“TIPS FOR PLEASING THE PICKY EATERS”
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When our first few children were toddlers, we dreaded dinnertime. We would prepare all kinds of sensible meals composed of what we thought were healthy, appealing foods.
Most of these offerings would end up splattering the high-chair tray and carpeting the floor.
To make matters worse, we took our kids' rejection of our cuisine personally, sure that this was a sign of parental lapse on our part. What was wrong? Why were these kids such picky eaters?
Why toddlers are picky. Being a picky eater is part of what it means to be a toddler. We have since learned that there are developmental reasons why kids between one and three years of age peck and poke at their food.
After a year of rapid growth (the average one-year-old has tripled her birth weight), toddlers gain weight more slowly. So, of course, they need less food. The fact that these little ones are always on the go also affects their eating patterns.
They don't sit still for anything, even food. Snacking their way through the day is more compatible with these busy explorers' lifestyle than sitting down to a full-fledged feast.
Learning this helped us relax. We now realize that our job is simply to buy the right food, prepare it nutritiously (steamed rather than boiled, baked rather than fried), and serve it creatively. We leave the rest up to the kids. How much they eat, when they eat, and if they eat is mostly their responsibility; we've learned to take neither the credit nor the blame.
Toddlers like to binge on one food at a time. They may eat only fruits one day, and vegetables the next. Since erratic eating habits are as normal as toddler mood swings, expect your child to eat well one day and eat practically nothing the next.
Toddlers from one to three years need between 1,000 and 1,300 calories a day, yet they may not eat this amount every day. Aim for a nutritionally-balanced week, not a balanced day.
All this is not to say that parents shouldn't encourage their toddlers to eat well and develop healthy food habits. Based on our hands-on experience with eight children, we've developed 17 tactics to tempt little taste buds and minimize mealtime hassles.
1. Offer a nibble tray. Toddlers like to graze their way through a variety of foods, so why not offer them a customized smorgasbord? The first tip from the Sears' kitchen is to offer toddlers a nibble tray.
Use an ice-cube tray, a muffin tin, or a compartmentalized dish, and put bite-size portions of colorful and nutritious foods in each section. Call these finger foods playful names that a two-year-old can appreciate, such as:
apple moons (thinly sliced)
avocado boats (a quarter of an avocado)
banana wheels
broccoli trees (steamed broccoli florets)
carrot swords (cooked and thinly sliced)
cheese building blocks
egg canoes (hard- boiled egg wedges)
little O's (o-shaped cereal)
Place the food on an easy-to-reach table. As your toddler makes his rounds through the house, he can stop, sit down, nibble a bit, and, when he's done, continue on his way. These foods have a table-life of an hour or two.
NUTRITIP: Good Grazing – Good Behavior
A child's demeanor often parallels her eating patterns. Parents often notice that a toddler's behavior deteriorates toward the end of the morning or mid-afternoon. Notice the connection? Behavior is at its worst the longer they go without food. Grazing minimizes blood-sugar swings and lessens the resulting undesirable behavior.
2. Dip it. Young children think that immersing foods in a tasty dip is pure fun (and delightfully messy). Some possibilities to dip into:
cottage cheese or tofu dip
cream cheese
fruit juice-sweetened preserves
guacamole
peanut butter, thinly spread
pureed fruits or vegetables
yogurt, plain or sweetened with juice concentrate
Those dips serve equally well as spreads on apple or pear slices, bell-pepper strips, rice cakes, bagels, toast, or other nutritious platforms.
3. Spread it. Toddlers like spreading, or more accurately, smearing. Show them how to use a table knife to spread cheese, peanut butter, and fruit concentrate onto crackers, toast, or rice cakes.
4. Top it. Toddlers are into toppings. Putting nutritious, familiar favorites on top of new and less-desirable foods is a way to broaden the finicky toddler's menu. Favorite toppings are yogurt, cream cheese, melted cheese, guacamole, tomato sauce, applesauce, and peanut butter.
