Natalia Stasenko's Emailed Responses to Webinar Questions from the Chat

• How do you handle classrooms with multiple children with feeding issues? It can be tough when a child's safe food is a toaster pastry or gummy candy that the other children are not offered this same food. This can cause disruptions with other children's eating. It's a very tough situation.

Keep a running list of each child's accepted foods, whether that's built into your tracking system or kept on paper at the classroom level. The key word is accepted, not favorite. Parents often report a much shorter list than what a child will actually eat, so it helps to observe and confirm over a few weeks rather than relying on intake forms alone. From that list, teachers should choose the least enticing safe option to serve, the food least likely to draw other children's attention or start a trading economy at the table. In practice, this is usually something plain: pasta, rice, crackers, plain bread. Build that food into the regular meal rotation rather than treating it as a special accommodation pulled out separately, and align choices with CACFP meal pattern requirements wherever possible so the accepted food is still doing nutritional work, not just keeping the peace.

• Would love to hear suggestions for what you see as the role of public health - outside of counseling. What can public health nutritionists do to support children with special nutrition and feeding needs? What gaps can we help fill?

Public health nutritionists have real reach outside one-on-one clinical support, and a lot of that is upstream work. Building general awareness that feeding difficulty exists on a spectrum, so a child who eats a narrow range of foods isn't automatically flagged as "the problem child" or a parenting failure, is one lever. Pointing families and early childhood staff toward digital resources extends reach well. Also, championing responsive feeding as the default framework in group settings, WIC offices, and CACFP-participating programs will help us set a consistent standard, so families aren't getting contradictory advice depending on which door they walk through. There's also a training gap public health is well positioned to fill: many ECE staff have never had formal instruction on feeding difficulties at all. We are happy to talk about it more and partner, if you are interested.

• Is there a particular age when "picky" eating shows up and why? Is there an evolutionary purpose?

Developmentally typical picky eating tends to emerge somewhere between 12 months and 4 to 5 years old. Growth velocity slows sharply after the first year, appetite drops accordingly, and food preferences narrow as a normal part of that shift. Layered on top of that is food neophobia, a wariness toward new foods that's widely thought to have an evolutionary basis. A toddler beginning to move independently and put things in their mouth without a caregiver's constant oversight benefits from a built-in hesitation toward anything unfamiliar. It functions much like a contamination disgust response: better to reject a new food outright than risk something toxic at exactly the developmental stage when independent exploration is taking off.

• We find most of our kids really like the crunchy food items only. Per your slides that looks very normal. Is that correct? How do we let our teachers know this is okay?

Yes, that can be a normal pattern, not a red flag, unless it correlates with a very limited diet overall and other factors that may point towards more extreme feeding issues or even feeding disorders like PFD or ARFID. Every child's sensory system processes food texture differently, and crunchy foods tend to feel safer because they're more predictable. Bite force, sound, and breakdown in the mouth are consistent every time, which matters for a child who needs predictable sensory input.  Crunchy foods also deliver strong proprioceptive input, which some children actively seek out. There's an evolutionary angle here too, since dry, crunchy foods were historically lower risk than soft or slimy ones, which were more likely to signal spoilage. For teachers, you can offer reassurance: a class full of children reaching for crackers over blueberries isn't a sign that something's going wrong; it's a fairly typical choice for small children.

• What about children who have difficulty regulating quantities and will overeat?

True absence of self-regulation is rare. When a child appears to be overeating, it's worth looking first at whether food insecurity or a history of restriction is in the picture, since both can override a child's internal cues and drive them to eat past fullness whenever food is available. The next step is to watch which foods trigger the overeating. If it's specifically foods that are restricted or rationed at home, like bread or plain pasta, that's a strong signal the behavior is about access anxiety rather than appetite. And it's worth checking whether the household or classroom has actually started practicing a no-pressure, no-restriction approach yet, or whether the child is still in an early phase of testing boundaries that were previously tightly controlled. That testing phase can look like overeating but often settles once the child trusts that the food isn't going away.

• What do you recommend in instances where family feeding needs differ. For example, I have a lot of parents who ask how to regulate eating environment to best meet needs of a neurotypical child and a child with Autism both at the table together?

Deconstructed family-style meals are the most workable foundation here, since they let each child build a plate from shared components without forcing identical food onto every plate. From there, the environment gets adjusted around whatever tends to trigger the autistic child specifically, whether that's smell, noise, or the sensory load of the table itself. It's worth preparing families for the fact that even a well-adjusted setup can break down during major transitions, the start of a school year being a common one, when family meals may become genuinely difficult or fall apart for a stretch. Once the transition settles and routine returns, going back to the same structure usually helps things return to normal.

• Can you speak to how to support families experiencing food insecurity in responsive feeding. As you mentioned, when their is food scarcity, it can be very difficult for families to follow this practice.

Responsive feeding isn't impossible under food insecurity, but it is harder, and it helps to frame it honestly with families rather than pretending the two can go easily together. Family-style meals can actually reduce food waste, since children serve themselves what they'll realistically eat rather than being handed a fixed portion that ends up in the bin. Practical strategies that help stretch resources further include encouraging families to recycle leftovers into new meals rather than treating them as separate, single-use dishes, and offering the same staple foods in deconstructed form across multiple meals, so a batch of rice or beans keeps reappearing in different combinations rather than being cooked once and discarded. Keeping those staples prepped and stored in containers in the fridge makes it much easier to pull together a responsive, no-pressure meal on a tight night rather than falling back on whatever's fastest.

The most important thing to hold onto with these families is sequencing. Food security has to come first. Responsive feeding is a practice that comes after that baseline is met, not a substitute for it, and it isn't going to solve food insecurity on its own. Presenting it as the answer to a family's food access problems sets everyone up to feel like the approach failed when really it was never the right tool for that layer of the problem.