My Kids Are Not Picky Eaters. And It’s Not My Fault.
This, they won’t eat. Yet.
Going on eleven years ago, I gave birth to a very hungry baby. We had about a week in which we weren’t exactly in sync, milk-wise, but once my milk came in? Man could that kid drain a breast and demand the second one. Two memories reliably make me laugh. One was the day my milk did come in, with the kind of vengeance that created those crazy porn-star boobs on my chest. My baby boy, who had for the first few days been grappling for the colostrum, barely touched this new milk source before he was sprayed with milk, a fountain all over his face. Rather than being put off in the slightest, he blinked his normally wide-open eyes a few times to get the milk out of his lashes, and dove right back in with single-minded determination. The other memory is of the many times I’d go to pick him up, hungry and crying after a nap. He would grab at my arms, my sides, my shirt — whatever he could get hold of — as I walked him to my chair and/or unbuttoned my top, as if to say, “don’t you even think about putting me down, lady!”
Everything he was given — first spoons of cereal or sweet potatoes or peas — he took, not even changing his facial expression (there was no, “hmm, this is different!”; he was all, “keep it coming, folks.”)
The first time we gave this hungry child solid food for self-feeding, he swept together every morsel that had been placed on his tray with both meaty hands, trying to get the whole lot of it to his mouth in one go (and often succeeding, until we learned, to avoid choking, to give him just a few pieces of peach or soft pasta at a time).
He’s stayed this way. He’s growing like crazy right now — 5 feet tall and nearly 100 pounds, which sounds overweight but trust me; he’s built like his dad. Broad-shouldered, strong, solid. Hungry. There is nothing weedy about this kid, never has been. I can circle my own wrist with my thumb and forefinger, with room to spare; I can’t make it around my son’s wrist. He may not love his vegetables or scoop them up as indiscriminately as he did as a baby and toddler (in fact he groans at broccoli, but that’s more a tweeny than a picky thing, more on that later), but he does eat them. And everything else.
Now my little guy, almost 9. At not quite 60 lbs, without a single cell seemingly devoted to any of the baby fat he used to have, my younger son (though he would eat his weight in macaroni and cheese or cherry tomatoes if given leave) is just … less hungry. He always was. As an infant, he would cry to be nursed, but would calm right down when I picked him up, as if knowing that it was coming, like a restaurant meal safely ordered. All had to do was be patient and his needs would be met.
Admittedly there are times the little one out-eats his brother, but not often, and usually only if he’s barely nibbled for several meals in a row. There are days his lunchbox comes home empty, but more often I’m greeted with a half-sandwich or an untouched yogurt or partly-finished milk or fruit, as though he had either no time or little interest in finishing everything. The real test is this: at a party, my younger guy will tuck into cake, but walk away after a few bites if there’s something more fun happening away from the table. His older brother is the last man standing near the last piece of cake, every single time.
They’re just different.
Like my younger guy, I could take or leave food when I was a child (food that wasn’t made exclusively of sugar, that is). I never pulled up to the table starving, in my memory, and this was back in the days when snacks weren’t dispensed like kibble as they are now in many homes. My sister, by contrast, remembers being hungry all the time. While my little brother tried to toss broccoli off his plate and onto mine (it never worked; my mom’s eye was way too sharp for that and she would toss it right back), my sister ate everything with no discrimination. Even gravy! And salad dressing! And salad.
Make no mistake, I ate it too, because I was compelled to, facing down spinach and beef stew and liver and wishing to heck it had been a spaghetti kind of day. But given my choice (which I wasn’t)? Cheese and butter sandwich, please.
My tastes, when I was hungry at all, ran to the bland.
That’s just the way I was. And then I grew out of it. As did my brother, who now does nearly all the from-scratch-farmer’s-market-locavore cooking in his house.
I’ve been thinking lately about the picky-eating issue. I’m squicky about the label, “picky eater,” for a couple of reasons.
One, it’s a label, and kids tend to grow into the labels placed on them. (“He’s the smart one.”)
Two, it has the whiff of judgment to it. Others judge, sure, but often we parents judge ourselves (what did I do wrong?).
Kids have all kinds of issues surrounding food. My kids love my homemade spaghetti and meatballs, but if I were to separate out some of the ingredients (onions, say, or basil) they would not go near it. My younger guy can locate a tiny bit of cooked onion on the surface of a meatball and flick it off as though it would somehow ruin his whole meal. I don’t like when he does that, but I get it. I did the same thing.
It’s often a texture thing. Just the other day, I cooked some garden-grown zucchini in a way I thought they might want to try — thin-sliced, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and Parmesan cheese, baked in the oven. They were delicious. The crunch part was fine. But the underside of the vegetable was a little slimy-mushy. Which zucchini can be. I love it. But when I was a kid, that texture would make me gag.
Guess what? Though compelled to try the food, both boys’ mouths rejected it. Not for taste, either. And they weren’t just being willful. My big boy did literally gag. They downshifted to baby carrots, with my approval for trying.
