The Connected Parent: Getting Beyond “Yuck!” with Your Picky Eater

“I’ve been struggling with my child’s picky eating for a long time now. It seems that the list of things he wants and really will eat is narrowing down over time. I don’t want him to grow up with the experience of daily battles over food. But I do want him to eat more than Cheerios and peanut butter! I feel like we’re caught between a rock and a hard place. Any ideas?”

Many children are finicky eaters at some time in their lives. There are lots of ideas out there about how and why food preferences become narrow, and I’ll talk next month about a few things I’ve observed in this regard. But no matter what has caused a child’s preferences to become strong and narrow, there’s a beginning strategy for loosening things up that’s fun to do, and that your child will most likely love. You may have some fun with it too! This recommendation goes with these provisos: if you suspect that your child is undersize or underweight, or if he never touches a vegetable or fruit, you of course need to have a conversation with his physician to make sure he’s getting the vitamins and nourishment he needs.

When children are caught in a behavior that makes them rigidly opposed to something ordinary and everyday, like putting on clothes, or shampooing their hair, or brushing their teeth, or eating a variety of foods, pushing them to do that one simple thing becomes a highly charged emotional event. We parents feel like we’re in a power struggle, and that for the child’s own good, we must “win.” We don’t know exactly what each child feels during these Waterloos, but we do learn that if we force a child to perform the dreaded task, he’ll have passionate feelings, express those feelings fully, and the next time we approach that task, his reaction is stronger than before. Forcing him doesn’t loosen the opposition. It tightens it.

Try a Humorous Tack

So the strategy I recommend as a first step is this: if you can’t fight ‘em, playfully join ‘em! Go ahead and adopt your child’s attitudes toward food, playfully, and with relish. You be the person who is openly disgusted by carrots, or peas, or mashed potatoes. You make faces. You say, “Yuck!” and stick out your tongue. You pick up the offending food and drop it on someone else’s plate. If you’re flamboyant, you fling a piece of broccoli across the table.

Chances are, your child will laugh heartily at your good-humored show of revulsion, and beg you to continue. As you play the one with the silly food aversions, your child’s laughter will, over time, have a healing effect. The laugher releases some of the tension that has nailed his aversion in place. He’s off the hook as “the one with the problem.” He’s not being singled out as wrong. Instead, you are silly and you and he together spend time in good humor, on the subject of yucky food, as a team. The food (or brushing teeth, or putting on clothes, or having a shampoo) loses the focus, and that focus turns to the relationship between the two of you as you lightheartedly play the troubled one. Your child feels delighted that eating has become less serious, and the laughter relaxes and encourages him. The “I hate broccoli” game can go on for long periods of time. I won’t guarantee that your child will suddenly eat a hated food after you’ve played this for 20 minutes—he probably won’t. But many ten-minute laughter sessions add up to a child’s sense that all is well. His fears diminish, silly time by silly time, and at some point, he’ll be more open to taking a tiny bite, or to tasting a food and spitting it out, a big step from tight lips and adamant refusal.

I watched one Dad do this with his three-year-old daughter. He sat down next to her, and put some vegetables on his plate that she was refusing to touch. He started to fork the food, and then went into “Daddy doesn’t want this food” mode. He moved his fork away quickly, and made a disgusted face. He winced, he turned away, he said, “Ewwwwwww!” He touched it gingerly with his finger and bolted back. He smelled it and turned up his nose. Somehow, he found twenty vivid ways to show that this food was the worst. His daughter laughed again and again. “Do I have to eat this?” he would ask. “Yes!” she would say, and he would wince and twist and protest some more. He ended the game by tasting the food, and having his face turn from disgust to a huge smile and an “Mmmmmmmm! Yummy!” If he had the energy, his daughter would have been happy to play this game for an hour, I’m sure.

