Should You Force Your Children to Eat Their Food?

Maybe you shouldn’t force your kids to eat their broccoli or brussels sprouts, after all. At least that’s what researchers at the University of Michigan are saying after concluding a study of nearly 250 children between the ages of 21-27 months.

Over the course of a year, the study released in the journal Appetite found that being a picky or flexible eater had minimal if any effect on growth. In addition, the analysis proved again that some toddlers are just strong-willing by nature.

“The kids’ picky eating was not very changeable,” said Dr. Julie Lumeng in an interview with Newsweek. “It stayed the same whether parents pressured their picky eaters or not.”

While refusing to eat unwanted foods produced no negative traits, the authors of the study warned that parents who pressured their kids into eating took a risk in complicating the dynamics between parent and child.

“The takeaway here is that pressuring children to eat needs to be done with caution, and we don’t have much evidence that it helps with much,” Lumeng said. “As a parent, if you pressure, you need to make sure you’re doing it in a way that’s good for the relationship with your child.”

Instead of forcing your child to eat, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the following five tips for dealing with picky eaters:

1. Offer the food again a couple of days later. It can take more than 10 times before your toddler might like a food.

2. Mix new foods with another food you know your child already enjoys.

3. Make funny faces with the foods on your child’s plate to create excitement for eating.

4. Eat the same food to demonstrate your own enjoyment of eating.

5. Give your child choices. As the old saying goes, variety is the spice of life!