Whining and Dining:
Feeding your Picky Eater
By Marie Fortin, MEd, RD
If you have a fussy eater at home, you’re not alone. How to improve the diet of an exceptionally picky eater is, in fact, one of the questions I’m asked most frequently as a Registered Dietitian. This question reassures me that parents understand the impact of early childhood nutrition on the relationship children ultimately establish with food, eating and their bodies. The eating patterns we help create for our children set the stage for an appreciation, respect and enjoyment of food later in life, and teach behaviours that will promote their wellbeing far beyond childhood.
One of the concepts parents find most useful (and at times most freeing) is that feeding a child involves a shared responsibility between parent and child: parents simply can’t control it all. According to this thinking, the parent is responsible for the what, when and where of feeding, while the child is responsible for the how much and the whether of eating.
This division of responsibility applies whether your child is 18 weeks or 18 years of age. By respecting the child’s role in mealtime decision-making, parents give their children credibility for knowing and recognizing their hunger and satiety. This encourages children to learn to respect and trust their body’s cues to start and stop eating.
How does this translate to your family’s mealtime battles? Offer your child nutritious, attractive meal and snack options at regular times and in a pleasant setting – such as in each other’s company, with no distractions. Let your child determine if he or she is hungry, and how much of that healthy food he or she needs to be satisfied. Resist the urge to fight, force-feed or bribe. The more pleasant and relaxed mealtimes are, the more your child will come to appreciate the food.
While you’re practicing this approach, try out some strategies to make the healthy options more enticing to your little one:
Strike a balance. Offer foods from three to four of the food groups at each meal. Serve a protein-rich food (chicken breast, meatloaf, a turkey burger, chili) with a source of carbohydrate (rice, a whole wheat roll, pasta, potato, starchy vegetables like corn, peas or beets) and at least two options from the fruit and vegetable category (a salad, stir-fried snow peas, vegetable noodle soup, carrot sticks, veggies and hummus, fruit salad, pear slices, a clementine).
It averages out. Offer a variety of foods over the course of the day. What’s eaten (or not eaten) at any one meal won’t compromise your child’s nutritional status. It’s more important to consider your child’s intake over the course of a few days or a week.
Frame them. When offering your child a choice of foods, offer two good options. Parents will often complain to me that their child prefers to snack on cookies instead of fruit, but what child wouldn’t? But when given a choice of two healthy options (“Would you like berries or orange segments?”), the child is guaranteed to make a great selection every time.
Make healthy choices fun. Use yogurts and puddings as dips for cut-up fruit. Offer salad dressing, salsa or hummus for dunking raw or cooked veggies. Make smoothies by blending milk, yogurt and your child’s favourite frozen fruit. Use cookie cutters to give fun shapes to sandwiches, fruit and veggies. Add fun pasta shapes to vegetable soups.
Sneak in the good stuff. Desperate times call for desperate measures. To add a nutrition boost to familiar foods, try adding mashed cauliflower to your home-made mashed potatoes. Hide pureed veggies in a pasta sauce, casserole or meat loaf. Incorporate whole wheat flour, rolled oats, dried fruit or nuts in your favourite cookie recipe.
Come to the table hungry. Snacking or drinking milk or juice throughout the day can mean that your child is coming to the dinner table with little or no appetite. I advise parents to withhold snacks and drinks for an hour before meal times to allow hunger to develop, thus making healthy foods more appealing. Your child should be hungry, but not ravenous, at meal times.
Roll up their sleeves. From an early age, involve your child in food preparation. One reason children rebel at dinnertime is that all too often they have absolutely no control over the foods that appear in front of them. Change this dynamic by giving them some involvement (and credit) for the food that appears on the table. From a young age, give your child age-appropriate tasks in meal preparation to give them the sense of ‘owning’ or being responsible for the meal. A young child might be able to scrub a vegetable, set the table, or measure rice into a pot, while older kids often enjoy experimenting with simple recipes, such as making a pizza or hamburgers from scratch. Take your child grocery shopping and ask them to select fresh produce after a bit of coaching. Encourage them to select a fruit or vegetable that is new to them, and search recipe books or cooking websites together for tasty ideas on how to prepare it.
Grow it. If you’re lucky enough to have a small patch of yard suitable for growing vegetables, start a garden project together: visit the local nursery to pick up veggie plants and give your child responsibility for nurturing the garden. There is no taste comparison between a store-bought carrot, bean or tomato, and one that is home-grown. Kids can taste the difference!
Lead by example. Kids often need repeated exposure to a new food before they either try it for the first time or re-try it after initially rejecting it. Don’t give up on offering a healthy food if your children refuse it. Keep serving it, perhaps prepared differently, and let them see you enjoying it.
Marie Fortin, MEd, RD, a Registered Dietitian, runs a busy nutrition consulting practice at the Markham Stouffville Health Centre, where she coaches clients of all ages to better health and vitality. Visit her at mariefortin.com
2600 John Street, Unit 207, Markham, ON L3R 3W3 T: 905.475.5222 F: 905.475.6369
