Read What to Expect the Toddler Years Online
Authors: Heidi Murkoff
What to Expect the Toddler Years (178 page)
Don’t make neatness count.
Most toddlers eat more if they’re allowed to feed themselves (see page 17). This is messy business, true, but it puts control over the eating itself where it belongs: in your toddler’s hands. Lessons in manners can—and should—come later.
Start small.
Instead of serving mountains of food (which can overwhelm and intimidate, causing a toddler to give up even before beginning or, perhaps, to make the mountain more manageable by unloading half of it onto the floor), start with small portions of each food. If those are finished, you can always offer seconds, then thirds.
Take “no” for an answer.
Make all kinds of foods available—the more variety the better—but don’t require them. When your toddler is finished eating don’t keep pressing for “one more bite.”
Limit liquids.
Too much to drink between and during meals can leave a tummy too full of fluids to fit in any solids. This is even more likely to be a problem with bottle drinkers, because it’s easier to drink too much from a bottle than a cup (most toddlers are more proficient at it), because the bottle is often more available (many toddlers carry theirs around with them), and because bottle drinkers drink not just to quench thirst but for comfort or out of habit. Make sure your toddler gets adequate fluids, of course, but watch out for excessive drinking. Work on increasing the consumption of solids by offering solid foods first at meals, and bringing on the fluids later. If your toddler insists on a drink with the meal, do serve one, but pour just a small amount at a time. Try to set a limit of no more than three cups of milk and two of juice a day (filling a jar with each allowance first thing in the morning will make the job easier); eliminate water entirely for the time being (except in hot weather). That said, if your toddler depends on tap water for fluorides, try preparing orange juice and other juices using frozen or liquid juice concentrate and tap water. Again, since excessive fluid intake is most common in toddlers who still use a bottle, it’s important to wean the under-weight child to a cup as soon as possible (see page 326 for tips on weaning).
If your toddler is still breastfeeding, and you aren’t ready to wean, then always serve solids and other fluids before offering the breast so your toddler’s appetite won’t be prematurely satisfied by your milk. If your toddler is always thirsty, check with the doctor.
Set an eating example you’d like followed.
If you “nosh” the day away, never sitting down for a meal until dinner (or worse still, never sitting down at all), your toddler may learn to do the same. If you breakfast on coffee cake and lunch on microwave popcorn, your toddler may soon be begging to do likewise. So watch what, when, and how
you
eat as much as you watch what, when, and how your toddler eats. Make your example not only good, but enthusiastic. Your toddler will be more likely to be an appreciative, adventurous eater if he or she sees you doing the same: “Oh, this salad tastes so good!” “This broccoli is so yummy with cheese sauce poured on top!” “This is the best mango I’ve ever tasted!”
Be patient.
Your toddler’s tastes
will
change—but they’ll probably change faster if you don’t push.
A persistently poor appetite can be sometimes related to changes in a child’s life or to a cold or another illness. If your toddler isn’t gaining weight or seems otherwise out of sorts, see page 513. A visit to the doctor’s office may be in order. Check with the doctor, too, if a toddler twenty months or older doesn’t seem to be able to self-feed.
FUN WITH FOOD
For many toddlers, eating can be something of a bore. Busy with playing, learning, and generally having a good time, they’re often reluctant to leave all that fun for the tedium of the table. But most will be more amenable to sitting down to a meal if it’s fun, too. So the next time you prepare food for your toddler, try adding a pinch of merriment. Peruse the tips that follow to get you started, then dare to create some merry meals of your own.
Shape up.
Cut sandwiches, bread for French toast, even chicken cutlets (pounded flat) into intriguing shapes (circles, diamonds, triangles, animals, hearts, stars) with a knife or a cookie cutter. Spread big, thin pancakes, bread (flatten slightly with a rolling pin first), or whole-grain flour tortillas with preserves, apple butter, cream cheese, tuna salad, or another favorite filling, and roll them up. (You can serve the roll-ups whole, or slice them into pinwheels.) Pour pancake batter (it’ll be easier to control from a spoon than a bowl) to form faces, letters, teddy bears, hearts (or shape pancakes after cooking with cookie cutters); decorate with raisins, banana slices, blueberries, dried apricots, or other fruits. Look for intriguing shapes when buying pasta: wagon wheels, shells, twists, and alphabet letters. Mix and match varieties that require the same cooking time.
Sculpt a dish.
Let loose the artist in you—and in your toddler—as you create masterpieces good enough to eat: a banana boat (with raisin sailors, a date for a mast, jelly waves licking the sides); a cheese “block” tower; a landscape of broccoli and cauliflower “trees” dusted with grated or shredded cheese “snow”; a still life of “ants on a log” (half a banana slightly hollowed out, then filled with cottage cheese, a thin layer of peanut butter, or yogurt, and dotted with dried currants); an abstract of cottage cheese drizzled with fruit-only syrup and studded with an eclectic montage of dried cereals and fresh or dried fruit; a house (whole-wheat bread, with a “door” flap, cheese shutters, broccoli flower beds); a fruit “tree” (a cantaloupe trunk, apple slice or dried apricot sliver branches, halved grape or blueberry leaves) instead of a fruit salad; a skyscape (mashed potato clouds, with green pea rain or a slice of baked sweet potato sun).
Think mini.
