We are parents, and it’s our job to feed our kids. Sounds straight-forward, doesn’t it? And for most of us, our parenting careers start off just that simply:

Baby cries = offer milk or formula = baby grows exponentially.

This usually works very well for the first several months. But then the adventure of solid food begins, and the equation gets messier:

Baby gets solid food = gobbles it up or
= spits it down chin or
= throws it on floor.

Then, somewhere around the 18th month, a mysterious switch goes off inside your child, compelling her to loudly declare her independence every day in every way, and all bets at the dinner table are solidly OFF. It’s enough to make a mother long for the simple predictability of 2 am feedings.

I was a picky eater as a child, and I seem to have spawned one as well. When he was a baby and first started eating finger foods, he gleefully inhaled anything we put in front of him. But over the course of the next several months, the list of foods he would consent to eat narrowed precipitously. I became frantic about how many calories and vitamins and minerals and various other nutrients he needed, and about how to get them into him. (Just what is a IU of Vitamin A anyway, and is it in mac and cheese?

Messy Eater

When I unloaded my worries to our pediatrician over the course of every subsequent well-child visit, she droned on and on about how it is completely normal for toddlers to eat like birds, and that they almost always manage to get what they need to grow up healthy and strong. But it was little relief. I think parents have a kind of repressed panic that the next dust bowl is right around the corner, and that drives us to want to stuff our children’s bellies at every meal. Or at the very least, we have to contend with the imprinted training of our parents’ efforts to feed us — cajoling, threatening, bribing, whatever — it made an impression that has us in its grip now that we’re the ones in charge of mealtimes.

Now we’ve all read the parenting literature, and we know that we’re supposed to offer healthy food and then lay off pressuring our little ones to eat. Trying to control exactly what and how much they ingest is certain to backfire as soon as little Jimmy or Sally gets a whiff of just how important this eating thing is to us, the People They Most Want to Control in the World. It can also set up unhealthy patterns for later in life: eating to please others, or to clean our plates, or to earn the reward of dessert, rather than eating to satisfy our appetites and nutritional needs.

But we’ve also seen the plethora articles encouraging us to virtually stand on our heads to create meals that are laden with vegetables, yet so pleasing and creative that our children will gobble them up because of just how darn cute they are. You know what I mean: Animal shaped tomato and avocado sandwiches. Smiley-faced spaghetti and carrot-laced meatballs. Fruit-n-zucchini smoothies.

What’s a mom to do? Do I back-off and not worry about what passes through junior’s lips at mealtime (no matter how much of a Slacker-Mommy that makes me feel like, or do I become a culinary contortionist five times a day trying to fool my child into ingesting a perfect reflection of the nutritional pyramid? Do I persistently offer a new food ten to fifteen times (which must involve keeping meticulous charts and diagrams, as far as I can tell no matter how fruitless and wasteful it feels, or do I serve up cold canned peas (not heated, not fresh, and definitely not touching anything else on the plate night after night after night?

Okay, I admit it. I’ve tried all of the above. And it has only served to hone my little one’s food radar; he has never been fooled by food bearing smiley faces, or cut into clever shapes. If it’s new, he’s suspicious, and it’s not getting past his lips, no way, no how. And the more often I offer a new food — one that he declared he didn’t like the first time — the more stubborn his resolve not to like it. So in our house, you might say we’re in a bit of a mealtime pickle (pun intended, of course. And so are most of the other parents I know. (In fact — a side note here — it makes me wonder if we shouldn’t just look more closely at how we’re defining “picky eating” anyway. I’m convinced that if you grouped together all the kids in your neighborhood and plotted their eating behavior on a graph, you would end up with a pretty standard bell-curve. You’d have the kid who will eat nothing but plain noodles at one end, and the kid who will eat anything — pizza with anchovies, triple-decker sandwiches with lettuce, tomatoes, mustard, and heck even horseradish — at the other, and then all of the other kids clustered together in the middle with their garden-variety finicky-eating patterns. So just who are the odd-eaters-out in this picture? And here’s an interesting tidbit: researchers in Finland recently discovered that the nutritional intake of kids whose parents labeled them picky eaters was pretty much the same as kids who were not labeled picky eaters, revealing that parents just may not be the most unbiased observers of their kids’ behavior.

