HOW TO FIX A PICKY EATER

Is your kid a picky eater? If you’re trying to fix the problem by forcing the issue, you’re probably making your child’s habit of picky eating worse. A study published in the journal Pediatrics followed more than 300 parent-and-child pairs for five years.
– Eating is one of the few domains kids can exert some control over. Demanding that a child eat, or restricting food, causes some of the pickiest eaters, according to the study.
– Don’t force kids to clean their plate. Don’t make them sit at the dinner table until they eat a certain amount of the food. Avoid bribing with food. It’s a natural inclination to say, ‘If you eat your green beans, you can have dessert.’ But that can backfire and create an even larger negative association with that food.
– The best time to introduce new foods is when the baby begins solid foods at six months, and then continue to offer a variety of foods throughout the formative years of toddlerhood.
– Let your infant lean in and open his mouth when he wants to eat. Don’t play airplane games – that doesn’t help.
– Expose your child to the food multiple times. Keep putting it on the dinner table.
– Let them “pick” the food at the grocery store by giving them a choice of two, and then let them help prepare it.
– If your child has developed some picky notions about what she will eat, don’t fall into the trap of making a meal for her and a meal for the rest of the family. Have something nutritious she can eat on the table, and then let it be.
* My parents had a cure for picky eating. It was called hunger.
* Kids’ll eat almost anything – asparagus, beets, lima beans – if you put a chocolate fondue pot on the table.
* Or flip it around – “You can have either the dinner I made, or a tablespoon of Tabasco sauce.”
* Children, yes, but how about a husband?
* PHONE TOPIC: What’s the one food that people keep trying to get you to like, but you hate it?