5. Drink it. If your youngster would rather drink than eat, don't despair. Make a smoothie – together. Milk and fruit – along with supplements such as juice, egg powder, wheat germ, yogurt, honey, and peanut butter – can be the basis of very healthy meals. So what if they are consumed through a straw? One note of caution: Avoid any drinks with raw eggs or you'll risk salmonella poisoning.
6. Cut it up. How much a child will eat often depends on how you cut it. Cut sandwiches, pancakes, waffles, and pizza into various shapes using cookie cutters.
7. Package it. Appearance is important. For something new and different, why not use your child's own toy plates for dishing out a snack? Our kids enjoy the unexpected and fanciful when it comes to serving dishes – anything from plastic measuring cups to ice-cream cones.
You can also try the scaled-down approach. Either serve pint-size portions or, when they're available, buy munchkin-size foodstuffs, such as mini bagels, mini quiches, chicken drummettes (the meat part of the wing), and tiny muffins.
8. Become a veggie vendor. I must have heard, "Doctor, he won't eat his vegetables" a thousand times. Yet, the child keeps right on growing. Vegetables require some creative marketing, as they seem to be the most contested food in households with young children.
How much vegetables do toddlers need? Although kids should be offered three to five servings of veggies a day, for children under five, each serving need be only a tablespoon for each year of age. In other words, a two- year-old should ideally consume two tablespoons of vegetables three to five times a day. So if you aren't the proud parent of a veggie lover, try the following tricks:
Plant a garden with your child. Let her help care for the plants, harvest the ripe vegetables, and wash and prepare them. She will probably be much more interested in eating what she has helped to grow.
Slip grated or diced vegetables into favorite foods. Try adding them to rice, cottage cheese, cream cheese, guacamole, or even macaroni and cheese. Zucchini pancakes are a big hit at our house, as are carrot muffins.
Camouflage vegetables with a favorite sauce.
Use vegetables as finger foods and dip them in a favorite sauce or dip.
Using a small cookie cutter, cut the vegetables into interesting shapes.
Steam your greens. They are much more flavorful and usually sweeter than when raw.
Make veggie art . Create colorful faces with olive- slice eyes, tomato ears, mushroom noses, bell-pepper mustaches, and any other playful features you can think of. Our eighth child, Lauren, loved to put olives on the tip of each finger. "Olive fingers" would then nibble this nutritious and nutrient-dense food off her fingertips. Zucchini pancakes make a terrific face to which you can add pea eyes, a carrot nose, and cheese hair.
Concoct creative camouflages. There are all kinds of possible variations on the old standby "cheese in the trees" (cheese melted on steamed broccoli florets). Or, you can all enjoy the pleasure of veggies topped with peanut- butter sauce, a specialty of Asian cuisines.
9. Share it. If your child is going through a picky-eater stage, invite over a friend who is the same age or slightly older whom you know "likes to eat." Your child will catch on. Group feeding lets the other kids set the example.
10. Respect tiny tummies. Keep food servings small. Wondering how much to offer? Here's a rule of thumb – or, rather, of hand. A young child's stomach is approximately the size of his fist. So dole out small portions at first and refill the plate when your child asks for more. This less-is-more meal plan is not only more successful with picky eaters, it also has the added benefit of stabilizing blood-sugar levels, which in turn minimizes mood swings. As most parents know, a hungry kid is generally not a happy kid.
Use what we call "the bite rule" to encourage the reluctant eater: "Take one bite, two bites…" (how ever far you think you can push it without force-feeding). The bite rule at least gets your child to taste a new food, while giving her some control over the feeding. As much as you possibly can, let your child – and his appetite – set the pace for meals. But if you want your child to eat dinner at the same time you do, try to time his snack-meals so that they are at least two hours before dinner.
11. Make it accessible. Give your toddler shelf space. Reserve a low shelf in the refrigerator for a variety of your toddler's favorite (nutritious) foods and drinks. Whenever she wants a snack, open the door for her and let her choose one. This tactic also enables children to eat when they are hungry, an important step in acquiring a healthy attitude about food.
