Beyond Your Baby's Checkup by Luke Voytas MD

Author:Luke Voytas, MD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2018-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

PREVENT PICKY EATERS!

Okay, this is a big one, and one of the most important messages I want to share in the entire book. At twelve months, kids are usually great eaters. They’re thrilled to try new things and excited to eat off your plate. But by eighteen months something has changed. That twelve-month-old who was downing hummus and kale with gusto now likes only five foods and deftly picks out any molecules of green he finds. The table has become a battleground three times a day, and you’re losing most of the battles. How does this happen? Parents talk about being picky as if it is a trait just like having curly hair or dimples. But I want to convince you that you have control of whether or not your kid becomes picky. Well-meaning parents fall into some common traps around this age that have implications for how their kids eat for the next few years. Let’s recognize these traps and figure out what we can do to avoid them.

On this page, we talked about how toddlers start to have big-time fluctuations in what foods they prefer and how much they eat from meal to meal and day to day. But how exactly do they become “picky” by eighteen months? Well, they start to realize that fatty, salty, and sweet foods taste better than foods that are not fatty, salty, and sweet. They start to prefer foods that are carb-heavy and starchy over foods with protein and fiber that might be mushy or stringy. And they’re busy! Forty-five-minute sit-down meals don’t fit their lifestyle. They would prefer to graze on snack foods so they can keep on playing. At the same time, they’re discovering their independence—that they can control their environment and you.

The result is that they gravitate toward simple processed foods such as hot dogs, chicken nuggets, and mac and cheese. Snack foods tend to be crackers or dry cereal. Toddlers often like milk because they can pound it and move on—many would live on milk if you let them. Most continue to enjoy fruit because it’s sweet. Vegetables often fall out of favor, even when you try to hide them. Little kids tend to avoid meats and dishes such as stews and casseroles that have multiple ingredients (you have to admit, tuna surprise can look a bit suspicious).

Now here’s the clincher, the thing that really sets a vicious cycle in motion: It’s dinnertime. You’ve made a wonderful lasagna with lots of good stuff in it—zucchini, spinach, whole wheat pasta, ground turkey. You’ve even sautéed some carrots on the side with just a little bit of butter so that they are soft and sweet, just how your toddler used to like them. He looks at everything on his plate, scrunches up his face in disgust, and refuses to touch it. You start to work your playbook, zooming the food in like an airplane, taking a bite yourself with a ridiculous smile to show him how delicious it is, even busting out the spoon that looks like a bulldozer.

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