Bite-size is just the right size for little fists, mouths, and appetites. Cut sandwiches or French toast into tiny squares, chicken cutlets into nuggets or “fingers”; make quarter-size pancakes; serve cooked carrot “pennies”; buy mini muffin pans and make pop-and-eat muffins, miniature meat loaves, single serving carrot cakes. Look for baby carrots, tomatoes, zucchini, squash, corn, and other mini vegetables, and serve steamed, stir-fried, au gratin, or raw.
Sauce and dip.
While some toddlers prefer their food plain, others like everything sauced or dipped. Many latch onto one particular sauce or dip (tomato sauce, ketchup, cheese sauce, applesauce, yogurt dip), and want everything they eat coated with it. Go along with this idiosyncrasy—even if the combinations disturb your sensibilities (tomato sauce on chicken, applesauce on mashed potatoes, waffles with cheese sauce, yogurt dip on toast). But make sure sauces aren’t loaded with salt and/or sugars (look for ketchup and tomato sauces in the health food section).
Grate great food.
For the toddler who is too young to safely chew a carrot, serve a mound (call it a “hill,” if you like) of grated carrot. Apple, cheese, and red cabbage can also be served grated and arranged as a garnish or as a centerpiece on the plate. For young toddlers, grate finely to eliminate a risk of gagging.
Make the name part of the game.
Just as you’d be more tempted to order “a mélange of baby spring greens tossed in a mustard vinaigrette” than a “house salad,” your toddler will be more tempted to eat egg salad if it’s scooped up with crackers and called “Eggie Dip,” a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich if it’s called a “p, b, and b,” a fried egg if it’s sunk into the center of a piece of toast and called, “Egg in a Hole,” a miniature meat loaf if it’s called a “Meat Muffin.”
Try a kebob.
Let your toddler string chunks of fruit (or cooked vegetables) and cheese onto a blunt-tipped skewer; kebobs can then be dipped in a sauce. Blunt-tipped toothpicks are also fun for snaring tasty tidbits.
Have your toddler join the fun.
Eating food is always more fun when you’ve had a hand (and some fingers, and maybe an elbow or two) in the preparation. Toddlers are often more willing to try new and different foods when they’ve helped “cook” them.
LIMITED DIETARY REPERTOIRE
We may not be able to live on bread alone, but many toddlers seem not only to live but to thrive on such limited fare. And virtually all children will eventually outgrow the self-imposed cereal-milk-and-juice or peanut-butter-jelly and banana regimens they embrace as toddlers. Sometimes craving the same foods day in and day out is related to a toddler’s comfort with routine, ritual, and predictability, and discomfort with change. Sometimes it has to do with a child having an extremely sensitive palate; overly keen taste buds can make all but the blandest flavors distasteful. Though such pronounced taste sensitivity is often outgrown (though not necessarily in the early years), it can stubbornly persist (which may explain why some adults
still
won’t eat their spinach or
still
turn their noses up at seafood).
As difficult as it may be to ignore your toddler’s eating eccentricities, don’t make a fuss about what’s eaten or not eaten. Strong-arm tactics or even more subtle manipulations will only serve to compound toddler stubbornness and turn mealtime into battle time. There are, however, some steps you can take:
Make certain that your toddler’s limited repertoire is unlimitedly healthy and
that what he or she
does
eat meets The Toddler Diet standards. For example, breads and cereals should be whole grain; pastas should be whole grain or high protein; juices should be chosen from the more nutritious varieties; sugar should be permitted only rarely. Select foods that have been fortified or fortify them yourself: Purchase milk with extra calcium and/or protein or add dry skim milk to regular milk (add the powder to the milk container; mix and chill well before serving); serve orange juice with calcium added, baked goods with added dry skim milk or grated carrots, and meat loaf, burgers, and tomato sauce with grated carrots, chopped cooked cauliflower, or other vegetables added.
Try to broaden the repertoire by building on your toddler’s favorites. If bread is a mainstay, for example, try some tempting specialty breads—carrot bread, pumpkin bread, cheese bread. Or turn bread into French toast, grilled cheese sandwiches, or toast spread with cottage cheese and fruit-sweetened jam. If your toddler tends to live on peanut butter sandwiches alone, try to add slices of banana or apple or chopped dried apricots to this favorite.
At each meal, offer options, either from the family meal or from the pantry: a snippet of chicken or tofu, a few strands of pasta, some bits of cheese, half a hard-cooked egg, banana slices, cooked carrot or sweet potato chunks,
a banana mini-muffin, a new fruit juice. Make sure that the options you offer are broad enough and interesting enough to really provide a choice. Maybe your toddler would enjoy more finger foods (for example a quartered tuna sandwich instead of a mound of tuna that has to be eaten with a spoon or fork) so self-feeding is easier.
Keep offering. It takes most young children time to warm up to anything new—whether it’s a new sofa in the living room or a new food on the table. So don’t assume that because your toddler has rejected a new or different food once that he or she will always reject it. Often it takes repeated exposure—making the food available dozens of times on the table—before a finicky eater will decide to take a bite. And keep in mind that biting doesn’t always come first; sometimes a toddler needs to get to know a food in other ways—by touching it, studying it, mushing it up, watching other people eat it—before that first bite is taken. (Taking a bite doesn’t guarantee that your toddler is going to chew or swallow that new food. Your toddler should always be allowed to spit into a napkin or paper towel a new food that hasn’t agreed with his or her taste buds; after all, the idea is to encourage adventurous eating, not to punish a child for trying something new.) Don’t force the eating issue, and your toddler may someday surprise you by asking for a serving of something he or she has rejected numerous times before.