Is your toddler making a meal of dinner time?
When her son was a toddler, Amy Anderson purposefully fed him a variety of healthy foods in the hope it would expand the range of things he would eat, and like, from an early age.“Rather infuriatingly, now that he’s more grown up, all he does is pester me for junk food, although it’s more as a rebellion than from a real preference.” Still, it’s likely Amy did the right thing in exposing her son to a range of new foods at an early age – getting a child’s diet right in the early years really does help set them up for life.
The trouble is, how do you know what is healthy – and how likely is your toddler to play ball? All experienced parents will know someone who struggled to get their toddler to eat anything other than bananas, toast or jam sandwiches. This is because, from about 12 months of age, children develop an innate aversion to new foods. It’s called “the neophobic response” and is thought to be a left-over survival mechanism from our Stone Age days, which prevented toddlers poisoning themselves on tasty-looking plants they may have encountered as they began to explore away from their parents.
The classic image of a toddler covered in food, but eating none of it, is often an unavoidable fact of parenting. What’s more, it can be a daunting experience, as you try out an endless procession of what you hope will be tasty new dishes to no avail. So what should you be giving them? The answer is pretty much everything, within reason (no raw egg, or whole nuts, for instance), because what counts as “healthy eating” for an adult is not necessarily right for a young child.
Toddlers need nutrient- and caloriedense food, as their stomachs are small and yet they have so much growing to do. Because of this (unlike with adults), fat is vital: dieticians have found that limiting dietary fat to less than 30 per cent of total calories may reduce a child’s growth. As consultant nutritionist Sian Porter points out: “You have to be wary of an over-zealous application of ‘healthy eating’ to children. For example, high-fibre foods are not energy-dense – they don’t have many calories compared to many other foods. So it’s probably best not to give young children brown rice or wholemeal pasta. Go for the white varieties instead.” This might seem anathema to health-conscious parents, but there have been a few cases of “mueslibelt malnutrition” among middleclass children who have been fed a diet too high in fibre and too low in fat. In fact, the only real dietary villains for under-twos are salt and sugar – a child aged one to three years should have no more than two grams of salt a day, and you should avoid giving them lots of sugary, fizzy drinks. So you’ve got a pretty free hand with the dinner menu, but this doesn’t mean you should expect instant success when introducing new foods. Instead, keep serving the foods you want your child to eat, without making a big fuss about it. If possible, eat with them.
Present foods attractively and in ways your child can cope with, for example, toast fingers or cubed cheese, and let them play with new foods and familiarise themselves with it. As long as you neither insist they eat a particular dish, nor prepare any alternatives if they reject it, sooner or later you should find your toddler trying, and enjoying, all kinds of food. Still, if despite all your best efforts you end up with a wilful two-year old who insists on eating nothing other than jam sandwiches, try not to worry. As Sian says: “Children have a great survival mechanism. They won’t let themselves starve.”