Q:We have a daughter who is almost three and is a dreadful eater. Dinner times in particular are becoming a nightmare. She will eat some simple things with pasta, but she refuses to eat anything else, especially if there is any sign of a vegetable in it.
She eats well in her creche, albeit she is quite fussy about fruit (she won’t eat any at home). Given that she eats her dinners in the creche, we are quite determined not to indulge her whims at home. She has gotten a lot worse recently and we have started to just leave the dinner on the table and tell her that this is all she is getting. I know this sounds bad, but some evenings she has gone to bed with no evening meal and it hasn’t knocked a bother out of her. She has an older sibling who is a very good eater. While we accept that there may be some dinners that a child won’t like, we aren’t prepared to have a situation where we are cooking different dinners for her every day.
A: Fussy or picky eating is very common in preschoolers and most children go through periods of being selective about what they eat and "resisting" their parents' attempts to feed them healthy foods. Despite being so common, most parents find fussy eating very stressful to deal with, and many report dreading meal times, which easily become battles over food with their children.
At the heart of this is the fact that parents feel a primary responsibility to ensure their children eat well, and most worry about whether their child is getting enough nutrition. As a parent, feeding your children is a very emotive issue and it is easy to feel rejected when your child refuses to eat the food that you have spent so much time and care preparing. This can put more pressure on meal times and increase the conflicts.
The key to successfully fostering good eating habits in young children is to take a step back from the food battles and from trying to control your child’s eating. Instead, your job is to trust in your child’s own natural appetites and to hand over to them the responsibility for eating. As a parent you are responsible for the set up and rituals around food, but your child is ultimately responsible for the eating.
Nutritionist Ellyn Satter puts this very well, arguing that a successful meal time requires a division of responsibility. “Parents are responsible for the what, when and where of feeding; children are responsible for the how much and whether of eating,” she says. In practical terms, this means that you make sure meal times are relaxed times, when your child has a choice of healthy foods, but accepting that they make the decision about what and how much they eat.
You can encourage your daughter to eat a range of foods, but this is best done gradually and new foods are often best presented alongside familiar ones. Make a list of all the different foods your daughter likes and think how you can build upon these. Often children have particular sensory preferences – it is not that they don’t like the taste of a certain food, it could be that they don’t like a certain texture or temperature which you can vary to their preference.
Try lots of different ways of presenting food. For example, carrots can be eaten raw or cooked, served in a soup or added to a smoothie with the juicer. They can also be hidden in mashed potato or in a meatloaf. You could also make your child’s favourite dip (such as guacamole) and make carrots into batons for her to eat. Sometimes, simply presenting vegetables in a different container can make a difference – the carrots might appear more appealing in a favourite cup or beaker.
In addition, children can have very different styles of eating. Some can keep to a routine of three meals a day, but more often preschoolers tend to have a more grazing style of eating whereby they eat smaller amounts but more frequently. One way to help these children is to ensure you have more regular meals and lots of healthy snacks.
It could be that your daughter has eaten the majority of her calories at the creche during the day and that she does not need to eat a main meal at dinner time. In that case, you should still concentrate on making dinner time a relaxed family time, and as the family eats offer her a small portion of the dinner and/or have healthy snacks (such as fruit) on the table as an alternative.
During meals, be wary of pressurising or bribing your daughter to eat and avoid criticising what she hasn’t eaten. Instead, focus on encouraging what she has done well – “you tried a bit of the cheese, that is nice”, or “you like that pasta, don’t you”. Sometimes it is best not to talk about the food at all and to simply chat about the day as you eat together. If she says no to food, respect this but don’t make a big deal about it. Let her choose something else from the table or not to eat much that particular meal time, but you don’t have to cook her anything new there and then.
Your daughter will learn most from your behaviour. Research shows that children are most likely to eat a new food when they have repeated opportunities to sample it and when they repeatedly see their parents and others eating it with gusto and enjoyment. Some children need to be exposed to a new food up to 15 times before they get to like it. They need time to touch it, test it, smell it, to watch other people eat it and maybe even take a bit in and out of their mouth once before they will eat it in earnest. It can also help to educate your daughter about food – reading books together about vegetables, showing her how to grow them in
the garden, involving her in cooking and preparing food and over time helping her learn to cook a favourite meal.
Finally, make meal times relaxed enjoyable family events. Aside from encouraging healthy eating, the routine of a relaxed family meal has many other benefits for children and parents, giving them time to chat and connect with one another and can become a special part of the day.
Dr John Sharry is a social worker and psychotherapist and director of Parents Plus charity. His website is solutiontalk.ie.
Readers’ queries are welcome and will be answered through the column, but John regrets that he cannot enter into individual correspondence. Questions should be e-mailed to healthsupplement@irishtimes.com