Picky eaters: Who’s to blame?
Our 5-year-old, like most first borns, is a picky eater. He has all sorts of weird food rules relating to color, texture and temperature. (There’s nothing like a brown spot on an apple to throw him into a tizzy.)
Our 3-year-old has no food rules. (Well, one. He won’t eat baked potatoes. We don’t get it either.) But he will eat broccoli, squid, beets, avocado – you name it.
I’ve always wondered if their eating habits are a result of their starting points. I spoon fed our 5-year-old processed baby food out of a jar starting at 6 months, while I let our 3-year-old pick salmon off my plate when his fingers wandered there at 9 months.
(I like to think I was less worried about food allergies my second time around, but the truth was I was too tired to stand up and fetch him a jar. We make our third child hunt for her own food. Thankfully, she’s good at it.)
Now apparently there is some science behind my theory, and a movement called baby-led solids, where parents skip the puree phase. Intentionally.
[Gill Rapley, author of Baby-Led Weaning: Helping Your Baby to Love Good Food] argues that bypassing the spoon and the cereals and purees in the transition to solids puts children in control of their own feeding, a natural extension of on-demand breastfeeding, and that doing so leaves them less likely to be overfed and to have problems later with food and obesity. She also believes that allowing children to choose to experience a variety of tastes and textures leads to fewer battles during mealtime further down the road. — Babble.com
What do you think?
I, for one, feel better about being lazy.
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It makes sense to me, but who knows? My third has always been pickier than my older two.
I’ve found that the less of a deal we make food, the easier is goes. My children eat what we eat or they wait until the next meal. The Babble article makes sense to me as well. If only sleep were as easy around here…
We have a HUGE amount of food allergies here. The kind that mean you have to carry an epi pen and go to the ER in 10 minutes or the kid dies type of allergies. My first is picky and he had the most variety. The next 4 have varying amounts of picky. I’m now introducing solids to the 6th. I agree free range is good, but I am now an advocate of starting at 4-6 months. See my post on my
blog for more details. I have found my group to be speech delayed if I wait too long.
We don’t have kids yet, but I am a picky eater according to some. I like REAL food, not processed junk. So I really don’t consider that too picky:) Love the photos!
I guess I’m lucky. Neither one of my boys is picky, they will eat just about anything and they will try everything. I exposed them to all different kinds of foods when they began eating solids, but there was no strategy, just luck!
OMG, that last picture made me laugh out loud!
I gave my daughter chopped up table food – other than cereal when she was really young, from about 8 months on she just got what we ate – and ate everything until about the age of 7 where she sustained herself on chicken fingers at restaurants, and hard salami sandwiches with muenster cheese for her lunch from third grade through 9th grade.
Now almost 18, she likes more vegetables and Chinese food than red meat. To which she blames me, because when I was pregnant with her, I ate a ton of Chinese food and shunned red meat – it made me want to throw up!
I completely agree! We followed all the “rules” with our biological son, who is now allergic to peanuts and is a fairly picky eater. Our daughter, adopted from Guatemala at 9 months, came home eating EVERYTHING…because that’s what her foster family gave her. I tried to give her baby food and she cried. I tried to give her cereal and she spit it out with a look of horror on her face. She wanted refried beans, chicken, eggs, tortillas and guacamole – the more flavor the better. She’s like that today – munching on cabbage and wasabi peas instead of carrots.
I’ll be honest. My #1 is like your #2 and your #1 is like my #2 an dour #3′s are the same!!!! Daughter #1 likes her carrots raw, can eat a whole cucumber and LOVES Spinach. She was on cereal till she was 2!
Daughter #2 started solids early and is a fussy eater though we discovered 2 years ago that once we started sitting together to have family meals, her eating improved. Now she eats a lot but still….. and the son, my #3 will try a lot of things, which this evening included dipping his PB sarnie in strawberry yogurt! Thankfully, he didn’t go through with it all. I would have been worried. A bit like his dad who’ll have chilli pepper and salt on a sunny side up, place that on orange marmalade and love it!!!!!
Baby girl would eat absolutely anything, but I started her on purees of fresh fruits and vegetables. We did that for a couple months until one day, she reached onto my plate and grabbed a noodle and then a piece of chicken sausage!! After that, there were no more purees. Here’s to lazy moms!
This was a really interesting read. My daughter is very picky. My pediatrician told me that she was enjoying all the attention she was getting (from us begging her to eat, singing to her while she was in her high chair, making funny faces as we tried to feed her, etc.), and that we needed to calm down and just go with the flow when it came to her eating. That actually worked – kind of.
But this notion of not doing the baby purees is so interesting. We’re hoping to have another baby in the relatively near future, so I will file this post away! Thanks for sharing.
Love all of the replies and how different our experiences have been
. We’ll see how it goes with the third. So far, so go!
Just found your blog…love it – that said, I’ve never commented on a blog and don’t know why I am but….I am a wanna-be foodie and a mom of 3 very different eaters! I’m not a big parenting book reader because I want to screw up on my own. So with my first I enforced all my food rules, sort of gave in with my second, and threw the book out the window with my third. Now I have one who thinks a hamburger will kill him but LOVES brussle sprouts raw, one who will eat salami and bacon with every meal and another who will eat what ever it is in front of him because it’s there (and like your third just has to fend for himself). What I’m getting at is….if I had to do it all over again (and thank GOD I don’t), I wouldn’t change anything – I figure at some point they will all figure out their own eating style or starve!!
My kids (also 5 and 3) were fed the same way as wee ones but the 5-year-old is incredibly picky, while the 3-year-old eats everything but cucumbers and cauliflower.
I do like the concept of skipping the purees though. Maybe we’ll do that with the baby. We’ve got plenty of time to decide though.