g with food helps them become a lot more comfortable with eating it.
Vary family meals – most of what we perceive as our sense of taste is actually driven by our sense of smell, so start to cook lots of interesting family meals so that the picky eater gets used to lots of different foods smells in the kitchen.
Eat as a family as much as possible – this may be tricky during the working week but prioritise this at the weekends. If you look like you are enjoying your food and having a fun time, this will rub off on your little one.
Keep on trying – children sometimes need to try a food up to twelve times before they like it. Try every week or so with zero pressure for the child to eat a food, and one day they might be curious and give it a go.
Start young – it is thought that babies have a “taste window” window during the first few months of weaning where they will accept most flavours and textures. This is why giving your baby a huge variety of different foods from around 6 months can make such a difference to future diet choices. Home-made baby food has the potential to give your child a much broader diet in terms of texture and taste than pouches of jars and this is the main reason why cooking from scratch for babies is so important.
My approach with cooking for babies is to allow independence from the start and offer them finger foods, puree and mashed foods to see which ones they prefer and find easier to eat. I always make the foods lovely and tasty with herbs and spices that helps educate the taste buds nice and early on. It’s all about tiny tastes when they are that little, so have fun making lots of different foods and make them yummy enough so you can enjoy mealtimes together right from the start.
Our Clinical Experience
While this research is interesting, the origins of fussy eating are very complex and in my clinical experience, I find that the parents of picky eaters are not always the pushy ones, and in fact, often quite the opposite; they often have incredible patience, and are very in tune with their child’s dietary choices. What we often find in our clinic is that there is much more going on than just the parenting style, and when we run nutritional evaluations we find that they are low in minerals like zinc and iron which are critical for forming a healthy appetite and taste buds. An out of sync gut microbiome due to antibiotic or reflux medication use, or a constant sore tummy can also drive picky eating – we find that kids tend to only choose the foods that feel comfy in their tummy when things are out of sorts in the gut. We also help with sensory kids to help rebalance things, so they don’t find tastes and textures so troublesome. You can read more in our series of blogs on severe picky eating to see if this might be an issue for your child.
- Children may not always grow out of being picky eaters
- The Persistence of Picky Eating: Opportunities to Improve Our Strategies and Messaging
- For Many Kids, Picky Eating Isn’t Just a Phase, Study Finds
- If your kid is a picky eater, you might be a helicopter parent
- Picky eating linked to demanding parents who limit foods, study says
- Exposure to foods’ non-taste sensory properties. A nursery intervention to increase children’s willingness to try fruit and vegetables