When a family comes to see me with concerns about their kids’ eating, I’ll ask them to send me a 5-10 minute video of a mealtime. This helps me get a better idea of what’s going down at dinnertime. These videos can reveal a lot about what’s influencing a kiddo’s struggles with eating. I can tell if the seating isn’t quite right, if they’re coming to the table dysregulated, if portions are unreasonable or overwhelming, or if a kid doesn’t have enough autonomy. But the biggest thing I’m looking for in these videos is sources of pressureto eat. My brain is wired to look out for things that might have a detrimental impact on the feeding relationship, and it’s hard to shut this off, even when it’s a fictional mealtime (a freaky occupational hazard I didn't anticipate when I was getting into this field).
And it’s this responsive feeding lens I was holding while watching the Pavlova episode of Bluey season 3. At the time I thought ‘oh for fuck sake’ and made a note to write about it at some point.
But my FFS turned into WTF when I started seeing feeding specialists hold this episode up as being a good example of how to support kids with picky/fussy/selective eating. Uhhhh, what?
I’m going to summarise the episode for you, then talk you through it with that responsive feeding lens, and see if you see what I do
If you haven’t seen ‘Pavlova’ then check out this clip from the Bluey YouTube channel.
The episode starts out with Chilli and Bandit playing a game of chess on the deck, while Bluey is sat next to them munching on a bowl of edamame beans. Bingo jumps up on the bench next to them, tail wagging, clearly pumped, and asks: ‘Mum, can I have some of the Pavlova that’s in the fridge?’
Chilli doesn’t even take a beat to consider her request before grumbling out a ‘No’.
‘Awww but I’m hungry’ continues Bingo.
‘Well, then have some edamame beans’ replies Chilli, as though that was a reasonable substitute for Pavlova.
‘Eda-whaty-what?’ asks a confused Bingo.
‘Edamame beans’ Chilli clarifies.
Bluey chimes in: ‘They’re from the sushi train. Pop! They’re yummy’.
‘No thanks. I don’t want an edamawee bean’. This child knows her own mind.
‘You don’t even want to try it?’. Chilli is bordering on pleading now.
‘Uh-uh!’. Bingo is quite sure tyvm.
‘Well then you can’t be hungry’ says Chilli, gaslighting her youngest pup.
After Chilli cake-blocks Bingo’s request for pavlova, Bluey asks Bingo to come and play ‘café’ with her - a ruse to get the goods. They set up the counter, complete with a red-checkered tablecloth and a menu with a single item: pavlova. But there’s a problem. The fridge is blocked by Bandit, who has styled himself as a French chef who doesn’t speak any English. Bluey instructs the new ‘chef’ to get the customer a piece of pavlova. He replies in the affirmative ‘bonjour!’, and proceeds to dole up a dish of, you guessed it, edamame beans.
‘Hey, this isn’t pavlova’ a disgruntled Bingo protests. To which he replies nonsense French like ‘Je suis le chien’ and ‘Où est la discothèque?’.
After a back-and-forth between Bluey and Bandit, where she repeatedly points to the pavlova, he finally concedes and brings Bingo a crumb of pavlova, barely perceptible to the naked eye. Bluey returns the plate and gestures with her hands to get a piece that’s ‘THIS BIG’.
Bingo and her crumb of pavlova. Womp.
When Bandit finally produces a piece of cake that’s acceptable to Bingo, he douses it in ketchup – presumably the sugar-free kind from the ‘Show and Tell’ episode.
Bluey, getting fed up with her dad’s charade, fires Le Chef and turns to a forlorn looking Bingo. ‘He was trying to stop you from eating pavlova’ says an indignant Bluey. Even fictional kids know when adults are full of shit.
While Bluey sorts her sister a piece of pavlova, Chef Bandit is busy setting up his own cafe on the kitchen table - an edamame cafe - quelle surprise!
Bandit gives it the hard sell to try and make it more appealing to Bingo. And to be fair, she wants to help him pop the beans out of the pod and get the dish ready.
‘Umm it’s just that I really think I want pavlova’, Bingo is sensing how desperately her dad wants her to eat the damn edamame, and seems to feel bad about disappointing him. Bandit looks dejected, at which point bingo concedes ‘You can make me some endamommy beans if you want’.
‘Tres Milan!’ rejoiced Bandit.
