Is Your Child a Picky Eater?

By Wenda Reed

Why Kids Develop Patterns of Choosy Eating

My daughter went through a phase when she wanted cheese and grapes at every meal. My son had a peanut butter and honey sandwich period. For a while, new menu items were greeted with that dreaded mealtime word: Yucky!

Fortunately, my children swung back to a balanced diet with just a few individual foods they absolutely avoided. Sometimes, though, children can be very stubborn about sticking to a short list of preferences and a long list of refusals.

Initially, most children labeled “picky eaters” are merely moving through appropriate developmental stages, says Dr. Susan Roberts, a professor of nutrition and psychiatry at Tufts University and co-author of Feeding Your Child for Lifelong Health. If parents can adapt to those changes and avoid fighting with their children’s biological imperatives, they can prevent them from settling into a pattern of picky eating.

Evolving eating patterns

From 6 months to 12 months of age, a baby needs solid food as well as breast milk or formula. Parents’ efforts to present their children with new foods are aided by the fact that babies this age want to put everything into their mouths. For the first few months, parents should introduce new, easy-to-digest, simple foods slowly to their babies to prevent allergies, Roberts says. Later in the first year, the child may enjoy the variety of a new food every three or four days.

“When children get to solid food, we put them in a highchair and put food in them, and it’s all bland,” says nutrition counselor Cynthia Lair, author of Feeding the Whole Family. “We have problems later because we’ve trained them to have separate meals and to like bland food.”

12 –21 months a window of opportunity

The period from 12 months to 21 months of age represents “a window of opportunity” for getting children used to a healthy diet, Roberts says. Toddlers tend to crave adventure and variety, so she recommends giving them the same things the rest of the family is eating, without too much dependence on commercial baby foods. Lair, a professor at Bastyr University’s School of Natural Medicine, points out that in primitive societies, mothers chewed up some of their own food and then spit it out to feed to their babies. Along the same lines, she adds, today’s parents can take some of what the rest of the family is eating and grind it up for young children.