Why is my child a fussy eater? What the science says about the real reasons behind picky eating. Food For Kids Podcast

Joanne (00:00)

In today's Food for Kids, we're talking about why it's not your fault if your child is fussy with food and what the science says about the real reasons for children being anxious with new foods.

Joanne (00:24)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. Is your child a fussy eater? Or maybe not incredibly restrictive, but you just can't seem to help them to be as adventurous with food as you'd like? Or are they okay with familiar foods but anxious when it comes to trying something new? Or is your child okay with some foods but it's really difficult to get them to eat certain food groups like vegetables or meat, for example? Maybe you're an adventurous family or you travel a lot or like to eat out at restaurants, or you just want your child to be able to go to people's houses and on school trips without being scared or embarrassed.

If so, this episode is here to reassure you that you're not doing anything wrong and to run through some of the real reasons why your child might be picky with food.

I've been creating books and activities to help children to become more confident with food for nearly 20 years. I'm not a dietitian and I leave all the actual eating advice to my brilliant paediatric dietitian friends. My work is all around the fun ways to get children involved with food and build their familiarity and confidence. As well as my books and activities for children, I also have an online workshop for parents, which is all about building familiarity away from the table with loads of ideas and printables That course includes lots of the scientific research about fussy eating, and I thought you might like to hear some of it here.

So first up, we're gonna look at some of the things that you might think are causing your child to be fussy. Or the things that well-meaning, or honestly not so well-meaning, relatives and friends might be telling you is the reason your child is fussy. The most underlying fear is that either there's something wrong with your child or that you as a parent are just not working hard enough at fixing it. Parenting can be so guilt and fear-inducing that we tend to jump first to all the ways that we could be failing our children.

You might think, for example, that you're not being consistent enough. If you've been a parent for any length of time, you'll have been told a thousand times that you need to be consistent. In fact, I think one of the only things that people are consistent about is telling other people how consistent they should be. Obviously, consistency is important for building good habits, but you're only human and at three meals a day plus snacks, that means you're serving food at least five times a day and you're not a robot. So being perfectly consistent, literally more than a thousand times a year is asking a lot.

You might also have told yourself off for using the wrong tactics. Maybe you've picked an idea up online or from a friend or grandparent. You've tried it with your child and it's backfired. So now you think you're being too hard on them or you're being too soft on them or you're not a very good eater yourself. So what are you expecting from them? So essentially, if you could just magic yourself into being a different kind of parent, then your child would be fine.

Sometimes you might think the opposite of that, that you're trying everything, but your child is just inherently terrible at food. They're never going to be able to eat properly. That's just the way it's going to be for them. There are of course always a very small number of children who are going to need help for a really long time. And in those scenarios, you should go and get some extra help. But for the vast majority of children, this is not a fixed position that can never change.

In those moments where you gather courage to tackle your child's eating, you might be thinking, if I could just find that one magic bullet, that one tactic that works. The internet's filled with people saying, this is the one true hack or this secret that they don't want you to know. So if you just scroll a bit further, read a bit longer, could today be the day that you find the one tactic that fixes your child's eating and makes family meal times bearable again? Maybe you've seen some tactics working great for someone else. Or maybe one worked for you for a few days and then stopped working. So that must be your fault because you didn't do it right.

But all of these reasons are just your parent guilt running wild. And we have to remember that our brains don't always tell us the truth, especially when we have a lot of emotion and fear attached to our worries about our kids. So if any of those reasons sound like you, then the rest of this episode is here to tell you some of the reasons the science tells us that really contribute to children being fussier with food.

First of all, a bunch of studies have shown that genetics accounts for more than half of the reason why children are picky. So in these studies, genetic variation in the population explained about 60 % of the differences in pickiness at 16 months, so that's your toddlers. And that went up to about 74 % between 3 and 13 years old. There are obviously other factors, genetics isn't everything, and even when they are at play they mix in with those other factors. But you just need to take some heart from the fact that parenting is not generally the biggest influence in why children can be picky. Genes play a really huge part in it. But most importantly, just because something is influenced by genetics doesn't mean it's inevitable or unchangeable. It doesn't mean that your child is going to be picky forever and there are lots of things that parents can do to help children build confidence with food, regardless of their starting point.

Another big factor in instigating picky phases is our instinctive fear of new things, is called neophobia. This is a natural stage of development for humans and some other animals. When we're starting to explore the world, when we're toddling about, if we didn't have some fear of new things, we'd be shoving things in their mouth and that could make us ill or kill As parents, we try to create safe environments for our crawlers and toddlers. But at a certain point, biology kicks in to help our children to be a bit hesitant. So having a little bit of neophobia is not a bad thing. It only causes frustration because it can also get applied to foods that are actually safe and it can go on for a longer phase than is helpful. So don't be upset at the fact that your child might go through a stage of being suspicious about new things. They're trying to exercise some control and to work through their anxieties that are caused by their more sophisticated understanding of their world.

And speaking of anxiety, another factor is that stress and anxiety can make it impossible for children to feel able to be adventurous around food. As adults, some of us will 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. Our bodies are adapted to down-regulate eating and digestion when we're faced with danger to concentrate our energy on survival. And unfortunately, our nervous systems can't always differentiate between anxiety and danger. So for your child, if their experience is that every time I come to the table, someone's gonna try and make me eat food that I don't want, or everyone's all grim faced and no one wants to be here, or everyone's looking at me like I'm doing something wrong, that's a massive source of anxiety and their bodies may just be turning off all of their desire to eat.

