My Toddler Won’t Eat
By Marcia Colpan
As a daycare provider, it’s common to see children who will not eat the nutritious meals you set up for them. The federal food program maintains that lunch or dinner should consist of milk, a meat, a cereal, and 2 servings of vegetable or fruit. Breakfast should be milk, a cereal and a fruit or vegetable, while snacks should consist of nutritious food that is taken from two different food groups. So, we spend all this time planning and preparing the food only to have at least half of the group we’re feeding say its yucky.
The first thing that a provider must know and that most parents do learn is that toddlers are notoriously poor eaters. For the first year of their lives, they had to do very little work to obtain nutrition. Their food came in bottled form predominantly and the liquid was well suited to easy digestion without a whole lot of work on their part. Now, we want them to eat. We want them to chew, swallow, digest and even put the food in their mouths themselves. Whew! What a job! They’ve seen baby food by now, but hey, that stuff was ground to a pulp, unseasoned and often very difficult to describe without being able to read. Look at all the different shapes and colors on the plate now! Boy, life was simpler just a few months ago.
After struggling through half that hot dog, the sippy cup with its familiar contents looks pretty good. You can do that wonderful sucking thing with it and you don’t have to figure it out first. Nobody expects you to chew anything with only half a mouthful of teeth. This is great!
Of course, the mothers have other ideas. They envision their little boy jumping with joy at the thought of finally being able to eat Mom’s homemade lasagna. They’re just dying to sit down and eat a meal with the family that isn’t cold and doesn’t have leftover baby food dripped into it. Then there’s the ever-present danger that Mom will get the spoons mixed up and accidentally eat the wrong food. Unseasoned, pulped out spinach is definitely an acquired taste.
So, now we have Mom who desperately wants Horace to eat his lasagna and Horace who has never had that before and is definitely not ready to give it a try.
As mentioned before, the sippy cup looks really good to your toddler. If you honestly want your toddler to eat, the first thing that needs controlled is the sippy cup. If the mother isn’t careful, all the work she put into weaning off the bottle can be undone in record time by continuous use of the sippy cup. Liquid will fill up a small stomach quickly and give the false impression of being full and sated when in fact, the toddler is in need of nutrition that the milk and juice won’t provide nearly as well as the formula did.
The first step is to make note of how much liquid your toddler is intaking during the day and then restrict it to reasonable limits. Take into account the temperature of the day and the energy level of the toddler, but do not permit continuous sippy cup use. It also helps to change the milk to 2% and to water down the juice so that it doesn’t have the same tendency to trick the body into feeling full. When they come to the table hungry, it’s far easier to get them to attempt new foods.
If your toddler has a favorite food that they always eat, like corn, don’t be afraid to serve corn as part of every meal. When they have completed their corn, then praise them for eating it all and suggest they try another food that is new to them or not currently a favorite. Remember that most foods are acquired tastes and need more than one try before they are accepted. A good rule is to permit the child to reject anything after they have tried at least one bite of it. If they resist strongly, don’t push. If there is an older child at the table who is eating the other food, praise them highly for it in front of the toddler. If there is no other child, praise your husband. Heck, he can use it. If that’s not possible, eat your own food with yummy noises, telling the child how good it is. So……. you look foolish. The bright side is that the child is so young that he won’t remember it when he’s forty.
The single largest downfall of toddler eating is the snack. Mothers who are afraid the child just isn’t eating will decide that any food is better than none. This is not true. If you give snacks, and you should, then they must be nutritious and at least 2 hours prior to any meal that is planned. If the mother gives into the easiest thing and allows the child junk food rather than nutritious alternatives, she is encouraging the child to ignore the meal time food in favor of getting something more interesting at snack. If the snack is placed too close to meal times, then the child will not eat the meal, as they are not hungry when it is served. Yes, snacking is a great art. It has to look good, be portable, be timely, and be nutritious. Yes, we are indeed talking about the versatile, the wondrous, the rib sticking peanut butter sandwich. There are many good foods out there that work just as well, but hey, perfection is tough to improve on.
Toddlers love predictability not only in their choice of foods, but in the times that those foods are served. Anyone who thinks toddlers can’t tell time never ran a daycare. They begin to migrate towards the kitchen within 15 minutes of snack time on a daily basis. The sad fact is that a toddler will eat more at meals if those meals are scheduled at the same time everyday. I had a child whose parents were divorced. Every other weekend, he would come back from his father’s home in a foul mood and often constipated. After some discussion and experimentation, we discovered that by having the father maintain the same feeding schedules and food choices that we used at the daycare and that the mother also used, the child was much happier. It was simply a matter of substituting peanut butter sandwiches for cheetos and having dinner at 6:00 PM every evening.
Another major downfall with toddlers is seasoning. They don’t like it. With the exception of salt and sugar, which they will eat in copious amounts until they cease to function, seasonings are not much loved. In addition to seasonings, toddlers will also reject onions, garlic and mushrooms. In short, if you put it in to make the food more appealing to you, they will hate it. Either fix their portions separately or season your food after you have removed theirs. That lasagna we talked about earlier won’t be a real big hit for another year or so. They dislike combined foods and tend to be more content with easily identifiable foods that are basically as plain as you can get them.
If you haven’t done so already, purchase a plate with sections. A toddler can reject an entire meal on the grounds that the applesauce touched the green beans. If you’re really clever, you’ll purchase a sectioned plate that has an interesting picture in each section. Put the new food over the favorite picture. The toddler gets to see the picture when he eats the food.
Last but by no means least, our toddler doesn’t like heated foods. In fact, the more lukewarm they are the better the child likes them. Prepare the food and leave it sit for a bit before serving your reluctant eater. If the child senses that even one of the foods on the plate is hot, he will decide that the entire plate of food is dangerous and will not touch it even if you were to put it in the freezer for an hour. Once he has determined that the food is unacceptable, you’d have a better chance of changing the weather. Toddlers are notorious for their concrete thinking.
As a note, many mothers will allow the toddler to play with a toy at dinnertime. Now, the theory is good. If he isn’t bored, he’ll stay put and eat his dinner. Unfortunately, the toy is usually more interesting than dinner and he forgets about eating entirely in favor of playing. This is really not helpful towards getting the child to eat.
So, you now know why your picky eater is a picky eater. Here’s ten ideas to help out the situation. Try one or several, maybe all.
In the end, this all boils down to common sense and consistency. There must be a predictable factor in anything that you do with your toddler including mealtime. If you are consistent and persistent, then the child will eventually follow your lead and develop good eating habits. Just remember when the peas go flying, that patience is a virtue and those dang little things will roll under the stove.
Copyright 1998 Marcia Colpan All Rights Reserved
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