12. Use sit-still strategies. One reason why toddlers don't like to sit still at the family table is that their feet dangle. Try sitting on a stool while eating. You naturally begin to squirm and want to get up and move around. Children are likely to sit and eat longer at a child-size table and chair where their feet touch the ground.
13. Turn meals upside down. The distinctions between breakfast, lunch, and dinner have little meaning to a child. If your youngster insists on eating pizza in the morning or fruit and cereal in the evening, go with it – better than her not eating at all. This is not to say that you should become a short-order cook, filling lots of special requests, but why not let your toddler set the menu sometimes? Other family members will probably enjoy the novelty of waffles and hash browns for dinner.
14. Let them cook. Children are more likely to eat their own creations, so, when appropriate, let your child help prepare the food. Use cookie cutters to create edible designs out of foods like cheese, bread, thin meat slices, or cooked lasagna noodles. Give your assistant such jobs as tearing and washing lettuce, scrubbing potatoes, or stirring batter. Put pancake batter in a squeeze bottle and let your child supervise as you squeeze the batter onto the hot griddle in fun shapes, such as hearts, numbers, letters, or even spell the child's name.
15. Make every calorie count. Offer your child foods that pack lots of nutrition into small doses. This is particularly important for toddlers who are often as active as rabbits, but who seem to eat like mice.
Nutrient-dense foods that most children are willing to eat include:
Eggs
Squash
Fish
Sweet potatoes
Kidney beans
Tofu
Yogurt
Avocados
Pasta
Broccoli
Peanut butter
Brown rice and other grains
Potatoes
Cheese
Poultry
16. Count on inconsistency. For young children, what and how much they are willing to eat may vary daily. This capriciousness is due in large part to their ambivalence about independence, and eating is an area where they can act out this confusion. So don't be surprised if your child eats a heaping plateful of food one day and practically nothing the next, adores broccoli on Tuesday and refuses it on Thursday, wants to feed herself at one meal and be totally catered to at another.
As a parent in our practice said, "The only thing consistent about toddler feeding is inconsistency." Try to simply roll with these mood swings, and don't take them personally.
17. Relax. Sometime between her second and third birthday, you can expect your child to become set in her ideas on just about everything – including the way food is prepared. Expect food fixations . If the peanut butter must be on top of the jelly and you put the jelly on top of the peanut butter, be prepared for a protest. It's not easy to reason with an opinionated two-year-old. Better to learn to make the sandwich the child's way. Don't interpret this as being stubborn. Toddlers have a mindset about the order of things in their world. Any alternative is unacceptable. This is a passing stage.
GRAZING
We have noticed that children's behavior often deteriorates in the late morning and late afternoon, or three to four hours after a meal. Children simply run out of fuel. When blood-sugar levels go down, stress hormones kick in to raise it up again, but this can cause behavioral problems and diminished concentration. To smooth out the blood-sugar mood swings, try the fine art of grazing.
Let your child nibble, or graze, on nutritious foods throughout the day. Make them easily accessible in a lunch pack at school. (Smart teachers allow even upper-grade children to have a mid-morning snack.) Carry snacks with you when you are away from home. While at home, keep a supply of healthy snacks readily available in the pantry or refrigerator.
Here's a trick from the Sears' family kitchen for the preschool child. Prepare a nibble tray. Use an ice cube tray, a muffin tin, or a compartmentalized plastic dish and fill each section with bite-size portions of colorful and nutritious foods. Give the foods fun names, such as avocado boats (a quarter of an avocado sectioned lengthwise), banana or cooked carrot wheels, broccoli trees, cheese blocks, little O's (O-shaped cereal), canoe eggs (hard-boiled eggs cut lengthwise in wedges), moons (peeled apple slices, thinly spread with peanut butter), or shells and worms (different shapes of pasta).
