Parenting a picky eater when you really love food

In this series of articles, I’m exploring YOUR eating habits and not your child’s. How you eat; how you feel about food; how you think about food.

Your eating has lots to do with your child’s eating. Not necessarily in a directly causal way –  there are many factors underpinning limited eating (many of them that your child is simply born with) so I’m not suggesting  that your child’s limited diet is your fault because you haven’t been a good enough role model. If only it were that simple! However, an honest appraisal of your relationship with food can give you some important insights into how to best support your child.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be talking about some of the ways in which different patterns of eating and different approaches to food can have an impact on how you think about your child’s eating.

 

First up: the foodie

I place myself firmly in this category. If you – like me – are a person who really loves to eat and cook, who cares about nutrition and sourcing ethically produced, fresh ingredients, you may have had many preconceptions about how you were going to feed your family.

I remember very much looking forward to introducing my kids to foods from other cuisines, to sharing old family favourites… I was looking forward to meals out, to new dishes on holiday, to teaching my children some of the cooking skills that have been handed down to me via my mother from her mother and beyond.

I am very lucky in that my girls enjoy eating, but despite this I still have some experiences of disastrous meals out or a favourite recipe of mine being rejected, where I have thought “It wasn’t meant to be this way!” More importantly, I have heard from countless clients just how hard it is to have some of these dreams shattered when their child finds eating really difficult.

 

Possible outcomes

If food is super important to you, this can lead to a greater urge to put pressure on your child to eat or try foods. You may have a heightened sense of disappointment when meals don’t go as you’d wished. It can even feel like a rejection of you when your child doesn’t even try a dish you put a lot of time and thought into.

 

Ways forward

It is essential that you accept your child where they are and develop a strong sense of empathy in relation to how they feel about food DESPITE these feelings being pretty unrelatable from your perspective. Acceptance and empathy go hand in hand, because while you are battling with your child’s responses to food, it’s very hard to make that shift into imagining what it’s like to be them, and vice versa.

Remember also, that exposures to a wide variety of foods and being around adults who enjoy food and feel good about eating, is still teaching your child valuable lessons even if they are not ready to eat those foods. Those lessons will stay with them for a lifetime. Maybe one day your child will be feeding a family of their own and their everyday – what you modelled, day in, day out – will form their blueprint for how they want their family to eat.

It’s important to acknowledge all the hopes you had for your child’s eating (and the assumptions you may have made about how they would eat) and it’s okay to feel a sense of loss in relation to those hopes. This is all part of making peace with how things are in your (and your child’s) present.

This isn’t in opposition to having aspirations for your child’s future relationship with food and doing your best to help them learn to feel good about eating, but you need to process how you feel about them having such a different take on food from your own.

Our kids challenge our assumptions every day – they are their own little people – individuals with unique strengths and challenges. I have certainly found that the areas where my daughters are different from me can be some of the trickiest bits to navigate.