Mom Shares Simple Manipulation Technique to Make Your Picky-Eating Child Try New Foods
When it comes to food, almost 30 to 50 percent of children are picky eaters. Give them a bowl of their favorite potato chips or a chocolate-glazed cake, they’ll gobble it up in seconds- but not a bowl of spinach or a platter of vegetables. As years pass, this stubborn and choosy attitude starts to expand into other areas of their life, prompting obsessions and disorders. Thankfully, a mom from Landskrona, Sweden, has figured out a way to make her little one less picky about food. In a 2021 post on a Reddit forum, the mom u/Lucky_Lola shared an incredible hack to deal with picky eaters, without suppressing their autonomy and personal choices.
At the time of writing the post, the woman had a four-year-old daughter who was too choosy about food. She would eat macaroni with tomato soup in every meal but rather refuse to try new foods. To correct her habit, the mom experimented with a hack. She asked her daughter to assist her in a mindful cooking process. As the child got involved in the cooking, she became more open to trying new foods.
“Lately I’ve been having her cook with me, letting her choose between three options on what we should cook, and letting her help me with the clean up. In this past month she had tried so many new foods I would have never imagined and has even declared a few new favorites. I’m floored,” she wrote in the post and added that once children feel pride in their cooking, they automatically become open to eating the food that they witnessed being cooked all the while from raw ingredients.
According to UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals, children usually become picky eaters when they are too sensitive to taste. Specific kinds of tastes, smells, textures and consistencies of foods repel them and make them fussy eaters. However, as u/Lucky_Lola said, when children get involved in the cooking process, they see the entire process of how the meal was made in the first place. This makes them more likely to be open to tasting the food. In the comment section, u/kedvaledrummer called this the “IKEA effect,” and explained that “it’s a really powerful cognitive bias. People place a higher value on things that they help to create. It can be so useful when applied correctly.”
u/joubachi and u/batikwarrior also agreed that when things are in the child’s control and they get involved in the cooking, they are more likely to try new foods. Another mom, u/comicshopgrl suggested a quirky idea to get the kids to try new foods. “I would also suggest rebranding foods,” she wrote, “My kid wouldn't eat green snap peas until I renamed them 'green snappies'. I let her think of cutesie names for foods and it motivates her to try them.”
Many people shared their insights on why and how children develop picky eating habits. u/upturnedfurball reflected that sometimes the pickiness comes from food textures and all a parent may need in this case, to change the texture such as sprinkling chopped onions or adding pepper seasoning, etc. Another factor behind picky eating could be an “underlying sensory processing disorder,” as u/sandyposs said. Several Redditors including u/svartblomma, u/vegatariangardener, and u/thuofthesire recommended moms to try getting their children involved in gardening, as it makes the kids love the vegetables better and more.
