What are the causes of children's picky eating? What should we do if children are picky eaters?

Everyone must have heard of a lot of children's problems in life, but do you know about children's picky eating? Today, let's learn about the reasons for children's picky eating and what to do about them. Let's learn together with the editor.

What are the causes of picky eating in children?

1. Parents neglect the cultivation of children's normal eating habits and are too accommodating and permissive to their children. Children do not develop a fixed place to eat, and parents chase them to feed them, which encourages children to develop bad habits of being picky eaters.

2. Parents intentionally or unintentionally show their preference for certain foods in front of their children, and children are influenced by their picky eating habits and naturally imitate them.

3. Parents pay too much attention to their children’s health and often force their children to eat certain nutritious foods, which causes the children to dislike these foods.

4. During the stage of adding complementary foods, parents do not pay attention to feeding their children a variety of foods, which makes the child's taste buds not adapted to and unacceptable to many foods. For example, adding complementary foods too late causes the child to only like liquid or paste foods and not hard foods. Adding complementary foods too early can easily cause children to be allergic, and thus artificially reject some foods, resulting in monotonous nutrition.

5. The mother's partiality for certain foods during pregnancy and lactation can also cause some children to have a preference for certain foods, because the taste of food can be passed on to the child through breast milk or amniotic fluid.

What to do if your child is picky about eating

1. If the child is picky about food, we can enrich the types of food as much as possible, change the patterns, increase the child's sense of freshness for the food, and consciously increase the amount of fish, shrimp, soy products, etc., which are rich in calcium.

2. We should cultivate children's habit of eating less snacks. If children are hungry outside of mealtimes, we can let them eat some fruits or fresh milk to fill their stomachs and replenish the missing nutrients in their bodies, instead of unhealthy foods such as hamburgers and cola.

3. For breakfast, we can choose high-protein foods. First, these things are more resistant to hunger and can prolong the feeling of fullness. Second, protein is an important factor that is essential to ensure physical development.

4. You can appropriately add some coarse grains or whole grains to your child’s food, and eat less high-calorie, high-fat, high-sugar and unhealthy fried foods to cultivate your child’s healthy eating habits.

What are the solutions to children's picky eating?

1. Let your baby go hungry once, so that your baby will be satisfied with the feeling of being full and will naturally avoid the feeling of hunger, so that your baby will eat on time.

2. The calories in the food you feed your baby between meals should be controlled. Do not drink beverages within an hour before meals, and do not eat desserts, such as cakes, biscuits, bread and other high-calorie foods.

3. Control the baby's eating time to about 25 minutes, and leave three and a half hours to four hours between each meal. This is conducive to the baby's eating.

4. If the baby refuses to eat, parents should temporarily take the food away and ignore the child and do their own things. Do not force the child to eat or coax the child to eat.

What are the dangers of picky eating in children?

1. There are many nutrients needed by the human body, such as vitamins, inorganic salts, fats, and proteins. These substances cannot exist in the same food at the same time. If children are picky eaters, the intake of nutrients cannot be guaranteed, resulting in nutritional imbalance, and children cannot grow and develop normally.

2. If a picky eater plays while eating, it will take too long to eat, which will affect the intake of nutrition and cause gastrointestinal disorders, affecting digestion and absorption. If it cannot be corrected in time, it will lead to growth retardation or even stagnation.

3. Being picky about food will reduce children's appetite. In the long run, it will lead to malnutrition and nutritional anemia, decreased resistance, and susceptibility to some infectious diseases and digestive tract diseases.

4. Insufficient intake of carbohydrates, fats, proteins and other nutrients in children will lead to underweight and slow growth. Studies have found that the incidence of low weight in picky eaters is twice that of normal children.