Fussy Eating Awareness Week has been created by Sarah Almond Bushell – an award-winning Registered Dietitian, ex NHS Consultant child nutritionist of 22 years and founder of The Children’s Nutritionist who is working to reduce the stress around mealtimes for parents of fussy eaters.

Driven by her own story of struggling to feed her son, despite her many years of clinical experience, Sarah is on a mission to open up more conversations around solutions to help overcome stressful mealtimes with fussy eaters, in a bid to support the thousands of families who suffer ongoing stress from this problem.

As a frustrated healthcare professional and parent, Sarah sought out the best advice from across the globe to help her understand what was at play with her son’s fussy eating. Learning from the most highly qualified specialists in America, who Sarah then trained with she has delved into the psychology of child development and eating psychology and feeding therapy to help initiate breakthroughs, both in her own situation and with her clients.

Sarah, who also consults for brands such as Annabel Karmel, Hovis, Tommee Tippee, and Aptamil, is now on a mission to spread this knowledge, which is still largely untapped,  much more widely, to bring tools and techniques to the table to help reduce mealtime stress.

She is also passionate about helping to cut the ties of generational eating habits, having seen that often the children’s behaviour is fuelled by our own ingrained unconcsious beliefs and habits from our childhoods around what mealtimes should look like.

She believes that sayings like – ‘if you don’t clear your plate there’ll be no pudding’ and ‘if you don’t eat your tea you’ll be having it for breakfast’ and ‘we’re not leaving the table until you’ve eaten that broccoli’ are all stress evoking, creating dangerous negative emotions around food and potentially fuelling later in life mental health challenges around food and weight management.

Instead Sarah is on a mission to share with us what science shows is the best way to parent around food and she hopes this will go some way to combat the misinformation that exists around how to deal with fussy eating and the desperation tactics that some parents resort to.

‘Making back up meals, bribing them to eat a vegetable, and tricking them with hidden ingredients only further fuels the fire and these approaches can cause further problems for the children as they grow up, and their relationship with food into adulthood can be affected’

During Fussy Eating Awareness Week Sarah will be hosting a 5 day challenge, sharing a range of tools and techniques she uses, which are scientifically proven to support the development of more positive food habits for fussy eaters and their families, with easy step by step activities and advice.

She is also using this week as an opportunity to reach out to the professionals who parents turn to for help – the frontline health professionals who are not specifically trained in this area, yet are expected to support parents who are struggling. She is working to share her specialist knowledge with them too so that they can create a positive ripple effect with families in their communities.