Why Some Kids Should Play with their Food

Next time you hear yourself saying, "Peter, don't play with your food," perhaps you should reconsider.

For some kids, food games are a good thing.  This is particularly true for tots who are resistant to new foods.

But let me be clear: I'm not talking about encouraging your kids to throw food at each other, or to smear stuff on the walls, in their ears, or up their noses.

I'm talking about something a little more structured.

I’ve written a lot about new food acceptance over the past few years, but I’ve mostly focused on:

• How to lay a foundation for new food acceptance by varying the tried-and-true foods that you serve. Read House Building 101 
• Ways to get your kids interested in the idea of new foods Read Take a Walk on the Wild Side.
• How to engage your child in tasting new foods.  Unleash Your Toddler’s Inner Food Critic!

But some kids need a slower approach. They need to get acquainted with a new food.  They need to have some fun!

Here are 5 games you can play with your children that will build new food acceptance.

These games are particularly good for children with food sensitivies.

Game 1: Hot Potato 

1. Select 3 new foods and 3 familiar foods.
2. Place one item in a small bowl.  
3. Turn the music on and pass the bowl around.
4. The person holding the bowl when the music stops makes a visual statement about the item: The carrot is orange.  (You can play a round using smell statements too).
5. The person who has the bowl now chooses another item to go into the bowl.
6. Start the game again.

Game 2: Guess What's in the Box

1.  Gather 7-10 new food items and a box with a small hole (shoe box will do).
2. Place one food in the Mystery Box.
3. Have the child place her hand through the hole, touch the item and guess what it is. (You can also ask your child to guess what's in the box by smelling the food inside.)
4. Give the child a turn to select and place the food in the box. Now the adult has to guess what it is.
5. Repeat.

Game 3: Paint with Food

1. Select 2-3 sauces as your paint.  Consider ketchup, mustard, ranch dressing, yogurt, and applesauce.
2. Select several foods as your paint brushes.  Consider carrot sticks, celery, chicken drumsticks, pretzel sticks, broccoli spears.
3. Provide construction paper and let your child have fun!

Game 4:  Food Bingo

1. Decide how many squares your Bingo cards will have. Then make Bingo cards by drawing squares onto a piece of construction paper and glueing on pictures of food.
2. Write the name of each food on a 3x5 card.
3. Give each member a bingo card and markers.
4. Turn over the 3x5 cards and select the first card.
5. Have each child identify if they have the food item on their Bingo card and place a marker on the card.
6. Each time the child has a chosen food item, he or she has to hold the actual food item and describe it's touch, smell, look, etc.

Game 5: The Matching Game

1. Select 3-5 food items, including some preferred foods.
2. Write a description for each food item on a separate 3x5 card such as: sweet, sour, bitter, strong, refreshing, spicy, minty.
3. Have each member of the group smell the food item and identify which description best describes it.
4. Encourage your children to write new and creative descriptions for each item.

I wish I could accept credit for inventing these games, but I can't.  

You might say I stole them, but I like to think I borrowed them, from a brilliant book Just Take A Bite: Easy, Effective Answers to Food Aversions and Eating Challenges.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

You Can't Feed Your Way Out of a Picky-Eating Problem.

You’ll never find the right food to solve a picky-eating problem.

That’s because picky eating isn’t really about food.  It is about control, a reluctance to try new things, sensory sensitivity, a chewing and/or swallowing problem, or some other issue. 

Read It’s Gross and You Can’t Make Me Eat It!; For extreme fruit and vegetable avoiders…; My child only eats Cheerios and Puffs: When to seek medical help.

Still, parents are always hopeful, and I am often asked to recommend a list of foods that a picky eater is likely to eat.

But searching for just the right dish is like looking for a needle in a haystack.  Actually, it’s worse. It’s like looking for a motorized needle that is constantly moving.  (Or like looking for a needle that is, perhaps, just a little bit possessed!)

Unless you’re extremely lucky, you’ll never find the needle (or that guaranteed-to-be-the tastiest noodle). Even if you did find it, discovering it today is no guarantee that you’ll do so tomorrow.  Kids (I mean needles) are fickle that way.

Kids don’t know what they like and don’t like.

