A new study is offering some reassurance for parents or caregivers of children who are picky eaters.
It’s not your fault.
The study, published in the Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, found that genetics, not parenting, accounts for most picky eating.
The study compared identical and fraternal twins and the authors found that genetics accounted for 60 per cent of the variation of so-called “food fussiness” at 16 months and that rose to as high as 84 per cent between the ages of three and 13.
Previous studies have found food fussiness can increase stress levels in parents — something that comes as no surprise to parents.
Megan Wallace, a pediatric registered dietitian who works at Sprout Nutrition in Edmonton, said picky eating does have a strong genetic component but parents and caregivers should weigh the results carefully.
“I think we have to be careful the way we look at some of this research because we can kind of say it’s all or nothing and then we can take this backhand approach or … our responsibility goes away for wanting to support our kids, learning more about food,” she said.
Wallace said the environment is also a factor in developing eating habits.
“They talk about how the genetic impact of picky eating is less in toddlerhood than it is as a child moves through adolescence,” she said.
“We have some ability to do early childhood intervention with these sweethearts to make sure that they learn about new foods and new flavours and maybe that the feeding experience is not as scary as some of them perceive it to be.”
Wallace also said social media is adding to the problem.
“We see the optimal, we see the highlights, we see the best-case scenarios,” she said.
“And so we see three-year-olds mawing broccoli like it’s going out of style or eating wilted spinach mixed with cottage cheese, or the really adventurous kiddo who’s, like, huffing sushi.”
Wallace said that parents then look at their own three-year-old and can’t understand why they are having a hard time eating carrots.
“Then we automatically assume it’s something we’re doing wrong or we haven’t done enough, or we’re a bad parent, which is just not the case,” she added.
The Canadian Paediatric Society offers tips to deal with picky eaters, including getting kids involved with meal planning and meal preparation, avoiding distractions during meals and serving at least one thing they like at each meal, along with other foods.
“I think what we need to do is we need to really take that pressure off ourselves that if we can’t get them to have anything green with that bowl of macaroni or whatever it is, then we have to really take baby steps there,” Wallace said.
Participants were from Gemini, a population-based British cohort of n = 4,804 twins born in 2007. Parents reported on FF using the Child Eating Behaviour Questionnaire ‘FF’ scale when children were 16 months (n = 3,854), 3 (n = 2,666), 5 (n = 2,098), 7 (n = 703), and 13 years old (n = 970). A mixed linear model examined the trajectory of FF, and a correlated factors twin model quantified genetic and environmental contributions to variation in and covariation between trajectory parameters. A longitudinal Cholesky twin model examined genetic and environmental influences on FF at each discrete age.