by: Joanna Storey, MD – Children’s Medical Group, Jackson, MS
Before I became a parent 26 years ago, I had the idea that parents whose children were picky eaters just didn’t know how to feed their kids right. All moms and dads needed to do, I thought, was to put healthy food in front of a child consistently, and the child would naturally respond by eating it. Then, I met my eldest son. I often tell parents in my practice that he was the person who taught me that you can’t force another human being to swallow something. (Surprisingly to me, this is not something that I learned in medical school.)
For the first five months of his second year of life, my son refused to eat all fruits and vegetables. I would cajole, encourage, beg, and fuss, but nothing worked. On the rare occasion that I could convince him to swallow a pea or a bite of carrots, he would make himself vomit. (He was definitely letting me know who had the last word!) I consoled myself by squirting some liquid vitamins into the only “juice” that he would drink (a sugar-sweetened fruit punch) with the reasoning that this would at least prevent him from getting scurvy (the disease caused by vitamin C deficiency suffered by ancient sailors who had no access to fruits or vegetables on long ocean voyages).
Eventually, my son’s complete embargo on fruit and vegetable consumption ended, but the situation didn’t improve much for a long time. For years, despite my best parental efforts, my kid ate only an occasional fruit, and hardly any vegetables other than forms of fried potatoes. I was reduced to hiding healthy food within other food. Think steamed cauliflower in mac & cheese, spinach in brownies, zucchini in muffins.
Over a long time, things gradually got better. I have a very clear memory of the first time my son willingly ate a bean. I had made chili with beans for dinner one night and he ate it and said “Mom, this is good.” I nearly fell off my chair. Fast forward to the next shocker when, as a college freshman, he told me that he was regularly enjoying the salad bar offerings in the university’s cafeteria.
In the present day, my son is a fully formed grown-up, reportedly shopping at farmers markets and expanding his culinary skills with the help of new cookbooks. When we were together over the holidays this year, I made a chocolate cake for a family birthday. My son took the opportunity to tease me about the time during his childhood when I followed a recipe for chocolate cake that incorporated beets. For the record, I would now not recommend that anyone try a recipe that suggests that beets belong in chocolate cake.
There is something very deeply ingrained in parenting that makes us feel like we are doing our job when our children sit down and plow through a plate of healthy food. And when they do not eat that healthy food, we feel like we are not doing our job. Feeding experts for kids encourage us to know that we have done what we need to do when we present our children with the best things to eat. My son taught me that sometimes teaching children about fueling their bodies right can be a parent’s childhood-long project. We just need to remember to play the long game.