It’s hard to believe this if you’ve got children who are loud and clear about which morsels will pass their lips and which ones won’t, but young kids don’t have what researchers call stable taste preferences.

Research shows that young kids don’t really know what they like or don’t like…They’re still exploring. 

For instance, in one recent investigation, kids were asked to taste and rate the same 5 flavors of ice cream on two consecutive days.   Researchers found that 3-4 year olds typically rated the ice cream flavors differently on each of the two days.  Kids 5 and up, however, were more consistent about what they liked.

In other words, if your kids are younger than 5, don’t believe what they say.

Kids don’t even know which foods they’ll try.

What do you think would happen if you presented a selection of fruits and vegetables to a group of 5-14 year old kids, asked them which items they were willing to try, and then two days later served them everything, even the offensive items?

If you are like every normal parent on the face of the planet you would expect the kids to eat the foods they had said they were willing to try, and to avoid the foods they had said they weren’t willing to try.  Surprisingly, you would be wrong.

A recent study tried this procedure and the researchers found some interesting results: not only were the kids willing to try the fruits and vegetables they had said they would try, but even the children who said they wouldn’t eat the fruits and vegetables ate them.  Not only that, on average, they ate more than half the amount they were served.

In other words, when kids predict what they will and will not try, don’t believe them.

(Of course, in this study, teachers and not parents were introducing the new foods – and we all know that kids always perform better for teachers -- but still, the kids did say they wouldn’t try the foods and they did try them.)

Parents make poor predictions about what their kids will eat or like.

Research shows that parents make accurate predictions about half of the time. That’s a pretty good average considering how flaky our kids are.

But if you can’t predict what your kids will like or eat, then you shouldn’t ...

1) Go searching for the perfect food.

2) Limit mealtime selections to foods that conform to your ideas about what your kids will eat.

In both cases, you’re just as likely to be wrong as to be right.  So you might as well serve what you want.

The only solution to a picky-eating problem is to provide a variety of foods.  To stay the course.  To resist the urge to cave in.

Giving in to your child's demands, particularly with sweet, salty and fat-filled “child-friendly” foods, only narrow’s a picky-eater’s developing palate.  Instead, continuing to provide a wide range of foods, especially fruits and vegetables, will eventually (and I stress eventually) expand your child’s palate.

I realize that providing foods to a kid who won’t eat them is stressful (you worry that he’ll go hungry or become nutrient deficient) and irritating (you did spend some time preparing the meal after all and you don’t like to waste food), but making a short-term compromise at the expense of your child’s long-term habits, is a form of Dealin’ with the Devil.  And nobody wins when dealin' with the devil.

Read House Building 101.

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

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Sources:

Busick, D. B., J. Brooks, S. Pernecky, R. Dawson, and J. Petzoldt. 2008. “Parent Food Purchases as a Measure of Exposure and Preschool-Aged Children's Willingness to Identify and Taste Fruit and Vegetables.” Appetite 51: 468-73.

Coulthard, H. and J. Blissett. 2009. “Fruit and Vegetable Consumption in Children and Their Mothers. Moderating Effects of Child Sensory Sensitivity.” Appetite 52: 410-15.

Dovey, T. M., P. A. Staples, G. E. Leigh, and J. C. G. Halford. 2008. “Food Neophobia and 'Picky/Fussy' Eating in Children: a Review.” Appetite 50: 181-93.

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.

What "I don't like it" really means.

In the last post I talked about Sensory Sensitivity, a condition where some kids are highly sensitive to some aspect of food -- taste, texture, smell, appearance -- and rejects anything that is unfamiliar.  If you have a child like this you know how challenging it can be to introduce new foods.  Most kids, however, don't have this condition.  There's no big reason behind their likes and dislikes.  In fact, when most kids say "I don't like it" they really mean "I don't want to eat that food right now." 

Children change what they like and dislike with amazing speed -- sometimes right in the middle of a mouthful. I'm sure if you ask around, people will tell you lots of stories about their kids liking things one day, not liking them the second day and then liking them again on the third day.  If you have a kid who does this, I'm sure you've already figured out that it can't be taste that influences what he'll eat.

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