The Fun Factor: Food For Feeding a Picky Eater

If you don’t have fun feeding your toddler, your toddler isn’t having any fun being fed.

I’m not talking about the “draw some ketchup happy faces on your kid’s plate” kind of fun.  I’m just talking about garden-variety fun. You know, where your child actually enjoys eating.

Recent research from Switzerland shows that eating enjoyment reduces picky eating.  In other words, feed your picky eater some fun, and your picky eater might just stop being so picky.

The more children enjoy eating, the less picky they are.

That’s what the research shows.  It makes sense too.  Many kids simply shut down when they feel stressed about eating.

The research also shows that:

• Fun activities, such as cooking, increase eating enjoyment.
• Parental pressure decreases eating enjoyment.

There is oodles of advice out there on increasing the fun factor—gardening, cooking, grocery shopping, food art, sandwich cutouts, you name it.  But fun added on top of pressure isn't fun at all.  In fact, in my experience, pressure cancels out the fun.

That's why you've got to eliminate the pressure first.  Then, you can add in any kind of fun you like.

Parents rarely consider how putting on the pressure is problematic. 

• Do you think your child should always finish her plate?
• Do you feel you have to be especially careful to make sure your child eats enough?
• If your child says, “I’m not hungry,” do you try to get her to eat anyway?
• Do you feel your child would eat much less food if you didn’t guide or regulate her eating?

These are the kinds of questions researchers ask parents to determine how likely they are to put on the pressure.

Read: The Pressure Cooker Problem , The Dinner Dance: When Is Enough Enough? and A New Approach to Teaching Tot to Try New Foods.

Of course, pressure might not actually cause a picky eating problem; it might be the way parents react to a picky eating problem instead.

This is a case when it doesn’t matter which came first, the chicken or the egg, because there’s no question that pressure reinforces pickiness. 

Remember, picky eating is rarely a real reaction to the food.

I'm sure you intuitively know this because picky eaters are totally erratic in their eating behavior: Loving today what they hated yesterday, and hating today what they loved yesterday.  That’s why you can’t feed your way out of a picky-eating problem.

So back off the pressure and put your energy towards producing a happier eating environment instead.

Read The Road Less Traveled.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

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Source: van der Horst, K. 2012. “Overcoming Picky Eating. Eating Enjoyment as a Central Aspect of Children's Eating Behaviors.” Appetite 58: 567-74

Kid Eats Q&A: Should you serve your kids exactly what you eat?

Thanks to Emma who originally posted this question on my Facebook page and to everyone who wrote about how they handled the situation when I posed the quested back to my FB friends.

Do you recommend serving your kids exactly what you eat, or making it a little more "kid-friendly" for them if it's easy to do, or do you make everyone's meal a little more kid-friendly in order to get something on the plate you know he'll eat?

My answer is “yes” and “yes” and "maybe yes depending on how much you're going to dumb down the meal." How’s that for clarity? Let me explain.

1) You want to set up the expectation that everyone in the household eats the same food.

Otherwise, why would your child ever rise to the occasion?  Plus, you don’t want your tot even to toy with the idea that there are separate foods for kids and for adults.  We can thank modern American manufacturers for that distinction, but it's not a real (or necessary) one. Read this post on feeding a one year old.

2) But, you don’t want to disregard your child’s taste preferences (though they’re always changing), personality and stage of development. 

That's a recipe for conflict. So you need to make some compromises.

3) You want to serve meals without putting on the pressure.

Pressure is the kiss of death. Read The Pressure-Cooker Problem.

In practice this means you need a hybrid approach to serving meals.

1. Serve the food you eat.
2. Be willing to serve foods separately, and to add extra flavors that you enjoy at the table.  It’s better to add these items — onions, jalapenos, and other spicy stuff—in front of your child (think of it as a form of exposure) than to create separate dishes in the kitchen.
3. Put something on the table that you know your child will eat (bread, rice, apples...) or consider using a backup. Read How Cottage Cheese Changed My Life.
4. Use dessert constructively, not coercively. Read Dishing Up Dessert.
5. Don’t take your child’s likes and dislikes too seriously, and never pressure your child to eat.  Read The Easy Way to Solve Your Toddler’s Decision to Suddenly Refuse Certain Foods.