They’ll grow into it.
Just like they grow in and out of preferences and food jags and devotions to, followed by rejections of, all kinds of foods.
It’s not my fault if my kids don’t want a certain food. I do all the right things (making a variety of foods, taking them shopping, not supplying too much “kid food,” eating together as a family all the time). More aptly, I do my best — which doesn’t mean a bag of frozen chicken nuggets hasn’t ever lurked in my freezer. But it’s also not my “fault” when they do love the good stuff. There is no rational explanation for why my younger guy is the Cherry Tomato King. I have to ask him to leave me a few for the salad, or he’d eat them all. But they’re gooey inside, with seeds and all. Yet he won’t eat zucchini or — oh, horrors! — eggplant. He’s actually told me (or was it the big guy?) that he’d try eggplant “when I’m 15.”
Random? Not all of it, not all the preferences and the dislikes and the jags, no. But a lot of it? Oh, yes, you better believe it. I didn’t “make” my big boy the fattest, happiest, hungriest kid on the planet, anymore than I made my younger guy the Cherry Tomato King.
They are who they are. (But they do have to eat their broccoli.)
August 16, 2013 @ 2:26 pm
On behalf of parents with picky kids everywhere, THANK YOU.
August 16, 2013 @ 2:50 pm
Ya I don’t buy it. Some picky eaters are definitely “made” not born. You are still offering them a variety of healthy foods and demand they try it. The pet peeve I have are the parents that cow tow to their children, continue to make separate meals for them at 10, 12 yrs old and then feign frustration when their children refuse to try anything new?
August 16, 2013 @ 2:57 pm
Kim, yes — I should have made that clearer. I do think that when parents just start out on the chicken nugget brigade (or when they themselves don’t model eating and trying different foods) they create table-monsters (trying for a new phrase other than “picky eater”!). I should have said so, but my main point here was to say that there is a whole range of stuff that’s out of our hands and our control with our kids, especially as they get older. I could easily have been smug with my big boy, shoveling food of all kinds into his mouth as fast as his hands could carry it, but as he gets closer to teenhood, he’s making different choices and expressing different preferences. The more we feel we’re on top of this kid thing, the more they go ahead and flip our ideas over.
That said, as I always say, we should still keep on keepin’ on, hoping that the good we’re doing will eventually stick. I mean, look at me: My parents kept compelling me to eat things I didn’t want, and eventually I changed. I eat everything now, except mushrooms (ugh; texture problems!). But what if they’d given in to my want for plain cheese sandwiches? They could have, and just called me a “picky eater,” and sighed. But they didn’t. Then again, maybe that wouldn’t have made a difference either and I’d still have grown up to call salad my favorite food.
Bottom line: I agree with you that separate meals for kids are the doom of all civilization. 😉
Denise
August 16, 2013 @ 3:29 pm
Great post, Denise. FWIW, I have a “little guy” too, and he’s fine. He’s healthy, he’s active and that’s good enough for me.
August 17, 2013 @ 10:56 am
My nine year old is tall and he weighs 50pounds. He’s super skinny and I’m fine with that. I stopped caring what people think about his diet a long time ago.
August 19, 2013 @ 11:02 am
My oldest DD is the opposite of your oldest, she was difficult to feed from the start, had to be nursed in a certain position, at a certain time, in the dark, with no distractions,etc. etc. When she was a baby, I NEVER understood mothers who could nurse in public! I couldn’t nurse with any other people present, any small distraction and she would pop right off the breast. She was exposed to a variety of foods, but was always very sensitive to textures and strong smells/flavours. So trying something new was a challenge. As a 2-YO she would eat hummus on a pita, but turn up her nose at any vegetable other than corn or raw carrots. She went through a phase where she LOVED lasagna, and then decided she hated it. We rode it out, asking her only to try one bite before allowing her to eat something else.
My second DD was the type of baby who literally latched on immediately after birth. After my experience with DD#1, I was shocked, as you can imagine! She went on to gobble up almost any food we put in front of her (other than prunes) and to this day is willing to try many things her sister won’t touch like salad and raw broccoli. However, unlike her “picky” older sister, she is not a fan of meat. She will eat all the sugar snap peas off her plate and has to be cajoled to try a piece of pork chops or steak. Again, I think it’s more of a texture thing, that “chewy” texture she really doesn’t care for.
Ont thing I wanted to mention that makes my situation harder, is that with my pickier eater being the oldest, she is the example for my younger 2. so they see her not wanting sauce on their spaghetti, and they don’t want any, either, even though when they were too young to care they ate it all the time and LOVED it. Currently, I don’t make different meals, but I do adapt them sometimes in the sense that I will make spaghetti with no sauce for the girls and my DH and I will eat the sauce. Or I’ll give them raw baby carrots while we eat asparagus. Do you have any advice other than keeping on encouraging the “one bite” rule?
Steph