Is it my fault my child is a fussy eater? Food For Kids Podcast episode 9

Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies.

In today's show I'm going to run through why it's probably not your fault if your child is a fussy eater or if you just can't seem to get them to be as adventurous with food as you would like.

Maybe your child's quite fussy in general or they're picky when it comes to trying something new, they're a bit reticent

Or maybe your child's not a terrible eater, but you just want them to branch out a bit because their repertoire's quite small.

I've been creating books and activities to help children become more confident with food for over 18 years now. I'm not a dietitian and I leave all the eating advice to my brilliant pediatric dietitian friends. I stick to the fun ways to get children involved with food.

I recently launched a really low cost mini workshop online to help parents to understand why building confidence and familiarity away from mealtimes is super important and how exactly to do that with lots of ideas and printables.

So this episode is using quite a lot of the script and evidence from that course.

So we're going to talk about why children can be picky and you might be thinking it's probably either something wrong with you or your child or that you're just not working hard enough at it. That's more or less where we normally go to when we're feeling guilty about parenting because parenting can be so relentless and hard. You might think, for example, I'm not being consistent enough. If you've been a parent for any length of time, you'll have been told a hundred times that you need to be more consistent. In fact, I think pretty much the only thing people are consistent about is telling other people how to be consistent.

And obviously consistency is important for building good habits, but you are also human and meals happen three times a day plus snacks. So maybe five times a day you're serving food and you're only human.

You might also have told yourself off for using the wrong tactics, that you've picked something up and tried it with your child and it's backfired and you think that maybe you've made it worse or you've been too hard on them or you've been too soft on them or you're not a very good eater so why on earth would they be? So essentially if you were a different kind of parent then your child would be fine.

That might be one thing you're saying to yourself or the opposite, you might be saying, I'm fine, but my child is just terrible at this. And you might be worrying about that, it's just who they are and how it's always going to be. And there are obviously a very small number of children that are going to really need help for a long time. And those are the scenarios where you'd go and get some extra help.

But for the majority of children you can actually increase their confidence. The other thing you might be thinking is well if I could just find that one magic bullet, the internet's filled with people saying this is the one true hack and the secret they don't want you to know. And you can just think if I scroll a bit longer, read a bit more, try some more things, then I'm going to end up with the thing that fixes my child's eating and fixes our mealtimes. And to be fair, while some tactics will work for some people and you might find a brilliant thing out there,

It's not your fault if it hasn't worked out so far. So that's your parent guilt running wild and just because it feels huge doesn't make it

So here are some of the reasons that the science would tell us that children actually tend to be bit pickier. So first of all, you do need to know that a bunch of studies have shown that genetics accounts for more than half the reasons why children are picky.

So genetic variation in the population explained about 60 % of the differences in pickiness at 16 months, so that's your toddlers. Then that went up to about 74 % between 3 and 13 years old.

There's obviously other factors, that's not the whole of it. And the genetics doesn't mean that they're going to stay picky forever. But you just need to take heart that it doesn't mean that your parenting is the reason why your child is being picky. Genes do play a really huge part in it.

So what we need to do is look at the things that we can do to build up our kids confidence.

The fear of new things is called neophobia. This is a natural stage of development for humans and some other animals. When we're getting out into the world, we're toddling or walking about. If we didn't have some fear of new things, we'd be shoving things in our mouth that really could make us ill or kill us. So having a little bit of neophobia is not a bad thing. It's how that gets applied to foods that are actually safe and for how long that lasts is the thing that we want to help your child with. So don't be upset at the fact that your child goes through a stage of being a bit suspicious about things.

They're trying to exercise control and work through their anxiety about their environment. And speaking of stress, stress and anxiety is not a good recipe for being able to be adventurous around food.

Now some of us do eat more when we're stressed and some of us will eat less when we're stressed but nobody really enjoys a meal when their stomach's churning and for your child if they think that every time I come to the table everyone gets mad at me and everyone's gonna try and me eat some stuff and then they're all stern and everyone's looking at me like I'm failing then that's not a good recipe for really wanting to be adventurous. Environment in general also plays a bigger part for some children than for others and probably bigger than we think.

So some children get really overwhelmed and just being in like a noisy room or very brightly lit or everybody talking can really affect some children. Conversely, some children really don't like it incredibly quiet. Some children really struggle with textures of food or textures on the table, the tablecloth, the chair they're sitting in, if the chair isn't the right height, if the chair doesn't feel safe, if they can't put their feet down on something, if they're having to lift their arms too much to reach their food.

All of these can make children feel uncomfortable and a bit unsafe at the table. If you think about it, if you go to a restaurant, like I really hate it when we go to pubs and they have those bar stools. I know there's people in my family that love those bar stools, but I really hate eating on a raised bar stool. I just don't feel safe with my legs swinging around. I know I don't enjoy those meals as much and I would really struggle to be adventurous in those scenarios and certainly to be relaxed.

