Is mealtime a struggle in your household? If you spend more time begging your child to eat than enjoying your own meal, you're not alone.
One in five preschoolers is a picky eater, several studies show. If your child only eats yellow foods, you may worry that she isn't getting adequate nutrition. Many children outgrow pickiness by age 4 or 5, but it can be difficult to endure.
“Let them choose the clothes they wear, not the foods they eat,” says Atlanta-based pediatrician Jennifer Shu, MD, co-author of Food Fights. “Kids get so used to mac and cheese, they forget that asparagus isn't so bad.”
Research suggests that picky children may become overweight, so it's beneficial to get kids eating a variety of healthy foods. But trying to coerce them to taste new things is tricky, as Jennifer Gunter of Mill Valley, Calif., can attest. Her 7-year-old son was so averse to solid foods, he consumed nothing but PediaSure until age 3.
“If we managed to get food past his lips, he'd gag and vomit,” she says. “It looked like he'd be taking a sippy cup and PediaSure to college.”
Gunter persisted until she found something her son enjoyed: thin slivers of milk chocolate, which melted in his mouth.
“Since you can make so many things with chocolate, I had something to work with,” she says. “I made chocolate cake to introduce textures, chocolate-covered bananas to introduce fruit, and peanut butter cups to introduce peanut butter.”
Profiles of Picky Eaters
To encourage your finicky child to eat a wider variety of foods, it's helpful to understand the reason for her eating habits:
She explodes when offered something other than chicken nuggets. She may be refusing food to exert authority, not because she truly dislikes something. “Picky habits start when children test their limits, around age 2,” Shu says. “Parents don't like rejection. They hear 'no' once or twice, they don't go back to that food.”
But many preschoolers need to be offered new foods 10 times before they taste them. Serving a new food among five or six familiar choices can take the pressure off, says Boston-area pediatric nutritionist Linda Piette, MS, RD, author of Just Two More Bites!
She gags when trying anything new. She may be an inexperienced chewer.
“Children who won't eat meat but prefer pureed food often have an oral-motor problem,” says pediatric psychologist Kay Toomey, PhD, director of Sensory Therapies and Research Center's Sequential-Oral-Sensory Feeding Solutions program in Greenwood Village, Colo. “Many prefer meltable, crunchy carbohydrates because they're easy to eat and have a single texture.”
Other possibilities include large tonsils, which get in the way, or a neurological condition like sensory processing disorder (SPD). Many children with SPD refuse food that crunches too loudly or looks, smells, or tastes weird, Toomey says. Others can't tolerate wet, slimy food in their hands or mouths. For others, chewing throws off their sense of balance.