‘But I get to choose if I eat them or the pavlova’ asserts Bingo. ‘It’s just that I don’t like it when you make me eat something’. YES. TELL ‘EM GIRL!!
Bluey declares it a cafe competition and Bluey and Bandit go about refining their respective dishes, adorning them with sprinkles and flaky salt respectively.
After a moment of contemplation, Bingo has made her decision. ‘Pavlova’
I mean, no duh the kid picks the pavlova.
Alright, now let me talk you through some of the parts that feel icky to me.
My problem is not that Chilli and Bandit are saying no to the pavlova, rather it’s how. There doesn’t seem to be a good reason for denying Bingo’s request. Like, ‘we’re having people over for dinner so we need to make sure there’s enough for everyone’. They also don’t even offer her any explanation like ‘we’re just about to have dinner, and we can have some pavlova then’. It’s just a flat no.
We’ve talked a lot about holding boundaries with sweet food in the sugar series I did last year, so I’m not going to say much more on that. Check that series out here, here, and here:
Now, some Division of Responsibility purists might argue that it’s the parents’ responsibility to decide ‘what’ is offered. If Bingo is deciding the ‘what’, doesn’t that violate the principles of DoR? Technically, yes. However, we’re not DoR purists here. And secondly, if we’re allowing foods into the house, in this case pavlova, and then telling our kids they can’t have it, what message does this send?
Chilli and Bandit are not playing the long-game; they’re inadvertently making a BFD about pavlova. When we put sweets, desserts, pizza, or crisps up on a pedestal, we create a forbidden fruit effect. We send the signal that there’s something special about those foods. Something enticing. As well as making the sweet foods more exciting than they already are, by contrast, they make foods like edamame seem like a chore (especially if we say you have to eat the gross edamame to get the delicious pavlova reward, which I know isn’t what happened here, but as an example).
There’s something else here too. Chilli and Bandit are telling Bingo that the pavlova is rationed. It needs to be limited and controlled by adults, sending the message to kids that they can’t trust themselves around certain foods. If kids experience this often enough, they will start to internalise it and learn not to trust themselves. Even Ellyn Satter concedes that sometimes kids need unlimited access to a food to learn what too much feels like for them, rather than it being dictated for them.
But the biggest thing for me in this episode is the pressure to eat disguised as play.
Right from the top, we see that there’s a clear adult agenda: Chilli and Bandit want Bingo to eat the edamame beans. But simultaneously do not want her to eat the Pavlova. Wherever there’s a strong adult agenda, we can be pretty certain that pressure to eat will follow. When adults are playing food-related games with kids, it doesn’t matter how fun or funny the adult thinks they’re being. What is important is how the kid perceives it. In Pavlova, Bingo knows that her dad is trying to make her eat something she doesn’t want to, and so even super fun cafe games will be perceived as pressure. Even as the overall tone of the cafe game is silly and fun, Bingo sees her dad’s disappointment when she doesn’t want to try the edamame. We as adults need to decide what is more important: teaching our child to eat to please other people? Or eating something because they’re genuinely curious about it and it brings them pleasure?
Pressuring kids to eat is appealing because it can produce a ‘win’ in the short-term. A few edamame beans. An extra piece of chicken. They might discover that they actually do like something they refused to try.
But the short-term ‘benefits’ of pressuring our kids to eat are far outweighed by the costs.
Classic experiments have taught us that pressure doesn't actually help kids eat more, nor does it help them learn to like those foods. In the paper ‘Finish Your Soup’ published in the journal Appetite, Leann Birch’s research team studied a small group of kids aged 3-5 years old. They wanted to know what the effect of pressure would be on a child’s intake, and liking of a vegetable-based soup. To familiarise the children with soup (so that unfamiliarity wasn’t a factor in their findings), they offered the kids a bowl of tomato soup for two days at lunchtime as an ‘appetiser’. They then split the kids into two groups: one who received pressure to eat, and one who didn’t. They were then given either corn or carrot soup over a few more days, during which time, the pressure group were told once a minute (for a total of four times) to ‘finish your soup’. The researchers made a point to say this completely neutrally to mimic very mild pressure. At the end of each appetiser, leftover soup was measured so that the researchers knew how much had been eaten.
Now while both groups ate more soup over the course of the experiment (presumably because they were more familiar with it), the pressure group ate significantly less soup than the non-pressured group. Even a seemingly gentle nudge to ‘finish your soup’ was enough to make kids eat less of the soup compared to kids who were just told to eat as much or as little as they wanted.
