Why does my 21-month-old baby not like to eat?

We all know that only a normal diet can provide the nutritional value needed by the body, especially for the 20-year-old baby.

For babies over 21 months old, relying solely on milk powder and breast milk every day cannot meet the needs of growth, which often leads to symptoms such as calcium deficiency or lack of trace elements. This will have a certain impact on bone development and the body's immunity, making it particularly prone to illness. Therefore, many parents are always very anxious and don’t know what to do when they encounter a 21-month-old baby who doesn’t like to eat. Let’s understand why a 21-month-old baby doesn’t like to eat.

Why does my 21-month-old baby not like to eat?

Children's refusal to eat is a problem that worries many parents. When children don't like to eat, parents should first find out the cause and not blindly force them to eat. The following are some common reasons why children don’t like to eat.

1. Constant snacking, constant mouthfeeling, and a busy stomach will lead to gastrointestinal motility and secretion disorders. Most children love to eat sweets. High-calorie sweets such as drinks, ice cream, and chocolate will excite the satiety center and inhibit the feeding center. In this way, children will hardly feel hungry and therefore have no interest in eating.

2. Children have irregular eating habits and no fixed meal times. Meal times are prolonged or shortened, and normal gastrointestinal digestion patterns are disrupted, so children will not eat obediently.

3. One-sided pursuit of high nutrition, giving children meat, eggs and milk without restraint, damaging the gastrointestinal tract and causing indigestion.

4. The eating environment is poor, children play while eating, or their parents tease or scold them while eating, which prevents the food center of the cerebral cortex from forming a dominant excitation focus.

5. Parents pay too much attention to their children's eating, which makes the children develop a rebellious mentality and then use refusing to eat as a bargaining chip to make conditions. Parents should be more relaxed about their children and let them eat more easily.

6. Zinc deficiency causes changes in taste. Children who are zinc deficient have lower taste sensitivity than normal children, which can easily lead to loss of appetite. To observe whether a child is zinc deficient, parents can judge by looking at the tongue coating. The small protrusions on the tongue are mostly flat or atrophied compared to the tongue of a normal child.

7. Lack of exercise, reduced metabolism, and failure to strengthen gastrointestinal digestive function; irregular life, insufficient sleep, excessive fatigue, constipation, physical discomfort, etc.

8. When children are sick, their appetite may change and they may not like to eat. Taking too many medicines or abusing health supplements will increase the burden on gastrointestinal digestion and absorption, causing the baby to lose interest in eating.

If we want to effectively improve the phenomenon that babies don’t like to eat, we must understand the reasons. The above is an introduction to why 21-month-old babies don’t like to eat. After understanding, we know that there are many reasons why babies don’t like to eat. First of all, when parents make some food for their babies, they must not feed the baby only a single food. They must change the type of food. In addition, they should also pay attention to whether the baby has spleen and stomach disharmony or zinc deficiency. If so, timely treatment should be carried out.