Sometimes, Deeper Feelings Need to be Aired

This is not the only strategy that’s helpful: sometimes it makes sense to simply say, “No, I’m not going to make you a different dinner. This is what there is to eat,” and stay close and supportive, sure that the food that’s there is actually fine the way it is. Laughter work can help your child loosen his resistance, but sometimes, the deeply emotional side of his resistance to food tastes and textures simply needs to be heard. Don’t force him to eat the food he doesn’t want. But do set some small step toward tolerance as your goal. Ask him to taste it, or touch his tongue to it, or chew a tiny morsel and then spit it out. Then sit with him, offering warmth and confidence, as he cries. Don’t apply a timeline: if it takes thirty minutes or longer for your child to tell you how impossible this is, that is time very well spent. A picky eater is often picky about lots of other things, too. Having your caring attention while he shows you the anger and desperation that’s been stored up inside will, paradoxically, help him relax. After several big cries, he’ll begin to step forward from a life in which many things don’t feel right to him, to a life in which most things feel pretty OK.

Children’s strong aversions often seem to tap into feelings that may come from very early struggles. Children who have had difficult births, who have needed intensive care or medical intervention as newborns, who haven’t nursed well at first, or whose mothers have had health crises just after birth may focus the fears they carry from these experiences onto food tastes and textures. The intensity of their feelings about foods is real, but the emotional source, one might venture to guess, is a feeling that is fraught with fear and desperation radiating from this earlier source. Listening and caring while his feelings are strong helps to ease the child off of his guarded stance, not while he’s crying, but afterward.

One Mother’s Experience

Here’s one mother’s experience with her two picky eaters, so you can see how these “Listening Tools” work when applied to this issue.

After talking with Patty about my picky eaters, I decided there was an emotional project to be tackled. My 3-year-old is super picky about food and she has the biggest journey with this issue. My 5-year-old is just very picky. When I thought more about Patty’s theory that this is about fear, I realized that my 5-year-old had been a spitty baby and also had some mild food allergies and that these were likely the sources of fear. It took me longer to think of the fear for my 3-year-old. It’s funny that this took me longer to figure out, because she dropped into the 5^th percentile in her first year of life and there was stress and lots of discussion about feeding her and making sure she was getting enough. That easily explains why she has a good-sized emotional project, because her difficulties were so early and so pervasive.

Anyway, one night I tried to find the point where the emotion would start for both of them. A food their older sister requests sometimes is potato soup and neither of them would get near it. So first I tried having it in a bowl in front of them, asking them to think about eating it. They both cried and screamed and yelled at points and I just let them protest and pushed it no further. I tried having it on a spoon half way to my 5-year-old’s mouth. That felt a bit weird and I decided to change this into the laughter mode. So I invited them to feed me. My younger daughter happily agreed. She fed me the thick soup on a spoon. I closed my mouth and made faces, turned away, said “Bleeech!” to keep her laughing. The older one said she didn’t want to, she didn’t like that and she got upset. I said it was fun and that I was having fun – it was OK. So she opened up to trying it. She held the spoon for me and I backed up and she giggled. When she got tired of that, I tried other things to get her laughing. And she kept giggling. I even tempted her to get some on my face and I had to practically do it myself, wiping some on my nose. In the end they each had a ball doing this and my 7-year-old wanted a turn to because it looked like so much fun.

The best part is that in the weeks after this my 5-year old tried many new foods. She is still willing to try new things and has found more and more foods she is willing to eat. This one Playlistening time really helped her. I have done this to a lesser extent a couple more times, focusing it mostly for my youngest. She has improved and will let most things sit on on her plate now. She will sometimes try something but she isn’t nearly as relaxed about it I would like. So whenever I have time I try to allow a little crying, but mostly laughter, as it seemed a better fit for this issue and this child. Tonight she wouldn’t try noodles and cried that there were too many on her plate when we sat down. I listened to her her a bit and she focused on other foods. During the meal, I stated that I wanted her to try it tonight. “Not right now,” she kept saying. At the end I asked her to touch the noodles and she hesitated but did. Then I asked her to pick them up and she didn’t want to. I picked them up and then thought of playing with them. I had her feed a noodle to me and then I dangled a few out of my mouth. She lay across my lap face up like a baby and I tickled her with them on her legs, elbows, chin, tummy etc. She laughed a lot and then was willing to pick it up a noodle herself. It is an ongoing project but I am confident that eventually she will be open to trying new things.

–a mother in Los Altos, CA.

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