I’ve recently written two articles where one covers the 5 food groups and how to balance your food intake and either focused on recognising what a food serving is and what that means in terms of the portions of food you should be eating with each meal.
That’s all well and good when you are someone with a broad taste in food who finds it easy to pack in all the essential nutrients you need to consume in a day. However, if you are a parent of a child who is a picky eater, trying to give your child sufficient nutrients in a day is not only a challenge but it can be extremely stressful and worrisome.
Firstly, assess whether you should be worried at all or whether you are being overprotective. Most children have an aversion to good old greens, especially if not introduced to them early enough and not raised in an environment where eating veg is expected behaviour. But let’s face it, persuading most kids to chow down on a floret of cauliflower is rarely going to be a walk in the park. The good news is that there are plenty of other vegetables you can offer instead to your picky eater.
However, you should be worried if your picky eater isn’t thriving. Failure to thrive is a term used when a child is not taking in sufficient nutrients to grow and develop as compared to their peers.
If your child is a picky eater to the extent that they won’t eat most foods, failure to thrive will become noticeable usually around 7-8 years of age when most parents begin to realise the problem isn’t going to go away on its own.
Causes Of Picky Eating
There are various reasons why a child may develop an aversion to certain foods. These could be:
- a heightened sense of smell that makes them taste flavours more intensely than most people.
- problems with anxiety.
- fear of being unhealthy and avoiding foods unnecessarily.
- an aversion to the texture of certain foods.
- being afraid to try new food experiences.
- having a fear of choking.
You may find that while your child will eat a lot, they will only eat certain types of food, severely limiting their ability to obtain a wide enough variety of nutrients from their diet.
Like any ingrained habit, the longer it goes on for and the more attention placed on it, the harder it is to correct. Seeking help early is key.
How To Help Your Picky Eater?
- Work with a food nutritionist to make a list of foods your child wants to try and then another list of things you as a parent think they should try.
- Determine whether they are avoiding food because of texture or smell.
- Create a plan to slowly expose your child step by step to new foods in a controlled way.
- Make a rule for your child – they can only say they don’t like a food item if they have tried it on three different occasions.
- Get your child to rate different foods they try on a scale from 0 to 10 and reward them with gifts and prizes if they eat foods they rate above 5 several times a week as practice
Over time, you may find that your child latches onto a new food item that you can prepare in meals in a variety of different ways, which in turn opens your child up to trying more new food types.
Does Homemade Soup Work For Your Picky Eater?
If you’ve been looking for a dish your picky eater will devour, homemade soup is the way to go. This is a dish that your picky eater will slurp up!
(Tip: To pique the childlike curiosity and make it look more yum, serve the soup hot with garnish and a side of boiled noodles)
At Shane’s Kitchen, we offer soups that picky eaters simply love and devour. Made with the world’s best soup recipes, our soups are prepared under a mom’s supervision. We understand the value of home-cooked food. Moreover, we understand how tough it is to conjure up meals with new food items. That is why our homemade soups are made to relieve you of cooking while bringing in the nutrition that every child requires.
So, if you are living in Singapore, be sure to try Shane’s Kitchen’s range of soups and stews! When you order our home-cooked food in Singapore, we make sure that you get Zero nasty stuff like artificial flavourings, additives and preservatives.
Get our freshest homemade soups delivered to your home with our healthy home-cooked food delivery in Singapore.