Why your child is a picky eater and what to do about it

If you’ve ever felt like trying to convince your child to try something new or eat a healthy varied diet is a battle, you’re not alone.

Parents feel so much responsibility and judgment around their child’s eating habits, and it causes a huge amount of anxiety, guilt, and even shame. 

The important thing to remember is that parenting doesn’t cause picky eaters. It’s not your fault.

There are real medical and/or developmental reasons why children refuse foods that need to be addressed.

SLPs don’t just work on helping your child communicate. They also can help your child with feeding – along with a team of nutritionists, OTs, and psychologists.

So, if your child is a picky eater, here’s what might be going on:

What Causes A Picky Eater?

Picky eating can be caused by a number of factors that don’t have anything to do with your parenting style. Not many people know this because it can be hard to identify just one cause when a child is picky.

It’s a complex issue that gets even more complicated as children age. But let's begin by looking at potential root causes of picky eating….

• Pain: such as reflux, stomach pain, sore throat, vomiting, infection, etc.

• Discomfort: such as constipation, nausea, stress, fatigue, stomach distention, allergies.

• Insufficient Oral-Motor Skills: such as inability to coordinate eating and breathing, overstuffing, poor tongue placement, inability to keep food on teeth for chewing, poor oral strength, oral processing difficulties.

• Sensory Processing Problems: such as being under or over-reactive to smells, tastes, textures, sights or sounds, movement-seeking needs compete with mealtimes, unaware of internal hunger cues, unable to see similarities to preferred foods.

• Inappropriate Learning and Behavioural Expectations: such as cognitive delay or learning difficulties, information processing problems, being in an independent developmental stage, or being in a developmental shift in cognition.

• Nutrition Issues: such as inadequate micronutrients, inadequate macronutrient ratio, calorie deficit, absorption or metabolic disorder.

The Picky Eater Cycle

Parents often cannot fix the underlying reason feeding is an adverse experience, but can work with it once they understand the issue. However, if a child has repeated negative memories of eating, it can be difficult to break out of the picky eating cycle. Often certain child, parent, and environmental factors exacerbate feeding issues, and they become chronic. 

Some of these include…

• Child factors: like an independent or oppositional temperament, anxiety, hyperactive, no/low emotional range, or distractibility.

• Parent factors: like not modelling and eating with the child, inappropriate expectations, no positive reinforcement, restricting the child’s diet, fear/anxiety around child’s weight, coercing child to eat, interrupting/speaking to the child while eating, punishing the child at meals, distracting the child at mealtimes, inconsistent expectations, or lack of knowledge about feeding development and nutrition.

• Environmental factors: like limited exposure to a variety of foods, ability to graze throughout the day, no mealtime schedule or routine, toys or TV used during meals, distracting/busy household, child does not have seating fitted to their height and postural stability needs, no cues to prepare child for meals, lack of food availability.

What Parents Can Do

Parents don’t cause feeding problems, but parents do need to respond to them in a way that minimizes the likelihood of them persisting. When a parent can understand and set reasonable expectations, their child can begin to have positive feeding experiences. Here’s how to start:

✓ Follow the division of responsibility in feeding.

The division of responsibility theory was coined by dietician, family therapist and feeding expert Ellyn Satter. Parents are responsible for choosing, preparing, and offering food during the child's early years, but the division of responsibility also involves the child. Even babies are responsible for when, where, how, and whether they eat. The same goes for your toddler and preschooler. Let them learn to listen to the cues their bodies are giving them!

✓ Create a consistent routine around meals for the child and model exploring and eating various foods together.

Routines can help your child feel safe during mealtime, especially if they’ve had bad experiences before. Giving your child cues that mealtime is approaching will help them learn to develop an appetite as well.

Eat a variety of foods around your child and show how much you personally enjoy eating, even if your little one doesn’t. Once the child has had a negative experience (or multiple) with eating, their adults need to make them feel safe and secure at mealtimes by providing appropriate foods given the child’s development (cognitive, motor, and sensory), nutritional needs, and medical condition. 

✓ Model staying calm and regulated regardless of the child’s eating behaviors. 

Parental stress tends to make eating behaviors in children worse. The more parents try, fail, and struggle, the more the child starts to feel stress around mealtimes and will try to avoid them. Many children begin to not only have adverse experiences because of the initial cause of their food refusal but because of the interactions they have with their parents, which invalidates that they find certain foods difficult.

✓ Encourage learning the skills to healthy eating habits

Your child needs to explore how to use their mouth for eating by putting toys or other large, unswallowable items that they can hold onto and move with their tongue and hands together as they learn (like a teether). 

This helps them learn how to use their tongue to hold items to the side (like in chewing), move the tongue back (like in a mature swallow), and reduces their oral sensitivity. If your child doesn’t naturally put items in their mouth, you can facilitate these experiences. You might need to model oral exploration yourself and physically prompt your little one to try it out too.

✓ Assess the child’s oral-motor, sensory and cognitive development with a feeding therapist 

Work with an OT, a feeding-trained SLP, a nutritionist, and their family doctor to determine the child’s developmental readiness for certain foods, explore any potential causes of pain or discomfort, and create a developmentally appropriate meal plan. Early intervention can prevent the issue from becoming chronic and ensure your child always has safe foods available at every meal!

What A Feeding Consultation Can Do

How do you know your child should see a feeding specialist?

Ideally, you should talk to both your doctor and a feeding professional right away if you’re worried about their eating habits. 

While picky eating still isn’t the parents’ fault, the situation can become chronic if the child doesn’t receive the support they need.

This is why early intervention is so important! When families know what to do, their little ones make quick improvements. If these areas are addressed early, picky eating can be short lived.

At Brighten this year, 50% of our families only needed 2 appointments before they were ready to support their child’s picky eating on their own at home.

Note: These were all children under 18 months of age. Our PreK and older clients also make progress, but it is often slower due to the higher anxiety levels and multiple adverse experiences.

So, please don't wait and see if you’re worried about picky eating!

Book a consultation call to see if an appointment is right for you.