Muffin Tins

This is something I learned along the way in order to help kids who are picky eaters. Sometimes it helps picky eaters to have a variety of things in front of them all at once. I got the idea once to fill muffin trays with many different snack varieties. With my own daughter, I used to let her have dinner like this sometimes. Of course, the foods in the tins can literally be anything, and some kids don’t like their food touching. Here’s a mommy blogger talking about the same thing 

I wasn’t always able to be very free range with kids at meal and snack times. When I worked at the child crisis center, the older staff members were so extremely strict with the kids and their meal times that they used to make kids eat all of one thing before eating another thing. This was taken to bigger extremes than just making kids finish their meal before dessert. They used to make them have all meat before vegetables, all vegetables before fruits, etc. and every kid at the table had to be finished with one thing before anyone could start on the next thing. It was extremely difficult to watch. It was even harder to enforce, and I often got “in trouble” for not enforcing that. The child crisis center had a therapist that would send letters to the staff telling them not to do this, but she never bothered to walk out of her office to the shelter area to help or even stay past 5:00. 

As a result of this, I’ve always been a fan of putting several things in front of kids and letting them eat whatever they want. Having to enforce crazy rules like that was not only traumatic for the kids, it was traumatic for me.