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Picky Eaters

This photo is licensed under cc by sa 2.0 by H Dickins

There are more picky eaters or fussy eating toddlers than you'd care to imagine. Since you're reading this page, your toddler is probably one of them.

What are you to do when your picky eater suddenly decides that she will eat nothing but Cheerios ever again? And this happens day after day, for a week or so?

The increasing stress that you are faced with is enough to make your blood-pressure spike. However, some good news - try not to worry (although I know it's hard not to) - because for most toddlers this is just a passing phase.

There are several reasons children become picky eaters when they become toddlers. Not only do they reduce the amount of food they consume, they become very selective about what they will eat.

Whatever happened to the chubby little creature that once gobbled up everything you put on her plate?

When toddlers discover that they are able to make decisions and that they do have a choice when it comes to food, they start to feel independent.

This newfound independence has the ability to quickly turn itself into a power struggle at the dinner table, usually concluding with you reaching the end of your tether, and your toddler having the last word - "No"!

But other than their attitude, for what other reasons do toddlers become picky eaters? One other reason has to do with her physical growth. Your toddler's rate of growth needs to slow down at this stage.

If you've been keeping a record of your tot's height and weight, you may have noticed that she is now having fewer growth spurts, compared to when she was age 0 to 12 months. Toddlers just don't continue to get bigger at the same rate they grow in their first year - otherwise by age 3 they would be giants!

Since your toddler has undergone an enormous growth spurt in her first year, her body recognises the need to grow more slowly. Exercise also becomes an important factor as she begins to lose her former protruding little belly, dimpled bottom and overall chubbiness.

As your toddler outgrows her once little snowball body, she will become longer and leaner. This happens regardless of whether or not she is a picky eater.

Now On to the Part about Eating (or Lack of It)...

When you ask one of the staff what she ate for lunch, the answer is likely to be something along the lines of a casual, "Oh, she had 2 serves of lunch and 2 serves of dessert. She had a good day today". A good day?! Is that all there is to it?

When she's at home, she won't touch a thing on her plate - except for maybe two bites of a fish finger. But when she's at preschool, she gobbles up everything.

I think this is a common concern for many parents of toddlers. I've lost count of how many times my toddlers have tapped me on my shoulder while I was working at my desk, to present me with plates that had been completely wiped clean of any trace of lunch - but coincidently occurring only while Grandma was there to look after them.

Rarely have they finished their meals without a fuss when it was just them and me. Does this sort of thing happen to you - why does it seem like your toddler will happily eat for others but not for you?

One of my theories is that perhaps you (now I don't want to accuse anyone of anything here, but just to let you know, I plead guilty here) make so much fuss over your toddler's picky eating habits that she feels the need to create more feeding problems.

If you react to your toddler's pickiness in such a way that it is treated as a sign of power, then you will have food battles ahead. It's not that she doesn't like the food.

Now, on the subject of being obsessed with the "pickiness" of our toddler, we may not realise that what comes across as pickiness sometimes, is in fact a newly developed instinct to be cautious with new things, a fear of new things - or what is termed "neophobia"

Don't let the food battles get so much attention that they get way out of proportion. And for the sake of your mental health, don't allow yourself to get increasingly distressed while your toddler remains indifferent.

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