Eating out with very young children can be a frantic rather than fun experience. Particularly if your child gets easily overwhelmed or over-excited. Listen in as four experienced therapists chat about how to make taking your toddler to a cafe or restaurant be less stressful and more enjoyable for the whole family. Get tips on how to help your child be prepared for the experience. Learn how a stomping walk beforehand can help your child sit for longer later. What should you look for when choosing a child-friendly restaurant - and we don’t just mean the menu. This episode of Sensory Chat is aimed at parents but will also be useful for teachers and professionals. TRANSCRIPT Lelanie 00:31 Hello, welcome to Sensory Chat. My name is Lelanie. I'm an Occupational Therapist and an Advanced Practitioner in Sensory Integration. I'm calling in from Germany. Amy 00:43 Hi, I'm Amy. I'm a speech and language therapist and also an Advanced Practitioner in Sensory Integration and I'm calling in from Salisbury in Southwest England. Angela 00:54 Hi everyone, my name is Angela. I am an Occupational Therapist and an Advanced Sensory Integration Practitioner, and I'm calling from Melbourne, Australia. Emma 01:06 And good morning from me, I'm Emma Snowdon and I am a Physiotherapist and I'm also an Advanced Sensory Integration Practitioner. And I'm calling in from Warwickshire. Lelanie 01:19 In today's podcast, we're going to be talking about eating out. In an earlier podcast, at the side, we were talking about difficulties from a sensory perspective, that you might see with toddlers eating and feeding at home. This podcast is for parents, but would also be useful for teachers and healthcare professionals. Amy 01:44 Right, so we were thinking really about what happens when you're going out with your little one to a restaurant, I guess that could be like a fast food restaurant, like a pizza place or a burger joint, or it could be like a, sort of a more formal restaurant, particularly if you're thinking about a restaurant where you're going out for a special occasion. So there's quite a lot of excitement and up involved in going into the restaurant. So I'm just wondering, from each of your perspectives, if parents are thinking about, maybe even dreading going to a restaurant with their little one, from a sensory perspective, what kinds of things should they just have in the back of their mind that they should be thinking about? Angela, would you like to kick us off? Angela 02:34 So, I think when we're thinking about taking our little ones to a place to eat, you know, it's all going to be very new. You know, this may be the very first time they've ever been to a place like pizza hut, and so I think if parents can begin to kind of have some conversations around, you know, what the place might look like, what sorts of things they might see in there, you know, what are the people, you know, that there'll be waiters and waitresses, and so it's about preparation. Really. It's about helping our little ones to begin to, understand what to expect. So that would be a good kind of starting point to start kind of talking about it, you know, with their child. Amy 03:24 Yeah, I agree. I think that predictability is very helpful and definitely, you might be thinking about kind of how you can bring in some of the aspects into play. So for example, the idea of having to choose food off a menu is not, I mean, in my home, maybe it's different than your home, but seldom do we have menu choices in my home. So that whole idea of actually there being a choice of foods, that's a new concept, that's a new thing, but that's something that's very easy to play when you're playing, you know, games, games with your child. Emma, what do you think? Emma 04:01 Yeah, I think the thing is the same meetings to think about isn't there, because like you say, it's a whole new experience. And I suppose specifically thinking about, the environment as well. I think we've got to consider all of those extra sensory things that we wouldn't necessarily have at home. So, you know, the noise, that's going to be very different in different places, isn't it. You know, in terms of how echoey it is and how many people are there, but there's other sensory challenges, including the smells, you know, having to sit still, thinking about sitting still, waiting, all those things that can be a real challenge for a two year old in general, but particularly for a two year old with sensory challenges, that could be difficult. So yeah, there's many things, is there an element we want to particularly discuss here? Amy 04:57 I'd love to pick up on that idea of waiting, so I know that. Yeah. So as Ayre's Sensory Integration Practitioners, you know, we think a lot, we talk a lot about the development of executive functions. So those are those higher level skills. And one of those is being able to sort of, inhibit impulses and to kind of wait and to attend those kinds of things. ...
