A typical breakfast in our house.
Are good eaters born or made?
While each baby’s individual personality plays a role in how well he accepts new foods, the evidence increasingly points to nurture over nature when it comes to your child’s long-term eating habits. In other words, our food preferences are learned, not fixed, and for the most part (excluding certain conditions, such as autism and sensory processing disorder), it is believed that there is no such thing as inherently picky eaters; there only eaters who need more exposure to different foods.
When I was pregnant, I spent a lot of time reading about how best to introduce solids to my children. My eldest naturally loved and accepted most foods from the get-go, whereas my little guy needed much more time and encouragement. At one year old, my younger son would eat only three foods: eggs, berries and bananas. But with lots of hard work and persistence, we gradually increased his food repertoire.
My kids are five and three now, and they eat everything. Of course they have their preferences, as we all do, but I never have to adapt meals, or cook a second meal, to meet their tastes. They eat whatever meal is put in front of them, usually with little or no fuss.
The list that follows is a summary of the tips and techniques that I think had the biggest impact on my children's eating habits.
My five-year-old, enjoying smoked whole capelins from the market. He saw them at the fishmonger, asked to try them, and loved them!
Start early. Food preferences start developing in utero, based on what mothers consume, and continue throughout children's lives. Research shows that there is a period between four and seven months where babies are particularly receptive to different flavours. Due to WHO recommendations for exclusive breastfeeding until six months of age, many parents either don't start introducing solids until too late in the period, or they miss the window entirely. Even if you wish to keep your baby exclusively breast or formula fed until six months old, you can start introducing tastes of different foods - on a finger tip or small spoon - from an earlier age.
Let them eat steak! Health Canada’s most recent infant nutrition guidelines recommend offering iron-rich foods – such as meat and egg yolk – for baby’s first foods. Meat provides much greater nutritional bang for your buck than rice cereal, which is a bland, processed starch, whose limited nutritional value comes only from synthetic nutrients added during the fortification process. Exposing your children to flavourful, whole, unprocessed proteins over fortified processed baby foods sets them up to enjoy those foods long after the baby food stage has ended.
Don’t shy away from strong flavours. There exists a common misconception that infants prefer – or can only tolerate – bland foods. This simply isn’t so. Take the French, for example, who routinely introduce babies to such flavourful foods as blue cheese and pickled vegetables. Indeed, there will be no other time in your baby’s childhood that he will be so accepting of so many different flavours, so take advantage of this prime opportunity to develop his palate.
Offer finger foods alongside purées. Children who learn to self-feed earlier feel more in control of their eating experiences and are more likely to develop positive associations with mealtimes. Allowing your baby to self-feed improves her physical skills, such as her sensory and motor development, and also respects her growing need to develop capability and autonomy.
Introduce textures early. Exposing your infant to a variety of textures as early as possibly just might be the best insurance against future picky eating. A 2001 study of more than 9000 infants concluded that children who were introduced to textured foods after the age of 10 months were “more difficult to feed and had more definite likes and dislikes” than those who were introduced earlier. But is it safe? The BC Ministry of Health recommends offering fork-mashed foods (as opposed to purées) from the age of six months onward, and Health Canada recommends that infants be eating “family foods,” served in soft and age-appropriate pieces, by the age of 12 months.
My son, age six months, enjoying blueberries.