What causes children to be picky eaters?

Parents with children at home often find that their children have picky eating habits, but they don’t quite understand why their children have picky eating habits. In fact, there are many reasons for children’s picky eating habits. In fact, it is closely related to the child’s personal constitution and the eating environment at home. So what are the reasons that may cause children to have picky eating habits? Let me explain it to you in detail below.

The root cause of children's picky eating lies in the family, mainly due to four reasons:

1) Influenced by parents’ dietary preferences

If parents are picky about food themselves, or say in front of their children that this food is not delicious or that food tastes bad, the children will be directly affected. In addition, if parents do not like to eat a certain food, the family will rarely buy this food, which will also make the child rarely eat this food, thus indirectly causing the child to develop a picky eating habit.

2) Daily diet is relatively monotonous

If parents do not pay attention to cooking methods, color matching and shape diversity, or the diet is relatively monotonous, it is easy for children to develop partial and picky eating habits. For example, some parents feed their children steamed eggs every day and rarely change the color and variety, so the children naturally don't like to eat them.

3) Parents are too accommodating and permissive to their children

Some parents are afraid that their children are not getting enough nutrition, so they always meet their children's dietary requests, which makes their children's tastes become more and more sophisticated and they only eat what they like.

4) Unpleasant eating experience

If a child has had a stomachache or become sick after eating a certain food in the past, or has been forced to eat a certain food under pleasant circumstances, he or she may develop a resistance to that food.

Health experts point out that partial eating and picky eating are not only bad eating behaviors in themselves, but also the direct factors that form other bad eating behaviors. Especially for children who are in a period of rapid growth and development, the harm caused by partial eating and picky eating is very serious. Once a child develops a picky eating habit, parents should pay enough attention and correct it in time. If they blindly obey the request, it will affect the child's healthy development.

If you want to help your child correct his or her picky eating habits, you need to find out the main cause of the picky eating habits. Parents should develop a correction plan based on their child’s different personality and habits. First of all, parents should set a good example and not force their children to eat certain foods. At the same time, they should also reduce the amount and frequency of snacks. It is also very important for parents to improve their own cooking skills.