Don't forget that children love to dip. Reserve one or two compartments in the tray for your child's favorite dips, such as yogurt or guacamole (without the spices). Encourage the child to sit and nibble from the tray frequently throughout the day, especially late in the morning and in the mid-to-late afternoon, when the fuel from the previous meal begins to wear off. Shorten the spacing between feedings and you are less likely to have spacey children.
Independence Day
Perhaps the food is not new to your child. In fact, they were just eating (and loving) that broccoli yesterday but today they absolutely refuse with the justification that they hate it. Frustrating? Yes, but there’s no reason that your toddler needs to know that.
Many times, toddlers say ‘no’ as a way to assert their independence from their parents. When it comes to mealtime, toddlers hardly ever have any say as to what they get to eat –unless they refuse to eat an item. By saying no, your toddler is able to take control over some part of his life. While 18 months may seem too young for a child to claim independence, just think of this time as training for when they are teenagers and will ignore everything you say to them.
Many parents choose to combat their child’s struggle for freedom with tyranny. Forcing your child to finish everything on their plate or risk being punished (“No dessert if your don’t finish that lentil soup!”) is often not the best solution to the problem. Not only can this backfire by making your child even more stubborn in their refusal to eat, it can also lead to problems with food later on, such as obesity or eating disorders.
Why Worry?
One of the main reasons parents become concerned over their little picky eaters is because they are worried that their toddler is not receiving the appropriate amount of nutrients. Before you become too overly concerned with this issue, take a moment to look at the bigger picture.
It is very unlikely that every single meal your toddler eats will pack all the nutrients your child needs. However, over the course of the day, most children consume enough of everything to get the vitamins that they need for healthy growth. Even if your child chooses to eat just peanut butter sandwiches for three days straight, there is still no cause for alarm just yet.
Just like adults, a toddler’s body knows what nutrients it needs. Over the course of a week, your toddler probably takes in all the vitamins and minerals necessary for good development. If you are concerned, then keep a food diary for a week or two. You might be surprised at how little it takes for a toddler to receive the appropriate nutrients. Also, remember that a serving for a child is only about a quarter to half the size of an adult serving. One slice of bread is equal to two grain servings for your toddler. To learn more about food requirements, take a look at the nutritional guidelines for toddlers.
If you are still unconvinced that your child is receiving enough nutrition, then make an appointment with her or his health care provider to discuss the situation.
Feed Them and They Will Eat
So, how do you make toddler food easier for the picky eater? Look to make the meal more toddler friendly. First, keep the serving sizes small. Too much food can overwhelm a child and can possibly lead to over eating which may cause problems later on. Additionally, it is important to remember to feed your children when they are hungry and to listen when they say they are full. Again, ignoring them when they say ‘enough’ can lead to food issues later on in life.
To help your child feel more in control of her or his food choices, then present them with a few options at meal time and let them decide what they would like to eat. Asking your child what she wants to eat may seem like a good idea since she can assert her independence this way. However, it can often result in her eating the same item over and over.
So, if you’re worried about your toddler’s nutrition, avoid asking him what he wants. Instead, put a few items onto the table, at least one of which you know they like and maybe one or two new items. And whatever he chooses, do not make a big deal about it. Even if you don’t agree with the choice, you need to allow your toddler the right to decide what he would like to eat.
Also, keep in mind that your child can only eat what you give him. If your toddler’s diet is full of healthy meal choices, then there is little chance that he will not receive the appropriate nutrition.
Presentation of food can also make a big difference with toddlers. Try making a sandwich more exciting by cutting it into a different shape. Serve applesauce with raisins in it and tell your little one the raisins are ants (this trick may not work with all toddlers, so use it with discretion). Sprinkling a light amount of icing sugar or cake-sprinkles on berries will downplay their healthy factor.
Foods that children can get their hands on are always a hit with toddlers. Some great “hands-on” toddler menus include tacos, fajitas, wraps, and pizzas where they can choose their own toppings. This is also a great way to introduce new items without them seeming so scary.
With a little creativity, toddler meals can easily be tailored to suit the fussy eaters in your household. And don’t worry, they will out grow this phase soon enough.
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