Melanie Potock

🥕 Got a picky eater? Don’t underestimate what ONE spoonful can do.

🎃Adding a little pumpkin, squash or sweet potato puree to a familiar food like mac & cheese isn’t just an easy nutrition boost. It’s also a simple way to help your child experience a slightly different flavor in a food they already know.
👋🏼 Hi, I’m Melanie, pediatric feeding therapist & author of Adventures in Veggieland, and I love using small, manageable changes to help kids gradually become more comfortable with variety.
🧡 Canned purees are inexpensive, easy to keep in the pantry & incredibly versatile. Start with just a spoonful in:
✨ Mac & cheese
✨ Pasta sauce
✨ Soups & stews
✨ Chili
✨ Pizza sauce
✨ Pancakes & waffles
✨ Muffins
✨ Sandwich spreads, like cream cheese
And here’s the picky-eating piece I especially love:
👉🏼 You’re gently changing the flavor profile of a familiar food without making it completely unfamiliar.

That tiny change matters - and all three of these purées are pretty equal in terms of nutrition ! Over time, experiencing small differences in flavor, texture & appearance can help kids learn that familiar foods don’t have to be exactly the same every single time.

And no, the goal isn’t to sneak vegetables past your child. When appropriate, let them see what you’re adding & invite them to help stir it in. We’re building familiarity, not fooling them.

❓Would your child notice one spoonful in their mac & cheese? Depends how picky is picky, right? So much to unpack here – let’s talk about it in the comments!

Melanie ❤️

Melanie Potock, picky eating, picky eater, feeding therapy, mac and cheese, vegetables for kids, veggie puree, pumpkin puree, sweet potato, squash, food variety, feeding kids, toddler meals

If your picky eater’s progress feels painfully slow…Remember this:
📚 Just like learning to read, learning to eat is a developmental process.
Children build reading skills one step at a time. They listen to stories. They learn sounds. They recognize letters. They put those letters together…and eventually, they read.

Eating develops through little steps too.
🥕Looking at a new food
🥕Tolerating it nearby
🥕Helping prepare it
🥕Touching it
🥕Smelling it
🥕Learning what to expect from it
🥕And eventually, when they’re ready, tasting and eating it

Not every step ends with a bite. But those steps can still be part of learning.
As a pediatric feeding therapist, I want parents to know that we’re not just focused on what a child eats at one meal. We’re helping them develop the skills, confidence & curiosity they need to eat enough to grow and thrive over time.

❤️Growth matters. And so does a healthy relationship with food.
So if dinner tonight looks a whole lot like dinner last night, that’s okay.
Keep creating opportunities to learn. Keep the joy at the table. Keep taking those little steps.
They add up. 💕
Melanie ❤️

📖My co-author Raising a Healthy Happy Eater, Dr. Yum, shared the reading analogy with me. Want a copy of our book? Just comment BOOKS and I’ll send you all the links, currently on sale!

Melanie Potock, picky eating, picky eaters, feeding development, pediatric feeding therapy, feeding skills, toddler meals, mealtime, healthy relationship with food

🐑If you don’t like trekking by sheep, old English manors, ancient churches, babbling brooks and English rose gardens…probably you should stay home.😉 The Cotswolds - where every cottage has a name.🏡

❤️Drop your questions in the comments! I’d love to tell you how to visit The Cotswolds!

Melanie 🥰

A play kitchen at 11 months? Absolutely. 🍳

And two years later, that same kitchen can inspire a whole new level of
play. I’d buy every little kid a play kitchen, if I could!

As a speech, language & feeding therapist, play kitchens are one of my
FAVORITE toys because they grow right along with your child.

They can support:
🍓 language & new vocabulary
🥄 pretend & imaginative play
👩‍🍳 imitation & social skills
🥕 early exposure to food concepts
💬 back-and-forth communication

The play changes as your child develops, and that’s exactly what makes a
great play kitchen worth having for years.

Want to see my favorites?

Comment KITCHEN and I’ll send you my favorite play kitchens!

Melanie ❤️

Melanie Potock, play kitchen, language development, speech
therapy, feeding therapy, pretend play, toddler activities, baby
development, food play

If you’ve ever wondered whether it’s okay to ask a therapist, “What makes you different?” — please ask.

This story isn’t really about me.
It’s about a dad who had watched his daughter go to feeding therapy twice a week for an entire year. She had received early intervention services, too. She had recently been diagnosed with autism.
And still, she still barely ate any new foods.

So when I showed up at their home as yet another feeding therapist, he didn’t need to make me feel comfortable.
He needed to know:
❤️ Do you understand what we’ve already been through?
❤️ Have you really listened to what has and hasn’t worked?
❤️ Do you understand MY child, not just her diagnosis?
❤️ What will you be looking at that perhaps hasn’t been considered before?
❤️ What are we going to do differently this time?
👉🏻👉🏻And maybe most importantly…
Why should I ask my child and my family to invest our time, energy, money and trust in therapy again?

