Rewards

Rewards can be used to encourage your child’s eating and positive mealtime behaviour (e.g., sitting at the table or trying a new food). The suitability of rewards will depend on your child’s preferences, but examples include toys, activities, descriptive praise, additional screen time (e.g., extra 10 minutes on I Pad) and certificates for effort and achievement. Rewards should reflect your child’s preferences, including sensory preferences. Praise and encouragement should also be a natural part of the mealtime routine.

Attention

The simplest and often the most valuable reward is caregiver attention. It is important that attention is given to the child only for behaviours you want to see more of (e.g., trying new foods, sitting in a seat). We know it can be really hard not to provide attention (comment or react) when your child is not eating or for any disruptive behaviours (e.g., spitting food, complaining), but if you react to these behaviours, they are likely to continue to occur (try to remain calm and focus on the mealtime expectation, e.g., have 5 mins left).

Parents often say:

• “It’s really difficult to stay calm when your child throws your food on the floor or just refuses it, when you’ve come home from work tired and spent time preparing a healthy meal for them.”
• “It’s hard to ignore bad behaviour from one child when the others are doing everything you expect at mealtimes, why should I let them get away with it? “Where did I go wrong?”

Once again, we understand it will be difficult to not react or provide attention to your child however, it is important, and it will reduce disruptive mealtime behaviours.

Minimising attention

In addition to providing praise and other rewards, it is important to minimise attention for undesirable mealtime behaviour. Try not to attend to behaviours that disrupt the mealtime routine or eating, if they don’t present harm to anyone (e.g., whining, dropping utensils). You can do this by briefly looking away and not saying anything, being “busy”, talking to other family members. As soon as they stop, you can go right back to rewarding a positive behaviour or general attention with conversation.

Examples of behaviours that you may not respond to include:

• Complaining about food/eating
• Not eating
• Efforts to draw your attention away from eating/meal

Provide breaks (final option)

When behaviour could be harmful to your child or others (e.g., throwing utensils or objects, pushing parent or sibling), allow a break from the table for a few minutes. If there is continued harmful behaviours and more support is required you may need to seek further support via your GP or other healthcare professional.

Incorporate rewards as a natural part of your child’s routine

It is recommended rewards are provided in a natural way, as part of your child’s routine, to make the process overall more ‘rewarding’. Many Autistic children have a strong preference for sameness, so it’s important these steps can be consistently recreated.

Incorporate rewards within visual supports

If you choose to incorporate rewards as part of your child’s routine, these should be included in their visual schedule or accompanied by appropriate visual cues (when needed) to communicate the process.

Embed flexibility, choice, and autonomy when using rewards

An individuals (including your child’s) capacity fluctuates depending on many different factors (psychological, medical, family stressors etc), so it is important that your child is set-up for success with flexible and realistic mealtime expectations. While this approach may take longer for your child’s eating to improve, it fosters a sense of autonomy for your child.

Tailor rewards to your child’s preferences

Rewards should be exciting, interesting and suit your child’s sensory needs to effectively encourage helpful mealtime behaviour. Think about things that your child likes to do or have. Children’s preferences change over time so a variety of rewards may be needed.

Provide attention and descriptive praise as encouragement

Descriptive praise describes praise that is behaviour specific (e.g., “you did a good job sitting on your chair”). This type of praise has been found to be more effective compared to general praise (e.g., “good job”). Attention and praise can be provided spontaneously and naturally and should also recognise your child’s effort.

Example of rewards:

Attention: songs, tickles, hugs, jokes

Toys: video, bubbles, activities, games, books

Preferred food: healthy foods ideal

Access to preferred food as a reward

Use two plates – one with new foods and one with preferred (reward) foods. New foods should be smaller bite sizes (pea-size), and preferred foods can be slightly larger. Provide the reward (a bite of preferred food) when your child accepts a new food. Do not provide a reward (preferred food) or attention if your child does not eat a new food. Your child will learn that little bites get access to really big bites.

• Ideally, your child’s preferred foods should be healthy!

Reward charts

Depending on your child’s understanding, sticker charts or other incentive systems can be a useful way of rewarding your child’s eating. Start by deciding on a reward with your child and what they can do to work toward this reward (e.g. the number of bites of a new food).

Each taste or bite of food can be checked off, and the meal ends after the target number of bites are tasted/consumed. Begin at a realistic goal for your child and increase the requirement daily depending on success. Once required bites are tasted/consumed, the meal ends ‘early’, engage in conversation until timer sounds (end of the meal). Follow with access to a desired item or food (e.g. dessert).

Here is a link to some token charts that you can download.

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