If your child's got issues with texture and temperature with foods, and that is one of the times that you might want to think about getting a little bit of extra help.

This is something that I came across from my own children who were AuDHD. They had issues with specific textures and also with textures mixing together.

But lots of children have issues with specific textures. I know that for a lot of my childhood I didn't like squeaky things like mushrooms, cheddar cheese, the skins on tomato, that sort of squeakiness. I couldn't cope with it for a really long time. I eat them all now, but that was a really big thing and those are quite common issues for children. Your child might also have a lack of skills or knowledge. This might sound a bit daft, but because we all want to eat because we get hungry and we seek out food, that can mean that we can think that eating is really easy and actually eating is incredibly complicated there are loads of processes in it, it's one of the most complicated things that we actually do. In the nerdy science bit in the course we talk about how eating breaks down into lots of different steps so they may not have the knowledge or the skill of what that food is that they've got in front of them. It doesn't mean they're not going to like it, it doesn't mean they're not adventurous, it's just a bit overwhelming because they've got to figure out all the things they need to know in order to be able to eat that food and to have the skills to eat it. 

Another thing that can cause children to be fussy at dinner is if they're not hungry or they're too tired. I can't eat when I'm incredibly tired,
If a child had a late snack, if they missed their afternoon nap, if they've just come from sport, there's loads of reasons why individual meals might be difficult for a child to be able to cope with, especially if there's a new food at the table as well.

Peer pressure is also quite a big one with preschool and primary school children. you might have a child that ate really well until they got to a group setting and then because they see other children not eating very well or refusing vegetables they join in with that because they want to fit in. This is a natural instinct to fit in. Or you might have the opposite which is if your child's very picky about foods and then they go and see all their friends chowing down on their school dinners they join in. There's lots of times when people say that their children eat much better at school than they do at home. I've got a background in school food provision and we always encourage the new class Rs coming in to have as many of the free school meals as possible. They all get free school meals now in classes R, one and two. We always used to say to try and do that because quite often children will eat things that their friends are eating that they would never eat at home with their parents. So that can be used to both advantages.

And then obviously on top of that there's a huge range of medical and developmental issues that can cause a child to have issues with food and not just if they've got an ongoing medical condition but also things like if they're going through a growth spurt which might mean that they're either more hungry and more amenable to being given new things or it might mean that they're incredibly tired all the time and they're grumpy or they're teething or any of those things. There's a lot of things in normal childhood development that can mean that at different times they are more or less likely to eat and more or less likely to accept new foods.

So all of those and more are reasons why your child might not have fancied eating that particular vegetable you put in front of them tonight at tea. And you've got to admit, none of those things are your fault and none of those things are your child's fault. It's just that eating is quite a complicated thing and the world is quite complicated and growing up is quite complicated. So I just wanted to get that across to you that you should be being less hard on yourself that this is the thing that you're dealing with.

On the other hand, after listening to all of that, you might be thinking...

So how on earth can we possibly tackle all of that? How can I know which one it is and what should I do about it? And the answer is, if you think there are a couple of specifics in there that you need help with, then by all means go and get some help with it.

There are loads of great dietitians around, quite a few of them are going to be on this show and in the course I link to a bunch of really reputable ones.

But the answer to a lot of these low grade reasons is to take the learning away from the table and to make the table comfortable and fun again. So although you still need to present new food at the table, if you can have some of the familiarity being built at other times of the day that are not in this stressful environment of needing to eat, then you can build up your child's confidence away from that eating environment. So you can still make a big difference, even if it's genetics or if you've got a child that's really struggling to grow out of this phase, you can still make a big difference to them.

In the course I focus on building familiarity, that's what the scientific studies tell us are important for building children's confidence to try new foods. I leave all the eating advice to the professionals, who I'll invite on here instead to give their advice. But at The Foodies I concentrate on ways to build familiarity, that's exposure to food, mostly away from the table. If you're interested in the course it's only £7.49 because I wanted to make it affordable so I'll put the link in the show notes. It takes about 90 minutes to run through and has loads of practical ideas for building familiarity and some printables to get you started, as well as lots of optional interesting science about how it works if you're a bit of a nerd like me.

So check that out if it appeals to you but I'll also be bringing regular ideas to the podcast as well. I hope this has given you some comfort to know that you probably didn't cause your child's picky eating but on the other hand might have given you some confidence that you can do something about it. So on the next show I'm talking to Nikki from Gluten Free Little Cook about what we should do if a child asks to bring home a friend for tea  who is a celiac. It's a really helpful episode so I'll see you then but in the meantime happy eating.

Chapters

00:00 Intro on the question it my fault my child is a fussy eater?

01:05 Why children are fussy

09.02 What we can do about it

10.37 Summary and Outro