Parents, you have every right to ask those questions.
✔️Ask about the therapist’s experience.
✔️Ask how they approach children like yours.
✔️Ask what they’ll do if the first approach isn’t working.
✔️Ask how they’ll include YOU in understanding the why behind your child’s feeding challenges.
✔️And ask, “What makes you different?”
A good professional shouldn’t be offended by thoughtful questions. We should understand what’s underneath them.

Because sometimes “What makes you different?” really means:
“We’ve tried so hard. Please give me a reason to hope this might actually help my child.”

That’s a question worth listening to.
❤️Melanie

Melanie Potock, feeding therapy, feeding therapist, pediatric feeding disorder, picky eating, autism and feeding, feeding challenges, parent advocacy, responsive feeding

🚜 Before I ask a child to taste any changes to their safe food, I want them to feel comfortable with the change FIRST.

His safe food is mac & cheese.
I added a few peas, handed him 3 construction vehicles + big kid-safe kitchen tongs, and let him PLAY.
❌No expectation that he would eat the peas.
❌No expectation that he would even eat the mac & cheese.
But then… he decided to take a bite. 💛

A pea came up with the tongs, so he carefully removed it with his fingers and happily kept eating.
And THAT interaction matters.
🫛 He saw the pea mixed into a familiar food.
🫛 He moved it around.
🫛 He scooped it up.
🫛 He touched it.
🫛 He problem-solved what to do with it.
🫛 And most importantly, he stayed comfortable with his mac & cheese.
For many kids, I’ll introduce a tiny change like this through PLAY before I ever expect them to tolerate that new combination on their plate, and certainly before expecting them to eat it.

Food exploration can happen long before tasting. ❤️As a pediatric feeding therapist, I’m looking for all those little interactions that help a child become more comfortable around a learning food.

📌 Save this for the next time you’re thinking about helping your child branch out from a favorite food.

🥰Melanie

Melanie Potock, picky eating, safe foods, food play, feeding therapy, food exploration, learning foods, picky eater tips, sensory food play

🍿Why is popcorn dangerous?
A young child has a much smaller airway, and their chewing skills are still developing. Popcorn is light, irregularly shaped and easily inhaled into the airway.

And that’s the piece I really want parents & grandparents to understand:
👀 Watching closely cannot prevent a piece of popcorn from entering a child’s airway.🔪Think of it like handing a toddler a sharp chef’s knife.
Of course we eventually teach children knife skills. But we don’t hand a 2-year-old a sharp knife and say, “It’s okay. I taught them how to use it & I’m supervising.” We wait until their physical and cognitive DEVELOPMENT matches the risk. The same principle applies here.

⚠️And yes, people can choke on virtually any food. That doesn’t mean all foods carry the same choking risk for young children.
💕This isn’t about judging parents or grandparents. It’s about sharing information that could prevent a tragedy.
🍿Popcorn can wait.

✈️Please SHARE this one with the grandparents, babysitters, teachers & anyone else who feeds your little one.

❤️Melanie
Melanie Potock - toddler choking safety, popcorn choking hazard, choking prevention, food safety for toddlers, pediatric feeding, toddler feeding safety, aspiration, child safety

🍦 She had no idea what that ice cream emoji meant to me.💔That morning, while I was in Canada teaching, I learned that my dad had passed away.
I grabbed the first flight I could get home, but the plane never took off because of mechanical problems. I was teary, frustrated, grieving, and desperate to get home to my family.

Eventually, I got a seat on another flight.
I pulled my baseball cap down over my eyes, hoping to disappear for a little while.

And then I heard:
“Excuse me… aren’t you Melanie Potock? You helped my son learn to eat.”
I’ll admit it. In that moment, I didn’t want to hear a feeding story.
But she didn’t know what had happened that morning.
So I listened.
And as she told me about her son and his feeding journey, something shifted in me.
It felt like my dad was saying:
💪🏻”Chin up. People are depending on you.”

By the time we landed, I felt different.
I asked this lovely mom if I could share our encounter. She graciously said yes, so I asked her one more question:
“What emoji should we use?”
“Ice cream. 🍦”
Goosebumps. We had not talked about ice cream at all.She had no idea.

My dad LOVED ice cream. His family owned an ice cream shop. To this day, our family still has the original sign from that shop, some of the old five-cent sticks used to make ice pops, and even the original ice cream molds.

Of all the emojis she could have chosen…
🍦That wasn’t just an emoji to me.
I knew that was my dad talking.

Sometimes the message you need finds you in the most unexpected place, from someone who has absolutely no idea how much you needed to hear it.
And to the mom who sat beside me that day, thank you.

Melanie ❤️

Melanie Potock, pediatric feeding therapist, feeding therapy, feeding journey, picky eating, family, grief, gratitude

Every year, August slips away…

And I’m still convinced @rorymcilroy waved at me 😉

✨Here’s to another summer with beautiful memories…

❤️Melanie