ANYWAY, back to our dilemma. Here we poor frazzled parents are, with doctors in one corner urging us to lay off already, offer our kids healthy foods and then get out of the way of whether they eat them or not. And in the other corner, we’ve got the voices of our parents and the instincts of thousands of years of evolution begging us to beg our kids to “Es, Es, Es” (or for those of you without Yiddish grandmas, “Eat, Eat, Eat!” What the heck is a mom to do?!

Well, I’ve done a bit of research, and here’s what it comes down to. As long as what you’re offering them is healthy, our kids don’t really need all that much. (Did I just hear your blood pressure drop a few notches? Yes, Virginia, we really can relax about our kids eating habits. And in order to help you quiet your inner Yiddish Grandma, here’s the straight facts on just how much your child needs.

Toddlers (those little tykes between 1 and 3:
What kids in this age group (and most age groups, for that matter are hungriest for is control. And we really do need to put them in charge of what and how much they eat. That said, a typical serving size for the toddler-set is one tablespoon per year of age of any one food. And when you’re offering new foods, or a food your toddler has not yet decided to like, start out with a teaspoon of it, alongside full servings of other foods you know she likes.

Keep in mind that toddlers often eat only one or two full meals a day. So if Johnny turns up his nose at breakfast and dinner, but ate a reasonable lunch, you’re golden. And if your little critter only wants to eat mashed potatoes this week, don’t sweat it. As long as he is taking in a roughly balanced diet over the course of a few weeks, he’s doing just fine.

If that still doesn’t help you to relax, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton has gone one step further. In his seminal parenting guide, Touchpoints, he lays out a daily minimum diet for a one to three year old, in an effort to help us parents cool our jets at the dinner table and let the little ones take charge. Here’s what his research has shown will cover a toddler’s daily minimum nutritional needs:

  • Sixteen ounces of milk, or its equivalent in cheese, yogurt, or other dairy products
  • Two ounces of iron-containing protein (meat or egg or cereals fortified with iron. (So how much is two ounces? The meat on one chicken leg, or a tablespoon of ground beef, or one egg, or 3/4 cup of cereal fortified with iron, for example.
  • One ounce of orange juice or fresh fruit (check that, one ounce.
  • One multivitamin (to cover for uneaten veggies.

Yes, sister, this is all your toddler truly needs to cover her basic nutritional needs in a 24-hour period. Doesn’t that make you feel better about the handful of peas she actually ate at lunch? (Note: you should definitely offer your toddler more than this, but if this is all that passes through her in a day, she’s going to be just fine.

Preschoolers (ages 3 – 6:

These wily little rangers eat a bit better than their toddler selves, but often not much. Portion size increases gradually in this age group from about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of any one food by the time they are 6. And, says William Wilkoff, MD, author of Coping with a Picky Eater, “That’s just what you should offer your child, not what you should expect him to eat at any given meal.” Just like us, kids’ appetites vary from day to day depending on activity level, mood, and rate of growth. Continue to offer an appropriate amount of a variety of healthy foods at every meal, and then let him make the final choices about what he is going to eat. You may not see anything green pass his lips this week, but next week, he may be all about broccoli or peas or green beans (yes, really.

One additional boon during the preschool years is that kids become wonderfully influenced by their peers at preschool (OK, sometimes this influence isn’t so wonderful, as evidenced by the array of interesting new words that your child is sure to bring home from school. But one of the ways peer pressure actually helps is that kids in preschool take an intense interest in what’s in each other’s lunchboxes. Gradually, your child may start to try some of the foods that were formerly anathema to her when she sees her best friend chowing down on them at lunchtime.

As this age of social awareness dawns, four and five year olds also start to imitate their parents at the table. Dietary habits, table manners, attitudes towards eating — they soak it all in (so be sure you’re modeling what you want them to absorb!

The golden rule of feeding our children, is, it turns out, fairly simple, according to Ellyn Satter, MS, (an internationally recognized authority on feeding and eating: offer an array of nutritious foods in the portions outlined above at regular mealtimes, and stand back, or, better yet, sit down and enjoy your meal while your child enjoys hiss – from whatever he chooses on his plate. Keep mealtimes pleasant for everyone, and “Never become upset
or worried about food in front of your child,” cautions Karen Cullen, MD, a behavioral nutrition researcher at the USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor and Texas Children’s Hospital.

And if you’re like me, do yourself a favor and just accept that as sure as the sun rises in the east, your child will never “es, es, es” as much or as wide a variety of food as you would like, but she will take in enough of what she needs to grow into an adult who, just like us, eventually, (maybe, say, around the age of 30, will eat a truly balanced diet.

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