I often see this study getting quoted in relation to dessert; it has nothing to do with dessert. BUT what is interesting about the study, is that even with that relatively small degree of pressure, the kids started trash talking the soup. Ok, in fairness, both groups trash talked the soup. But the extent of the trash talking (‘yuck’, ‘I don’t like it’ etc) was much higher in the pressure group (70% compared to 40% in the non-pressure group). Even relatively low pressure makes kids push back.
In another set of classic experiments by Birch’s group, preschoolers were given a fruit-flavoured kefir drink and offered a reward for drinking it: either verbal praise (‘Good job’, ‘That’s very good, you drank it all the way down’), or a token to watch a kids’ movie. Regardless of the type of reward, kids drank less of the milk drink over the month-long experiment when there was an external motivator. Kids in the control group, where they didn’t receive a ‘reward’ for drinking, drank more of the milk drink, both over time as they became more familiar with it, and than the control group. Just letting kids get on with it is more effective than motivating them with praise and rewards.
Look, both of these studies were really short-term, using small samples, and using young children as the participants. The research in this area is messy, and different children will respond to pressure in different ways depending on their temperament, neurotype, trauma history (i.e. food scarcity, neglect, abuse), anxiety around demands, developmental stage, and more. But I think it’s safe to say that, on the whole, pressure backfires. It can cause more mealtime battles as children (understandably) try to exert control over their bodies. It can lead to anxiety around coming to the table, which kills appetite. And while it might lead to a few extra bites in the moment, in the long-term it undermines kids having a positive relationship with that food, leading them to create negative associations and dislike that food in the long-term.
In a study of college-aged students called ‘You Will Eat All of That’, participants were asked about whether or not they were coerced into eating something they didn’t want as a child. 70% of participants reported that they could identify at least one experience where they were forced to eat something against their will - typically a fruit, vegetable, meat, or fish. The participants, who hadn’t identified as ‘picky eaters’ as kids, were more likely to identify as ‘picky’ adults if they’d had one of these forced eating experiences. The researchers tried to pinpoint what exactly was aversive about these experiences and found that the child was required to eat an unfamiliar or disliked food, and when they refused, the conflict escalated to the point where various coercion techniques were used including bribes, threats, ridicule, and guilt. When researchers asked participants to rate the food they were forced to eat as kids, the young adults reported that they by and large didn’t like or eat that food now. Pressuring kids to eat foods doesn’t foster a positive relationship with those foods in the long-run.
In ‘Pavlova’, the overall framing of the episode was light-hearted and fun, turning trying new food into a game (which is why I think so many people hold it up as a good example of helping kids learn to enjoy a wider variety of foods). And on the surface, this feels very different to forcing a kid to stay at the table for hours staring at a cold plate of food, or worse, physically restraining them and forcing food into their mouths. But recall that Bandit did guilt Bingo. Both Bluey and Bingo were aware that Bandit was trying to sabotage their efforts to get a piece of pavlova, and push her towards the edamame. All of this is pressure, which, at best, doesn't work. And at worst, can lead to kids having a negative relationship to that food.
I’m not saying not to play cafes with our kids, or come up with other creative ways to explore food with them. What I am saying is that we need to check in with our agendas - are we trying to *get* a kid to eat something in particular? Or are we invested in their games, what they find fun, and what they want to learn about food?
There’s a movement at the end of the episode, when Bluey, Bandit, and Chilli have all left the room, and Bingo notices a single edamame bean on the plate. She picks it up, puts it in her mouth, and decides that she does, in fact, like it. But it takes a moment when nobody is looking, where there’s no pressure or expectation, before Bingo even samples it. It makes me wonder about the lengths that adults go to to try and *get* kids to eat in a particular way: the hiding veg in foods where they wouldn’t otherwise be, turning veg into monsters that need to be destroyed, the ‘Treat Saturdays’, the ‘can you chomp this like a dinosaur’ games, the sticker charts, the bribing, cajoling, begging, rewarding, pleading and praising. How did feeding kids get so convoluted? And what would it be like if we took the pressure off our kids, and ourselves?
What would I have done in this situation? And why pavlova is actually great for supporting ‘picky’ eaters.
So, I’ve told you what I thought this episode got wrong, but what would I have done differently as a parent if my kid wanted a piece of pavlova, while also supporting them to be curious about the edamame beans?
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