5 Tips to Overcome Your Child’s Picky Eating
Mealtimes can all too easily turn into a battle of wills if you’re a parent with a young child. Food, a pleasure to most, becomes a source of stress for parents who worry that their toddlers and preschoolers are eating too little, or too much, or the wrong foods.
With a better understanding of nutrition, psychology and behaviour these days, it’s much easier now to look to parenting resources published by experts and seasoned parents on ways to address picky eating in young children.
Below are five tried-and-true tips from these authors to help your kid be more adventurous with food. For more in-depth explanations and strategies, scroll to the bottom of this article for our book recommendations!
1. Persist in Offering Different Foods
Never mind that your child seems to reject almost everything that you’ve placed in front of them—experts agree that one of the most crucial ways for parents to overcome picky eating is to slowly introduce a wide variety of foods.
Most parents offer a type of food three to five times, decide that their child doesn’t like it, and completely stop offering it. Persist a little more and consistently offer your child the new food between 10 to 15 times, allowing them to interact with the food—smell it, touch it—to build their interest in trying it.
One way to expand your child’s list of acceptable foods is to offer small portions of less desired foods alongside more desired foods. A teaspoon’s worth is enough for your child to sample. Alternatively, leave more on their plate and allow them to explore as much as they’d like throughout their childhood. With repeated exposure, you’ll increase their chances of becoming an adventurous eater.
2. Eat Family Meals and Serve Your Kids “Adult Food”
Establishing a routine of having the family sit down together to eat—without any distractions; no TV, phones, books, toys and so on — can help nurture a healthy relationship with food. In French Kids Eat Everything, author Karen Le Billon says that eating family meals together means that food isn’t a matter of individual preferences. French parents expect their children to learn to be comfortable with eating a variety of foods.
During family mealtimes, focus on interacting, bonding and sharing ideas with one other. Take the opportunity to chat with your child, ask them to share stories about their day and give them your undivided attention. Make family meals a pleasurable social experience, not a high-pressure negotiation (more on this later!).
Another central idea is that your child should eat what the adults are eating. Make sure there is always one item on the table that your child likes. You can modify how you cut or serve certain ingredients to suit babies and young toddlers. For older children, allow them to decide how much of each food item they would like on their plate. Let them specify if they want a “big scoop” or a “small sample” of a dish without any judgment.
3. Tone Down the Pressure
Many experts agree that parental pressure only exacerbates picky eating in children. Pressure can look like threats, bribes, guilt trips and innocuous actions such as introducing sticker charts, praising your child or prodding him to try food. In Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating, the authors define pressure as the following:
- Any gesture where you make your child eat or try a food
- Any gesture that causes your child to shut down, protest, turn away, whine, etc.
Pressuring your child to eat foods they don’t want to eat makes them even less likely to want to eat those foods. Worse, it turns you into an adversary and leads to power struggles over food.
While pressure may give you the short-term victory of getting your child to take one or two bites, it will come at the cost of your child eating for reasons other than hunger or having an appetite.
Other negative consequences of pressure include increased anxiety and decreased appetite in your child, making them like food less and depending on you for every bite. Instead, adopt a relaxed attitude during mealtimes, and focus on conversations instead of whether or not your child has taken your desired number of bites.
4. Limit Snacks
Experts on child nutrition have much to say about snacks. The consensus is to limit snacks so that most food consumption happens at mealtimes, where food tends to be healthier.
The issue with snacks is that they prevent your child from tuning in to their hunger and satiety cues. Kids who graze on snacks eat for reasons other than nourishment, which may make them emotional eaters rather than mindful, intuitive eaters. High-calorie snacks, particularly those high in sugar, salt and fat, stimulate our appetites for even more snacks.
But snacks shouldn’t be written off completely. Snack time can be part of your child’s schedule, as long as you keep them small so that your child’s hunger drive aligns with family meals. In Responsive Feeding, Melanie Potock defines snacks as “big enough for your child to hold in the palm of their hand”. Also, snacks don’t necessarily have to come from the snack food aisle. Why not make snacks out of cheese, fruits, vegetables and dips?
5. Focus on Habits Rather Than Nutrition
In It’s Not About the Broccoli, Dina Rose argues that when parents focus solely on nutrition, their kids surprisingly eat poorly. But when families shift their emphasis to behaviours — the skills and habits kids are taught — they learn to eat right.
Rose identifies three key eating habits for parents to nurture: proportion, variety and moderation.
- Proportion: Get into the habit of eating foods in proportion to their benefits by categorising food into “growing foods” (whole, healthy foods), “fun foods” (foods which are in between healthy and junk) and “treat foods” (junk food). Proportion is about eating growing foods most, fun foods less frequently, and treat foods least frequently.
- Variety: Use the “Rotation Rule” of never offering the same food for two days in a row, except for milk. Your child will stop expecting to eat the same flavours and textures every day. In a small but profound way, they’ll begin to expect and accept variety.
- Moderation: Trust what your child says about them being hungry or full, even though there are seemingly plenty of reasons not to. How much your child eats is something that they have to decide for themselves.
Successful parents, she observed, recognised that eating, much like sleeping or bathing or good manners, was an area that required parental teaching. Such parents took a “teaching approach” to food rather than focusing solely on nutrition. They were patient and understood that the seeds of learning could take weeks, months or even longer to germinate.
Discover More Tips
Want to go more in-depth into the parenting tips above? Check out these popular titles on how you can nurture healthy eating habits in children!
From left to right:
Responsive Feeding: The Baby-First Guide to Stress-Free Weaning, Healthy Eating, and Mealtime Bonding — Melanie Potock | Physical Copy, eBook
Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating: A Step-by-Step Guide for Overcoming Selective Eating, Food Aversion, and Feeding Disorders — Katja Rowell, MD | Audiobook
French Kids Eat Everything: How Our Family Moved to France, Cured Picky Eating, Banned Snacking, and Discovered 10 Simple Rules for Raising Happy, Healthy Eaters — Karen Le Billon | Physical Copy, eBook, Audiobook
It’s Not About the Broccoli: Three Habits to Teach Your Kids for a Lifetime of Healthy Eating — Dina Rose | eBook
