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Your child's fussiness for food is mostly inherited, and most of the things parents try in order to fix it make it worse. Find out why young children refuse food, why it is rarely a parent's fault, and the unglamorous method that genuinely changes how they eat.
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Your child's fussiness for food is mostly inherited, and most of the things parents try in order to fix it make it worse. Find out why young children refuse food, why it is rarely a parent's fault, and the unglamorous method that genuinely changes how they eat.
A child's fussiness for food is mostly inherited, settled long before the first argument over vegetables. That sounds like bad news for parents, until you understand what it means and what actually changes how a child eats.
Picture a four-year-old at the table with a plate of something green in front of them. They have decided the green thing is dangerous, and nothing will persuade them to put it in their mouth. The parent tries reason, then encouragement, then a deal involving pudding, then the line their own mother used on them: you are not leaving this table until you have eaten it. The child holds out. Dinner ends without a winner, and the parent goes to bed certain they have done something wrong.
Few things worry parents of young children more, and few are more misunderstood. The reassuring news from the past few years of research is that the worry is mostly misplaced.
The harder news is that the things parents reach for to fix the problem tend to make it worse. The evidence now shows why young children refuse food, why it is rarely a parent's fault, and what actually moves a child from refusal towards acceptance.
The research reveals two key findings. The first is that fussy eating is mostly inherited, which means a parent's cooking, discipline or warmth is not the cause. The second is that even though fussiness is largely genetic, a child can still be helped towards new foods by one plain, well-tested method, while pressing a child to eat, the thing most parents do on instinct, makes the problem worse.
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