As with everything parent-related, you have multiple goals at each meal:

• Nourish your child.
• Socialize your child to eat with the rest of the human race.
• Keep the peace.

It's not always so easy to balance these goals. Let's take a look at each goal, and then, in the spirit of the political season, let's vote to see how the balancing turns out.  

A vote for Your Food=Serve your kids what you eat.  A vote for Their Food=Serve your kids what they want to eat.

Goal One: Nourish your child 

Fundamentally, you want to get enough food into your child so he’ll make it to the next meal, without having a major meltdown—or worse, waking you up unnecessarily throughout the night.  Vote: Their Food.

On the other hand, how nourishing is the stuff your kid prefers? If it’s typical “kid-friendly” food then…not so much.  Read The Truth About “Child-Friendly” Food.  Vote: Your food.

If your child isn’t into the usual crap—i.e. macaroni and cheese and hot dogs—you might get a pass.  Before you vote, though, take a long hard look at what you’ll be serving if you continue to cater to your kid.  Read What’s the Problem with Cheese?,  Polly Want a Cracker?, and Yogurt vs. Coke. Then decide how to vote: Your Food or Their Food.

Overall to reach your Nourish goal the vote is...too close to call.

Goal Two: Socialize your child to eat with the rest of the human race.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you’d like to move your child beyond pasta and chicken nuggets, and so the question becomes: what’s the best way to do it?

One strategy is to wait until your child expresses an interest in other food. The underlying logic is that when your child is ready, it’ll be a lot easier to introduce these items.  Vote: Their Food.

On the other hand—Didn’t you know this was coming?—research shows that the strongest predictor of the number of foods liked at age 8 is the number of foods liked at age 4.  Furthermore, kids are more likely to accept new foods that are introduced between the ages of 2 and 4 than they are to accept foods introduced between 4 and 8.  Vote: Your Food.

And, if you consider the evidence that repeated exposure is the key to food preferences—You know the advice: you have to introduce your child to a new vegetables 3492 times before he’ll like it.—then you have to factor this into your feeding strategy.  The more you feed your child stuff that resembles fast food (salty and sweet snacks, sugar-added items) the more you reinforce a preference for those kinds of foods.  Vote: Your Food.

Finally, since the brain biases the buds—what people eat is related to what they think they like— it’s vital not to teach your child that children eat differently than adults.  Keep categorizing foods as “kid-friendly” and that is what your kid will want to eat.  Read Mind over Matter.

Overall Join the Human Race Votes: Your Food.  (Personally, I think this is the most important goal, but I understand why you might not agree with me.)

Goal Three: Keep the Peace

If you are willing to be a short-order chef for your child for the long haul, then vote Their Food.

If you think you’d like to stop some day vote Your Food.  Kicking the can (or in this case the confrontation) down the road will only make it worse.

Overall Keep the Peace Votes...another toss up.

And the winner is…Your Food.

If you have a child with a very limited diet this might seem like a total disaster.  Before you disregard everything I've written, read this woman's experience with a very picky eater. She stopped catering dinner to her daughter "cold turkey" with a Dinner Challenge.

Even though a Dinner Challenge might not work for you, the habits idea being served up in this strategy, is a message well worth considering. Your expectations really can shape how your child eats.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~ 

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Sources:

Skinner, J. D., B. R. Carruth, W. Bounds, and P. Ziegler. 2002. “Children's Food Preferences: a Logitudinal Analysis.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 102(11): 1638-47.

Cornwell, T. B. and A. R. McAlister. 2011. “Alternative Thinking About Starting Points in Obesity. Development of Child Taste Preferences.” Appetite 56: 428-39.

