The Audacity of Fussy Eating Advice

Kid Food Instagram is awash with ‘tips’ and ‘tricks’ and ‘expert advice’ for getting your ‘picky’ eater to eat two goddamn peas. On top of perfectly curated bowls of organic, home-grown veggies and locally produced quinoa or whatever-the-fuck, parents, ok mothers, are expected to deploy a battery of strategies to ‘overcome’ their child’s ‘fussy’ eating and raise Good Citizens who like their broccoli as much as their cake. Allegedly.

Popular strategies include: sticker charts for finishing their fruits and vegetables, playing with food at the table (“can you show me how to chomp these peas like a dinosaur”), cutting shapes out of fruit and sandwiches with teeny tiny cookie cutters, and sticking little flags or forks in food. We’re taught to praise them for clearing their plates, or to hide veggies in their pasta sauce, or just to have a ‘no thank you bite’.

Some, maybe even most, of these ‘tips’ come from professionals - registered nutritionists and dietitians, doctors, psychologists, and feeding therapists. People who are ostensibly qualified, but seem to be missing something key about what kids actually need to eat well.

So, what’s the problem?

Well, maybe there isn’t one, and if these things work for you, then that’s cool.

But if they’re not, and you find yourself in a battle with your toddler, preschooler or school-aged kid almost every mealtime then it could be because these strategies are designed to appease adults, not to help kids. And don’t get me wrong, this isn’t your fault as a parent. It’s because we’ve been given shitty strategies that completely ignore the fundamental building blocks that kids need to learn how to eat. And a lot of them are coming from nutrition professionals. YIKES.

Here’s the deal: these strategies are based on external motivation. They build motivation outside of the child. Rewards, praise, fun shapes, games and so on, don’t help support a kid’s internal drive to eat.

And here’s the kicker - eating is internally motivated. It’s “I WANT TO DO IT” on overdrive.

The reason why lots of kids don’t respond well to all the tactics Instagram throws at you is because they perceive that their autonomy is being undermined. Just in the same way that kids have strong convictions about wearing their sparkly princess skirt and dinosaur onesie to the playground, they have clear and strong boundaries about what and how much they will eat.