Text: Georgina Gueses. Article from the August 2014 issue of Living and Loving Magazine.
Almost all toddlers give their parents grey hairs at meal times. Try some of these tricks to tempt your toddler’s palate.
You thought you’d cracked this parenting thing. Your toddler was eating everything you fed her – even olives – and you were just giving yourself a hearty pat on the back, when suddenly … bowls of food started getting pushed away, once-loved vegetables were rejected, and yoghurt and Salticrax became the only food your little one would even consider trying. So what happened?
According to US-based Dr Sears’ website, “Being a picky eater is part of what it means to be a toddler. After a year of rapid growth (when 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.”
Of course, understanding the reasons doesn’t make it any easier. And most moms and experts will tell you that there’s no magical solution to getting toddlers to hoover up their butternut mash again. In fact, feeding a toddler becomes more about staying ahead of their game, with a set of changing strategies to work around every protest. This is how to tackle some of the major feeding challenges:
Hidden vegetables
Almost overnight, vegetables become the biggest battlefield between toddlers and their parents. According to Deborah Jacobson, a dietician with an interest in paediatric eating, as long as your children eat fruit or vegetables, it’s not necessary that they eat both – so don’t panic if you can still get them to eat apples, bananas and pawpaw.
However, if you’re still not sure that they’re getting enough (a toddler should have five small servings of fruit and vegetables a day), you’ll have to resort to hiding the goods.
“I hide things in muffins,” says Avital, mom to a picky toddler. “I use wholewheat flour, with apple sauce to sweeten them, olive oil for fat, and almond chocolate milk instead of cow’s milk. I also throw in pumpkin puree, sweet potato or zucchini. As long as I sprinkle chocolate chips on top, she likes them.”
Another idea is to mash whole vegetables and hide them in mashed potato cakes, which kids will often eat.
Another mom, Deborah, advises using the old trick of pureed vegetables hidden in a tomato or mince sauce, or smoothies with carrots or beetroot mixed with other blended juices.
“I usually grill a bunch of veggies and then blitz them in a food processor,” says Sharon. “Ava calls it tomato sauce when in reality it’s a ton of veggie sauce that she’s happily eating in her spaghetti bolognaise or stew.”
Another good trick is to use vegetable spreads – sundried tomato paste, pesto or tapenade on wholewheat toast fingers, might get past their vegetable detection radars.
They’ll eat well for anyone but you
A large part of what toddlers put their parents through at this stage is all about control. “I was hugely relieved when Luke went off to school at the age of three,” says Tracy. “It must have been the peer pressure, but he ate the food at school. He was still fussy at home, but I could finally relax because he was at least eating something nutritious during the day.”
Many people report similar stories – their children will eat at school, at friends’ houses, or they’ll have whatever their nanny feeds them at lunch time. If you know that your child is eating enough good food, regularly, with someone else, then you can allow dinner to be only fish fingers, pizza, or rice cakes with cream cheese. Just be sure to keep track of whatever else they’re eating.
‘The only way to get my child to eat was by drifting into the room and ‘accidentally’ leaving a bowl of food with her.’
Often, a child will resist eating when you’re paying them close attention, so for some kids, the best idea is to deliver food nonchalantly and get on with something else. “The only way to get my child to eat was by drifting into the room and ‘accidentally’ leaving a bowl of food with her,” said one mom. “As soon as I tried to make her sit and eat, it wouldn’t happen. I’ll deal with table manners when we’re past this phase.”
The illusion of choice
Hand-in-hand with the need for control, comes the desire for choice. Some children will accept being told that they can eat carrots or butternut, but they can choose which one. Some children won’t, of course.
“What worked with my kids was placing lots of little servings of foods in small containers and giving them a bowl of pasta or rice to create their own dish,” says Nicki. “Of course, my eldest still doesn’t choose the vegetables, but I do feel that I get them to try more variety this way.”
Children generally find snack platters quite appealing, and by presenting them with a variety of bits and pieces, you’re less likely to be told, “I don’t like dat!”
“My daughter has been the fussiest eater ever,” says Bronwyn. “I started making a platter every day with healthy foods, which I would put down without any fanfare, and she began nibbling from it. Now she expects it every day!”
You can try carrot sticks, cucumber slices, cooked corn off the cob, apple moons, grated or cubed cheese, sliced sausages, shredded chicken, and biltong, and you can even include a treat item, like a small handful of crisps, in one of the bowls.
This approach also helps with toddlers who are, by their very nature, distracted. They can help themselves and get on with what they were doing, going back for more when they feel like it.
Grow a garden and let them cook
“When my daughter started helping me to pick vegetables from our veggie patch, I found that she was much more likely to eat them – either straight from the plant, or later when I’d cooked them,” says Victoria.
Children like knowing where things come from, and the process that goes into making them. If you can grow vegetables (in a window box if you don’t have a garden), they’ll be more likely to try things that they’ve tended and picked themselves.
“My son wouldn’t touch scrambled eggs, but as soon as I let him break the eggs (yes, it was messy), stir them up and then, under close supervision, cook them on the stove, they became his favourite thing,” says Geraldine. “I think kids like to do things that grownups do, and when they feel important, they forget that they’re pretending they don’t want to eat.”
Giving yourself a break
“The biggest favour that I ever did myself was giving up caring what my children ate,” says Geraldine. “I don’t let them eat junk, and I put out fresh, healthy food and try to entice them with something new occasionally, but I don’t get uptight about it. The result is still the same, and there are no mealtime battles.”
Roberta agrees, “I never forced my fussy eater to eat. According to the doctors, she was well, and I was simply asked to trust her own hunger. She would eat when she was hungry. Don’t obsess over it, and don’t make food the enemy.”
Even so, Deborah says it’s important to persevere with a variety of foods. “Just because a child won’t eat something one week, doesn’t mean he won’t eat it the next.”
It’s much better for the family to sit down together for an early dinner, than for parents to eat after the children have been put to bed.
Sharon’s experience bears this out, “Ava goes through phases when she’ll eat three bananas a day for a week, and then she’ll tell me she doesn’t like bananas and only wants apples. So all I do is let her have those for as long as that phase lasts.”
Forcing the issue
While a lot of the advice given here is about avoiding a fight, sometimes you do have to engage in a battle of wills with your child. Deborah says that if you’re jumping through dietary hoops and cooking two or even three meals a night to satisfy picky children, it may be time to wrest back some control.
“Put a meal down in front of them, and try for half an hour to get them to eat it,” she says. “If, after half an hour, they haven’t, take it away, and let them know that they can eat at the next meal.” While it goes against maternal instinct to make a hungry child wait for food, this method is effective and should resolve most eating issues fairly quickly.
Deborah also says that it’s important for societal as well as nutritional reasons to get small children to eat with the family. “It’s much better for the family to sit down together for an early dinner, than for parents to eat after children have been put to bed. Children learn by example, so it’s important for them to watch you eat at a shared mealtime.”
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