When it comes to a desire to eat, environmental factors can also play a big part and it can be a bigger issue for some children than for others. Some children get easily overwhelmed and a noisy room or bright lights or people all talking at once or not talking at all, the smell of foods and all the new things to see on the table can easily overwhelm some children. Some children also really struggle with textures of food, all the textures of the table, the tablecloth, the chair they're sitting in, if the chair isn't the right height, if it doesn't feel safe enough, if they have to lift their arms too much to reach their food, all of these things can make children feel really uncomfortable. And to be fair, adults too. You might, for example, not like eating on those bar stalls that you find in restaurants where you have to perch. And if you're not tall enough to reach the floor, you can slide off if you don't sit perfectly upright. Or you might be someone who hates eating on your lap on a squidgy sofa because you don't like being scrunched up. So sitting comfortably can make a big difference.

Lots of children have issues with textures of food and for some children this is more severe than others that sensory overwhelm. This is something I came across with my own children who are AuDHD. They had issues with specific textures and also with textures mixing together. There's loads of great advice about now about how to build familiarity with textures and tastes. And some of our other episodes have advice on those strategies. But if your child is really anxious about some textures, you could think about getting some advice from a dietitian and get some personalised tactics that could help them.

But don't forget that lots of children have issues with some specific textures, particularly squeaky, pithy or slimy ones. For example, most of my childhood I did not like squeaky things, which included mushrooms, unmelted cheddar cheese or the skins on fresh tomatoes. I eat all of them now, but I definitely had to work to build familiarity with them. And those textures are quite common roadblocks for many children.

Another factor which might not be as obvious when you're focused on why they won't eat something is that your child might lack the knowledge or skills to tackle it without fear. Because we have that inbuilt drive to eat and seek out food, we can often think that eating is really easy. But actually, eating is one of the most complicated things we do as humans. Not only are there 32 steps involved in eating, but most foods that very young children come into contact with are new to them and they might not know exactly what the food is in front of them or how to go about eating it, what peeling, chopping, mashing, chewing, biting, licking or anything else it might need. food seem daunting even if they might like the taste once it's in their mouth.

Practical factors count too, like if they're not hungry or they're too tired. If a child has had a late snack or missed their afternoon nap or has been to a party and worn themselves out, there's loads of reasons why individual meals might be difficult for a child to cope with, and then adding in a new food at the table as well is a hiding to nowhere.

Peer pressure can be quite a big factor with preschool and primary school children. Lots of people have a child that eats really well when they're at home, but when they get into a group setting and they see other children not eating well or refusing vegetables, they join in with that because they want to fit in. This is a natural survival instinct to fit in. Or you could have the opposite, which is your child's very picky about food and then they go and see all their friends chowing down on their school dinners and they join in. I've got a background in school food provision and we always encourage the new reception children coming in to have as many of their free school meals as possible. Even when parents are convinced that they won't eat some of the things on the menu, lots of them do decide to eat things that their friends are eating that they would never eat at home with their parents because their peers have effectively rated those foods as acceptable. So sometimes that peer pressure disadvantage can be turned into an advantage.

On top of these general factors, there are obviously a huge range of individual medical or developmental issues that can cause a child to have issues with food. This can include if a child has an ongoing medical condition, anything from an eating condition like ARFID, a neurological issue that makes eating harder, Or just that they have medications or treatments that cause problems with their appetite. But children who aren't having to deal with ongoing medical conditions can also have developmental stints of difficulty. For example, if they're going through a growth spurt, that might mean that they're more hungry and therefore more amenable to being given new things, or it might mean that they're incredibly tired all the time and they're grumpy, or if they're teething or going through a school transition or any of these things. There are a lot of things in normal childhood development that can mean that they might have phases of being more or less likely to eat and especially new foods.

So those are just some of the reasons why the science says that your child might not have fancied eating that vegetable you put in front of them last night at dinner. 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 a complicated thing and the world is quite complicated and growing up is quite complicated. So I just wanted to get that across that you should be less hard on yourself that this is the thing that you're dealing with right now.

If you've listened to this episode and it makes you feel less guilty, but also a bit daunted thinking, so how on earth can we possibly tackle all that? How can I know which reason it is and what should I do about it? Then please don't lose heart. The science also tells us there are lots of things that you can do and that parents really can make a huge difference over time to raise more confident eaters. Whatever your combination of reasons for fussiness and whatever starting point you're at.

Some examples are that you can make mealtimes more relaxed and less focused on food. You can help children to explore food without pressure away from the table. You can use tactics like food chaining with their meals to build their confidence with new foods. You can model a good relationship with food yourself. And if needed, you can obviously seek help from one of the wonderful professionals that I work with.

In the show notes, I'll link to the episodes with some of those lovely experts where we covered some of these ideas so you can go and check those out. I'll also put a link in the show notes to the workshop I mentioned, which runs through some of this in more detail, tells you how to build familiarity with food in a non-pressured way and provides you with printables and practical ideas.

I hope that something in this episode has given you some comfort today. You should finish listening and know that your parenting is a tiny factor amongst many other bigger ones and that you should stop beating yourself up if your child is anxious with food. But on the other hand, please take away some confidence that you still can make a huge difference to your child to them deal with those other reasons and to help them build their confidence over time.

If you're dealing with this right now, please do go and check out those links in the show notes for for some of the episodes that might be able to help you. I really hope to see you on the next episode, but in the meantime, please be kind to yourself and happy eating.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

01:13 Why you might be thinking your child is fussy

02:48 Why the science says about why children really are fussy

06:40 Summary and outro