Broccoli Boot Camp: Basic Training for Parents of Selective Eaters

Are you dealing with a picky eater? Then welcome to Broccoli Boot Camp - the informative and accessible resource for parents challenged by selective eaters!

This comprehensive guide can be used with children with or without special needs (e.g., autism or Down syndrome). It presents commonsense behavioral interventions to expand children's diet variety and preferences for healthy foods.

Broccoli Boot Camp will help you with the strategies to shape eating behavior. Parents can choose the intervention which works best for their family's circumstances. The book not only could change the child's life, but it can also help parents eliminate their stress with the greatest panacea of all knowledgeable understanding.

Editorial Reviews
This is an incredibly well-researched, informative, and accessible resource for parents challenged by selective eating. Broccoli Boot Camp is a must-read, whether your child is a picky eater or demonstrates more significant issues.
--David Celiberti, Ph.D., BCBA-D, Association for Science in Autism Treatment

Feeding their children is perhaps the most basic job assigned to parents but also one that can be the most challenging. The consequences of inadequate nutrition multiply quickly and the ways determined children can defy parental efforts to promote good eating habits are many and maddening. Although billed as a book for parents, and it is truly an invaluable resource for them, it is also a tremendous resource for the professionals who serve them.
--Patrick C. Friman, Ph.D., ABPP, Vice President of Behavioral Health, Boys Town Clinical Professor of Pediatrics, UNMC

Forget kid-friendly menus or hiding vegetables in a cake. This book offers techniques that can actually help a child to enjoy eating greens for their own sake and to develop into an adult with a varied palate. For any parent struggling to feed a picky child, this book is a treasure trove of useful, evidence-based information and advice. I wish I'd had it when my own children were toddlers. I found wisdom on every page. Keith Williams and Laura Seiverling understand that every family is different but they also understand what works and what doesn't when it comes to learning new tastes. Most new parents know that multiple taste exposures are the key, but the difficult part is getting a child who is scared of new foods to experience those multiple taste exposures. There is no magic bullet, but Broccoli Boot Camp draws on the authors' extensive clinical knowledge to show how to create positive and patient methods for tasting new foods that work for you and your child. With their mantra that 'liking comes later', family mealtimes can stop being a battle.
--Bee Wilson, author of First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (Basic Books)

About the Authors
Keith Williams is a licensed psychologist and Board Certified Behavior Analyst. He is the Director of the Feeding Program at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center, and a Professor of Pediatrics at the Penn State College of Medicine. He is the author of book chapters, articles, and a book, Treating Eating Problems of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Developmental Disabilities.

Laura Seiverling is a licensed psychologist and Board Certified Behavior Analyst. Previously at St. Mary’s Hospital for Children’s Center for Pediatric Feeding Disorders in Bayside, New York, serving as both psychologist and clinical supervisor for the program, she now holds an Assistant Teaching Professor position at Ball State University. She is the author of numerous book chapters and articles.

The strategies in this book can be helpful for families of children along the entire continuum of food selectivity. There are strategies for parents of children with mild food selectivity who want their children to eat more healthy foods and be more open to trying new foods. There are also strategies that can be used for children whose parents have repeatedly tried and failed to address their selective eating. The interventions in this book can be used with children with or without delays in development, children from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, and at various ages throughout their development (i.e., from toddlers to adolescents). About 75 percent of all children referred to our feeding programs have special needs, but of the children seen specifically for limited diet variety, about 50 percent have special needs. Out of the children with special needs who have selective eating, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are

most likely to have extremely limited food repertoires. The particular needs of these children are discussed in detail in chapter 6.