Eight reasons to use a visual menu for your ‘picky eater’

In this article, I’m going to share a strategy which can help enormously with food anxiety: the visual menu.

What is a visual menu?

A visual menu is a method of communicating to your child what you will be serving for meals and snacks that week, and when they will be served.

How do make a visual menu?

The answer to this depends on the age and cognitive ability of your child, plus your creative abilities and the time available to you!

For young children who cannot yet read, you can either take photos of foods or do drawings. If you are feeling ambitious, you can laminate these and pop some velcro on the back, enabling you to stick them onto a board.

You can indicate time pictorially (breakfast time might have a picture of your child waking up in the morning) or you can have an image of a clock if your child has learned to tell the time. Most children will soon learn to interpret the plan – they will learn with practice, that the first space shows breakfast, the second one shows the mid-morning snack, etc. You can also have a marker (like a cardboard heart stuck with blu-tack)  which you move across the plan to indicate where you are in your day.

Older children can handle a written plan, which is much less time consuming for you…. If your menu plan is written rather than pictorial, you can use a chalk board or wipe board very effectively. You know your child best – you will be able to come up with a format that they can understand.

The benefits of a visual menu

1. It helps with meal planning – you can’t have a visual menu without a meal plan! Sometimes life gets in the way and it can be hard to maintain the discipline of planning meals in advance. When your child only eats a limited range of foods, effective meal planning is a key part of optimising and introducing variety.
2. It removes the pre-meal ‘what are we having?’ anxiety – does your child nervously ask what is for dinner? Giving them the ability to go and find out for themselves if they feel the need to know, is very empowering. It gives them control in a really constructive way.
3. It reduces the chance of pre-meal power struggles – maybe your child asks what is for lunch and you tell them. Before you know it, you can find yourself embroiled in a debate about whether they like it and whether they can have something different. This brings in a negative dynamic before the meal has even begun. Conflict and stress have a negative impact on eating. Refer your child to the meal plan and you can keep the atmosphere positive.
4. It can help you maintain control over the content of meals* –  when your child is used to seeing the meal plan on display, this helps them conceptualise it as something fixed and something that the adults are responsible for. I have written elsewhere about the problem with asking children what they want, rather than giving them the freedom to make their own eating decisions in the context of the foods you have chosen to serve.
5. It can help you maintain control over the timing of meals* – a clear meal / snack structure is really important when it comes to feeding children.  A visual menu will help you stay consistent and offer meals and snacks at fixed times throughout the day. This supports self-regulation as your child’s body will get used to having food at set times.
6. It helps avoid grazing – If children fall into a grazing pattern this can get in the way of their ability to self-regulate (eat in response to their body’s cues) and it can block their natural appetite. When you have a visual menu, it will be much easier to avoid slipping into the trap of providing extra eating opportunities throughout the day.
7. It can support routine – young children love routine and if their day is predictable, this lowers anxiety. By having a menu on display, you are giving your child a reassuring sense that their day is mapped out and predictable. They may even naturally incorporate the ritual of checking the visual menu into what they do each day.
8. They won’t worry about whether there will be something available that they can eat – I recommend always including some accepted foods in every meal and snack. It is really hard to build trust if sometimes, nothing is served that a child can handle. If your child can see by looking at the visual menu, that there accepted foods are on offer (alongside new and non-accepted foods if they can cope with this), there is far less scope for anxiety in the run up to meals.

Do you use a visual menu, or is it something you are considering trying, now you’ve read about how helpful they can be? Can you think of any benefits that I haven’t listed here? Or have you got some thoughts about what some of the challenges involved might be? As with many aspects of supporting your child’s relationship with food, strategies like this are not necessarily the easiest course of action and they require time, thought and commitment.  Post in the comments or come and join me in Your Feeding Team or Parenting Picky Eaters.

*This is in line with Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility model, see this post and the Ellyn Satter Institute website.