How Milton the Mealtime Companion Helps Picky Eaters

We love hearing feedback from parents who have used Milton the Mealtime Companion to help their children become less picky eaters and try new foods. Whether on social media or via our website contact form (don’t be shy!), it’s incredible to hear from people using the product that we spent the better part of a year developing.

As dads ourselves, we also really enjoy getting questions from fellow parents about Milton. One of the more common questions is how and why Milton works as a solution for picky eaters.

To begin with, it’s important to point out that Milton is very different from other products available to help your toddler become a courageous and less picky eater. Milton helps children try new foods and develop other important skills such as using utensils and even teeth brushing by utilizing social modeling. While it may sound fancy, it’s something parents instinctively do all the time. “Watch mommy take a bite of celery” or “Look at how daddy takes small bites” are both examples of how you have probably used social modeling with your own child.

Milton takes this principle and puts it in a form factor that is both fun and easy for the child. As your child “becomes friends” with Milton, they get excited to try new foods with him or show Milton how they use their spoon. The uses for how you can use Milton to encourage and model positive behaviors to your child are almost endless.

As we developed Milton, we recognized that it wasn’t enough to just give parents a tool that they could use to help develop their children into courageous eaters. There also needed to be strategies and content that was included with Milton to help parents get the most out of the product. That is exactly why we partnered with speech language pathologist and feeding specialist Catherine Callahan to develop the methods and strategies included in the Meet Milton’s children’s book. In addition to being a fun story about Milton’s adventure to your child’s home, Meet Milton doubles as an instruction manual for parents. Catherine is also featured in the instructional videos on our Expert Tips page, where we are continually adding new informative videos.

All of this is not to say that there are aren’t other products available that can help feeding challenges. There are some very well designed and fun utensils on the market which can help your child sample new tastes and textures, without necessarily having to eat the new food at first. As an example, we love the NumNum GOOtensil as a way to become familiar with using utensils and explore different textures. There is also some great content and feeding advice available to parents in the form of books, videos and online resources. Milton can work hand in hand with the information from these products.

What really sets Milton the Mealtime Companion apart, is that it is the one of the only physical products designed specifically for picky eaters. Having an educational tool like Milton to use during mealtime (or snack time) helps parents to recall and use all of the advice that they’ve come across, even if it’s from somewhere other than our book or videos.

In some upcoming blog posts, we will be sharing some discussions with pediatric feeding specialists. We’ll learn about how they use Milton in their practice as well ask them for some feeding ideas that you can use at your own dinner table.

Thanks for reading and happy eating!

-Dan and Justin