Supporting children with feeding difficulties to thrive

Supporting children with feeding difficulties to thrive

Description

7 year old boy cooking in the kitchen. Handwriting says "The kitchen is my favourite place in the house"

Food nourishes not only our bodies, but our spirits. The way we share food creates connections and bonds. For children, it underpins emotional development. But what does this mean for children with medical conditions who need to be fed with a tube? What does it mean to live well?

That was the central question for the Sydney-based SUCCEED Child Feeding Alliance project. SUCCEED is a collaboration between researchers, clinicians, families and artists. For this living well project, the team included seven-year-old Henry Gowans and his mum Jess, researcher Nick Hopwood, photographer Kate Disher-Quill and paediatrician Chris Elliot.

Henry has been tube-fed since birth, and like many parents, his mum Jess was tired of how children who tube-feed were portrayed as sick and fragile. Such stereotypes create stigma and social barriers, and do not reflect the lived experiences of children and their families.

The project was designed to challenge those perceptions, and centred on the core ideas that we feed our children with our hearts, not spoons or tubes, and that while a tube may deliver essential nutrition and fill the stomach, it is practices of cooking and eating together that fill our hearts. Love, joy and connection through food are just as important and possible for children who tube-feed as for those who eat orally. The team tackled the idea of how we collectively make change to create a world where children like Henry can thrive just as much as their peers.

Spoiler alert: Henry’s favourite place is the kitchen, and when he grows up, he wants to be a chef. If his chocolate pudding recipe is anything to go by, he’s off to a great start.

Book chapter

This project is described in more detail in Chapter 11, titled “The Kitchen is My Favrote Place in the House”: A World Worth Living in for Children with Feeding Difficulties and Their Families, in the book called Living Well in a World Worth Living in for All, Volume 1: Current Practices of Social Justice, Sustainability and Wellbeing.

The authors of this chapter are:

  • Nick Hopwood (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia)
  • Kate Disher-Quill (a Melbourne-based interdisciplinary artist)
  • Chris Elliot (paediatrician at St George Hospital and Sydney Children’s Hospital)
  • Jessica and Henry Gowans (mother and son)