For many families, meal times can be a stressful, for both the kids and their parents or carers. While some kids might find it more difficult to eat and try certain foods, some might be against stepping out of their comfort zones at all.
According to the NHS, it’s perfectly normal for children, especially toddlers, to refuse to eat or even taste new foods. While this can cause worry for parents, they went on to say that as long as the child in question is active and gaining weight, and they seem well, then they’re getting enough to eat.
They went on to say that the main thing is to make sure your child is eating at least one thing from each of the main food groups, which are fruit and vegetables, starchy carbohydrates, dairy or dairy alternatives, as well as a protein.
But to help parents and carers, one Occupational Therapy Assistant has taken to TikTok to urge parents to make sure they’re doing one thing during meal times, which could help your child get used to and start liking new foods a lot easier.
“The real reason your kid won’t eat new foods (from an 18-year pediatric OTA),” the woman wrote on her video, where she went on to show the stages she’d take to introduce a new food to a picky eater.
She went on to explain in the caption of the video: “I was the “picky eater.” My parents made me try new foods—but if I didn’t like it after a couple bites, they figured that was that.
“I thought not liking something after 2 tries meant I never would. And once I pushed it away a few times, it disappeared from my plate for good,” she added.
However, after having started her career as an occupational therapy assistant for children, she soon realised that this wasn’t the ideal way to do things.
“Tastes change. But only if the food sticks around,” she explained, revealing that it can take over 20 exposures for some kids to even feel safe enough to try a new food.
Because of this, it’s important for parents or carers to be patient when intorducing a new food to a child, and being aware of that even if they reject the food, it doesn’t mean that they don’t like it.
“So when your kid pushes it away—or ignores it completely? Sometimes it’s just unfamiliarity,” she explained.
In the video, she showed how she’d added grapes onto her child’s plate for 11 days in a row, and it having taken several days for the child to even acknowledge the grape. And while they had spit it out when trying it for the first time, they soon took a proper bite and ended up loving it.
So what’s the best way to go about this? The mum went on to urge people to let the food live on the plate without drawing too much attention to it as a way to avoid creating any pressures and drama surrounding it.
“Because the goal isn’t ‘get them to like it.’ It’s [to] help them feel safe with it first,” she explained.
However, if you feel like your child is find it particularly difficult to eat any type of food, she went on to say that this could be due to ‘something deeper’ going on, such as ARFID, sensory needs, or trauma around food.
For this, the best cause of action could be to contact your healthcare provider for more help.
