (Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder). I suspect he has always had this and I could see it was not just simply ‘fussy eating’ like my daughter! Fortunately, due to seeing a professional in his early years meant I was equipped to carefully manage my son’s aversions and sensitivities and he has come out the other side unaware of all of this. His ‘food journey’ is taking longer than his twin sister’s, but there is no rush! There’s no way of knowing whether my paranoia about feeding in the early days caused my son to develop such strong aversions to certain food, but I try to focus on now having the tools to manage all of this. My main interest is that my children are Happy Little Eaters and this I can say they are!

I have spent the last six years researching the topic of mealtimes, how to manage fussy eating and have built up a bank of brilliant feeding therapists who support what I do and anything ‘nutritional’ I post on here is checked by them.

Present Day
My time is currently spent writing blog posts on here and articles for local magazines, going on local radio, doing live cook-alongs, creating meal plans and 1:1 mealtime coaching, which I just love. I have recently had a ‘Happy Family Mealtimes’ poem produced and have started to sell this on my website for families looking for a bit of motivation at mealtimes to hang in their kitchen. And maybe, I can somehow condense everything I’ve written into a book or podcast!

End goal
To enlighten more families on how to create happier mealtimes, which no longer involve stress and frustration.  Parenting is hard enough without having to add extra strain 3 times a day at mealtimes!  I’d love to help schools change the way mealtimes are conducted too with more focus on working with the child’s appetite and satiety rather than external strategies (such as reward charts) to get kids eat more than they are comfortable with.  The more control we give our kids at the table, the more likely they are to eat more variety.   My generation was told to ‘finish your plate’, but evidence now shows the long-term damaging effects of this and I strongly believe pressure around mealtimes will be as out-dated as the way children were forced to write right-handed!
Thank you for following me and I hope I can produce good enough content so you stick around.
Grace x