Melanie Potock

From an expert feeding therapist, here’s the authoritative guide on everything you need to know about responsive feeding.

Parents are tired of struggling with their child at mealtimes. It’s a familiar scene: Parent offers a spoon, loaded with nutritious food; Baby turns their head away and starts crying. Enter responsive feeding. Recommended by the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Academy of American Pediatrics, and UNICEF, responsive feeding is learning how to read your baby’s communication cues and your toddler’s often-very-strong preferences (hello two-year-olds!) rather than feeding them a predetermined amount.

Think of responsive feeding as a dance. For parents, it’s about engaging your baby, anticipating their moves, and taking turns to lead the choreography. The parent responds to baby’s communication and baby responds to parent. Because the parent is in-tune and present in the moment, they will connect and flow, making for a joyful experience!

Using evidence-based strategies, feeding therapist and speech-language pathologist Melanie Potock explains how to read your child’s cues to ensure happy mealtimes with happy kids. This book is designed to answer the most common questions about feeding babies and toddlers up to age three. It also debunks myths while offering practical tips on making mealtimes joyful and less stressful. It teaches a no-nonsense, straightforward approach to responsive feeding that’s focused on nurturing trust and communication between parent and child.

The Story of How Kids Become Adventurous Eaters!

You are Not an Otter takes children on a food adventure, exploring all the ways that animals eat! Otters carry a favorite rock under their arms for cracking open clams, flamingos dip and drizzle water as they stand on one foot, and gorillas travel in troops to dine together in the jungle.

Parents will benefit from the expert tips on how to encourage children to try new foods, especially picky eaters, plus learn the importance of pretend play in early childhood development. Professional tips from pediatric feeding expert Melanie Potock, MA, CCC-SLP include how to:

• Use pretend-play to encourage kids to try new foods
• Teach kids to be ok if something doesn’t taste good, at first!
• Spark conversations about healthy eating
• Help picky eaters try new foods
• Bring happy kids to the table hungry and ready to try new foods
• Encourage kids to eat mindfully

Kids can learn to eat all sorts of vegetables—and have fun in the process.

Melanie has developed an easy, effective system to introduce children to vegetables as they embark on a lifetime of healthy eating. Adventures in Veggieland: Help Your Kids Learn to Love Vegetables with 100 Easy Activities and Recipes features a year’s worth of family-friendly recipes along with practical, proven strategies for helping kids learn to become more adventurous eaters over time. Parents will learn how to introduce a new vegetable every week, plus creative and engaging ways to expose their kids to new foods. The book features 20 vegetables, organized by season, each with activities and recipes highlighting the program’s three phases to vegetable love: expose, explore, expand. Here a few examples of the creative fun that leads to yum! The turnip chapter includes:

• Expose Kids to Turnips with Mr. Turnip Head
• Explore Mashed Turnips with Bacon and Chives
• Expand with a Sweet Treat: Monogrammed Mini Turnip Pies.

The kids are involved in every part of the activity process from washing the vegetable to eating delicious food they helped make. Using the “3 Easy E’s,” Coach Mel has created activities that will help children to become food explorers, not picky eaters!

Now updated in a second edition – The award-winning parenting book on feeding babies, toddlers & big kids too!

Pediatrician Nimali Fernando and feeding therapist Melanie Potock (aka Dr. Yum and Coach Mel) know the importance of giving your child the right start on their food journey—for good health, motor skills, and even cognitive and emotional development. In this updated, second edition of Raising a Healthy, Happy Eater, they explain how to expand your family’s food horizons, avoid the picky eater trap, identify special feeding needs, and put joy back into mealtimes, with

• the latest research and advice tailored to every stage from newborn through school-age
• new guidance on pacifiers, thumb-sucking, feeding concerns, and barriers to eating well
• helpful insights on the sensory system, difficult mealtime behaviors, and everything from baby-led weaning to sippy cups
• and seven “passport stamps” for modern parenting: joyful, compassionate, brave, patient, consistent, proactive, and mindful.

Raising a Healthy, Happy Eater shows the way to lead your child on the path to adventurous eating. Grab your passport and go!