How to Cure the Picky Eater Blues

!±8± How to Cure the Picky Eater Blues

"When he's hungry, he'll eat." Such was the prediction of our pediatrician when my mother complained about how few things my brother would eat. My brother inherited his picky eating habits from my grandmother, but I wasn't picky at all. I was determined that my children would eat whatever was placed in front of them.

And then I had kids. My first two were really good eaters; I was convinced this was because of my superior parenting skills.

But then I had my next two. Like my mother, I started a quest on how to cure a picky eater! Here are some basic principles we've learned at our house.

Out of sight - out of mouth.

Don't give the picky eater the choice to be picky. If macaroni and cheese is not there, she can't eat it. Stop buying the thing that your child has to have. Buy fruit and vegetables, peanut butter and cheese, tuna and eggs. Pop popcorn. Get nuts you have to crack.

You can't judge a carrot by its cover.

While you're switching over, buy the snack-y looking, individually wrapped packages of the foods you want your kids to like. Carrots and tuna come in cool packages. I even saw Scooby Doo bottled water the other day. A recent study said that kids would eat anything in a McDonald's wrapper. It's scary, but true. Packaging can be everything.

All natural.

I'm not talking about organic. I'm talking about serving plainer food. Put raw brocolli on the table instead of brocolli casserole. Offer fresh salads with oil and vinegar (or oil, garlic and lemon!) dressing, fresh fruits, grilled meats. Don't use sauces from a bottle - use garlic, fresh spices, onions and peppers. Marinade in lemon juice, orange juice, vinegar.

The whole truth.

Use REAL whole grains. Brown rice. 100% whole wheat bread. Whole grain cereal. I still laugh that Lucky Charms advertises that it has whole grains. It does, but not much. And don't use instant. It really doesn't take that much longer to cook the real deal, but you have to put that rice on to cook at the beginning of your cooking!

Skip dessert.

I rarely serve dessert. If the kids are hungry at the end of a meal, they can have seconds. Or thirds or fourths. Or we'll cut a watermelon, or they'll grab a piece of fruit. Okay, or have ice cream. We always have ice cream on hand - processed, sugary, fat laden and delicious.

Hide and Seek.

Grate a carrot and add to your spaghetti sauce. Add fruit to muffins. Add a jar of baby food to macaroni and cheese. Mix a bit of wheat germ into the peanut butter. As long as the kids don't see, you can do lots to slip in extra nutrition to things your little ones already like.

The cure for a picky eater.

As we get older, our taste buds die, leaving us with a less discriminating palate. In other words, the final cure for a picky eater is - age. In the meantime, try some of the things that have worked for our family. Email us at picky@goaskmom.com for some free recipes that will help cure your child of the picky eating blues.

My boys still don't eat everything. But thankfully, what they do pick to eat is getting easier and easier for me to swallow.