There are two central questions to help determine if you and your baby could use a visual menu to help you have a conversation about what’s for lunch.
If you answered yes to both, then your child is old enough to use a visual menu. Our two kids started using them at around ten or eleven months.
2. How long will my baby use the menu?
Every baby is different. Our kids needed it for about a year before they could talk well enough that we could understand them most of the time.
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3. How do I teach my baby to use the photo menu?
Just put it in front of him, and ask what he wants. Even if he can’t understand the exact words you use, he probably understands the tone. Once your baby can point, it’s a natural development for him to point at what he wants – a toy, you, an airplane in the sky, something he’d like to eat. When he points to a photo of a food on the menu, say stuff like, “You’d like some crackers? Sure! We can get you crackers! Here’s a cracker!” while you get him the food he pointed to. You could even show him the food in your hand next to the picture of it on the menu, and then give him the food. You’re the expert on your baby, and you know best how to communicate with and teach your child.
It helps to keep the menu where you can see it easily, such as hanging on the kitchen wall. If it’s stuffed in a drawer, you’re less likely to use it consistently, leaving your baby with no way to tell you what would really hit the spot for her today.
Hang the menu at your eye level, not your toddler’s. You don’t want her asking to eat for entertainment every time she passes through the kitchen.
It also helps if you have most of the food on the menu for the first few days you use it, so your baby will connect pointing to the food to being given the food. Once your baby understands how it works, saying, “Sorry, we’re out of pickles. What else would you like?” is no big deal.
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4. Won’t this make my child a picky eater, always getting what she wants?
No. This will allow your child to tell you what she wants, just like you are able to tell people what you want. It doesn’t mean your child will always get what she wants. Just as with all parents, you still decide which foods go on the photo menu, and you still decide which foods go on your child’s plate.
There are, for example, no sweets on the menus we made for our two kids when they were little. Babies don’t really need sugar to be added to anything. They love the flavors of minimally processed foods, like steamed broccoli, apples, and plain oatmeal. We found that our girls were happy to eat a wide variety of foods, as long as they saw us enjoying them, too.
You also decide when it’s appropriate to use your photo menu. When our family was sitting down to a dinner of spaghetti, salad, and asparagus, we didn’t ask our girls what they wanted for dinner, not even when they were one-year-olds with a photo menu. Mom isn’t a short-order cook, so at those times our girls ate what everyone ate. However, at snack time, or when everyone was just putting together whatever they wanted for lunch, I was happy to know if my baby wanted peas, black beans, or blueberries, because I had them all in my freezer.
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5. What happens when I run out of something on the menu?
You have two easy choices.
First, you can cover the photo of the item with a sticky note, so your baby can’t see it. Even if your baby knows what’s under the paper square, he’ll quickly learn he can’t have the covered item.
Second, you can tell your baby, “Sorry, no string cheese. We’re all out. All gone. Do you want American cheese instead?” It’s good for developing their language skills.
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6. Won’t my baby have a tantrum if we don’t have what he points to?
Maybe. Ours had lots of tantrums for all kinds of reasons, some that we could figure out, and some that remained mysteries to us.
We found that our kids seemed satisfied that they had been understood, and they were usually content to make do with their second or third choice. Think how you’d feel, if you wanted a grilled cheese sandwich, and you couldn’t communicate that fact to the people who were going to feed you. You’d work harder and harder to find a way to get them to understand “grilled cheese sandwich,” getting more and more worked up as they continued to say, “You want a banana? Here are some peas!” Once they GET that you want grilled cheese, you can move on to the next point of discussion. If they don’t have any cheese, then you go for PBJ instead, and as you eat it contentedly, you know that it wasn’t just a frustrating failure of communication that caused the switch. Plus, you’re eating your second choice, which hits the spot pretty well, too.
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7. Why are the pictures so big? Why can’t I put ten or twelve on a page?
If the photos are much smaller, your baby or toddler won’t be able to tell easily what is in the picture, especially when using the menu in the beginning.
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8. Why are the pictures so small? Why can’t I put one or two on a page?
If the photos are much bigger, the menu will require so many pages that your baby or toddler won’t be able to take them all in when choosing a food. Your child will need to be within arm’s reach of the menu in order to point at the chosen food, and it’ll probably be a pretty small arm, so your child will be pretty close to the menu.
With eight food photographs on a page, most menus are around four to six pages long, and those pages can be taped to a kitchen wall in a block or a line such that your toddler will be able to look through them at a glance, especially once the images become familiar.
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9. Why do you have photos of food that’s still frozen? I can see the ice on it.
Many babies we know, including our own, love frozen food such as peas, blueberries, and pinto beans. Kate often started crying if I walked to the microwave with her green beans from the freezer, because she didn’t want them thawed even slightly. I learned to just break them off the frozen block and put them in front of her. Maybe it’s because we live in Phoenix, and it’s 110 in the summer, or maybe it helped with their teething, but our girls love all kinds of frozen produce.
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