SDN Children’s Services has written SDN Beranga Mealtimes: cooking for and sharing meals with your child, a free family cookbook designed to assist families who have children with autism. The book is also a useful resource for families with children who have affected food allergies or are fussy eaters.

Mealtimes combines a range of budget-conscious, allergen-free recipes with strategies for minimising the stress often associated with mealtimes and outlines the importance of routine when developing a positive relationship between children and the food they are eating.

Strategies outlined in Mealtimes include: praising a child for any attempts to explore new food, such as touching it, smelling, tasting, licking and of course eating it, and if a child is focussed on eating only one food, keeping that food as a constant and varying the foods served with it.

The Mealtimes cookbook combines the knowledge and expertise of the SDN Beranga team, which includes educators, occupational therapists, speech therapists, psychologists, social workers and cook, Agatha Tobia Nicol.

Flip through the cookbook below, or download it here.