Some of the worst times of my whole life – and this I have in common with many readers, I am sure – were those nights being made to finish what was on my plate. Usually, it was overcooked broccoli but quite often, and even worse, some kind of meat I didn’t like. I vowed that I would never inflict such scenes on a child of my own, and now that I have one, I am standing by this vow.
It should be easier than I thought. Recent findings show that picky eating in children, between 18 months and 13 years, is caused by DNA not parenting or, God forbid, weaning method. Forcing children to eat their veg may not be de rigeur any more, but parents can still get snarled in attempts to persuade and bamboozle, often culminating in frustration and tears all round. Now that we know that kids will either pop what they’re given in their gob or develop complex systems around eating based on what they inherited from you, it takes the pressure off all sides. As Dr Zeynep Nas, a behavioural geneticist at UCL who worked on the study, said: “The main takeaway from this work is that food fussiness is not something that arises from parenting. It really does come down to the genetic differences between us.”
To some, this will sound rather like getting parents and kids off the hook. But to me, it’s as good an excuse as any for spending less of my life, and my child’s, labouring over ingestion.
And we are to infer from this study that even if the balance of banana and cake to broccoli and boiled eggs stays unfavourable for a few years, the plague of pickiness should improve as they grow up.
In the end, the main thing is to avoid giving a child a complex about food, which they’ll carry through the rest of their lives. This is far worse, surely, than a few years of accepting that your tot has a diet less rich in kale than you would have liked.