The Easy Way to Solve Your Toddler's Decision to Suddenly Refuse Certain Foods

I’m pretty sure there’s no research (yet) to back up the strategy my husband and I used to combat my young daughter’s desire to eliminate foods, but it worked so well I have decided to share it. 

We let her go on strike. It was a fast and effective strategy that produced the right habits.  Here is how it worked.

My daugther would announce she was done with apples and we would jokingly say, “Oh, so you’re on strike against apples?”  And she would proudly say, “yes!”

Now, I’m sure she didn’t know what on strike meant—after all, we weren’t raising a little labor relations lawyer! —but she quickly got the gist.  When my daughter was on strike she didn’t have to eat whatever food had suddenly offended her (newfound) sophisticated sensibilities, even though she had been eating that item with no problem for ages.

• Apples?  On strike!
• Oranges? On strike!
• Potatoes? On strike!
• Mushrooms? On strike!
• Cookies?  Not a chance!

We didn't urge, we didn't reason, we didn't discuss.  We simply checked in and accepted. (Of course, we also always kept the offending item on the menu and frequently ate it ourselves!)

Then, one day I realized the on strike list had grown a little bit long.

And so the next time my daughter announced she was no longer eating something, I rebelled.  Management had finally taken a stand.

“You can only go on strike against 5 things,” I said.  (Actually, I don’t quite remember how many on strike items there were, but 5 sounds like the right number.)

“If you’re going on strike against carrots,” I continued, “you’ve got to bring something back.”

My daughter considered.  We waited.  Times were tense and I worried: would she accept my list of demands?  Or would there be a total work stoppage?

 “Ok. I’ll start eating apples.”

And with that simple statement a crisis was averted.  Relations were normalized.  A new contract was signed!

6 Reasons why letting your child go on strike is a successful strategy.

1) Strikes keep things light.  It’s hard to ask tots if they're on strike without smiling. If you don’t take food jags seriously, neither will they.

2) Strikes honor your toddler’s feelings.  Strikes empower kids by giving them a say over what they eat, without locking them into a battle of wills.

3) Strikes don’t confuse Not Eating with Not Liking.  Strikes give toddlers an eating “out” that acknowledges their craving for control. Children don’t have to convince their parents (and themselves) that they don't like something to make their point.

4) Strikes enable you to set reasonable limits.  It’s realistic to regulate little acts of rebellion.  It’s not really rational to try to set limits on liking. 

5) Strikes help your child save face.  It's easier for kids to end a strike than to say they've suddenly started liking something.  Remember to check in regularly with your child. "Still on strike against apples?"

6) Strikes always end.  And knowing this helps keep things light. (See point #1.)

Food jags are a normal part of toddler life.  

Don't take them seriously (unless you want to solidify them).

It's a shocking thing for most parents to hear, but young kids don't know what they like because they don't have what researchers call stable taste preferences. 

Check this out:  In one study, more than 50% of 3-4 year olds didn't like the same flavor of ice cream two days in a row.

I say, if kids aren't even consistent about whether they like ice cream, what does that say about more challenging foods like broccoli, beans, and bananas?  

What kids know is what they're willing to eat.  Today.

Read What “I Don’t Like It” Really Means and You Can’t Feed Your Way Out of a Picky-Eating Problem.

Strikes work by changing the dynamic at the dinner table.

Strikes help you set the overarching parameters for eating while giving your kids some wiggle room. It's the no-pressure solution to what seems like an intractable problem. Read The Pressure-Cooker Problem and The Goldilocks Approach.

So the next time your toddler suddenly turns his nose up at tomatoes, resist the urge to interpret this arbitary food refusal as an indication of his taste preferences.  Think of it as temporary strike instead.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~ 

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Source:

Liem, D. G., L. Zandstra, and A. Thomas. 2010. “Prediction of Children's Flavour Preferences. Effect of Age and Stability in Reported Preferences.” Appetite 55: 69-75.