What to do if your child has severe picky eating

Each of us has our own favorite tastes and also our own disliked tastes. Generally speaking, those who can accept both what they like and dislike are not picky eaters. Some children have serious picky eating habits. For example, some children like to eat meat but do not like vegetables and fruits, so their basic food every day is meat, and they do not eat any vegetables or fruits. This situation is a more serious picky eating habit, and parents need to pay special attention.

For children who are picky eaters, the following methods can be used:

1. If the child is not very willing to eat vegetables, the solution is to expand the variety of vegetables purchased by the family and replace them with similar vegetable varieties. Parents should consciously let the child taste fresh vegetables all year round, and have more varieties of vegetables every day, hopefully 3-4 kinds, so that he will love eating vegetables and get richer nutrition. Children generally like to eat dumplings, wontons, etc. made with vegetables.

2. Cooking meat and vegetables together. For example, if your child doesn’t like to eat carrots, you can cook carrots with meat. Not only will the smell be eliminated, but it will also be nutritious.

3. For children who don’t like to eat meat, parents should improve their cooking skills and try to make it more varied, such as braised pork slices, vegetarian meatballs, borscht, etc. Braised pork should be cooked and then steamed to make the meat very soft, which children will also accept.

4. Check whether the family’s dietary habits tend to favor certain types of food. If so, this is not conducive to the child’s nutritional intake. Try to expand the variety of foods.

5. You can educate your children to change their bad eating habits such as picky eating through methods such as storytelling.

6. Do not judge which dishes are unpalatable in front of your children, and do not tell others which foods your children do not like to eat, etc., otherwise it will have a reinforcement effect.

7. Children with poor appetite can take some medicine under the guidance of a doctor to increase their appetite.

8. Parents should set a good example by not being picky about food.

If children have partial or picky eating habits for a long time, they are prone to skin diseases and myopia, and may also suffer from health problems such as malnutrition and developmental delay.

Parents can refer to the following methods to solve children's picky eating behaviors: let the baby experience hunger and then feel full; meal time is less than 25 minutes, and each meal is 3.5 to 4 hours apart; when the child pushes the bowl away, cries, turns his head, etc., parents should use temporary isolation method, remove the bowl, put the child in the high chair and ignore her (him); call food with interesting names, etc.

Parents with children at home should pay attention to their children's eating problems when they first start to add complementary foods. They should train their children to have good eating habits from the very beginning. They should not feed their children whatever they like every day. If this continues for a long time, they will develop partial or picky eating habits. Therefore, a large part of the reason for children's severe partial eating is the parents' fault.