Dr Angharad Rudkin, a leading clinical psychologist has partnered with us to help parents decipher what their children could be thinking during feeding times.
Our recent research revealed 37% of parents find feeding in general the most stressful aspect of parenting, with 80% revealing they felt pressure to have a perfect weaning journey.
As a result of this, we wanted to put together a handy guide for parents to read and help them make their weaning journey a little easier.
According to Dr Rudkin, weaning a child onto solid foods can be one of the most exciting times of parenting, but it can also be a confusing and stressful time.
She says: “The biggest challenge is trying to figure out what your child is thinking as they explore and experiment with food.”
Below she includes her top tips to help parents give a little insight into what their little ones like and don’t like and why it’s so important to respect their boundaries.
Food preference does begin right at the very beginning
Food preference begins at conception and continues throughout our lifetime, and are partially genetically determined.* Your child will be born with a preference for certain tastes over others. These preferences may well be different to yours so try not to assume they won’t like something because you don’t, or that they will because you will.
Your child could be a supertaster
Some people are considered to be “supertasters”. The number of taste receptors on tongues can differ hugely across people. Supertasters have 16 times more taste buds on their tongue than “non-tasters”. Because they can taste more, supertasters may be especially fussy about what they eat.
It’s normal for them to not want to eat food
It is perfectly normal for your child to not want to eat some foods. They are hard wired to be picky about their food and to prefer sweet foods, so that – thousands of years ago – they steered away from poisonous food and instead ate sweet berries. It is thought children have an even greater preference for sweet food during periods of rapid growth.
Anyone for salt?
A preference for salt shows from about the age of 4 months. There is some interesting ongoing research about the link between pregnancy sickness and your child’s preference for salt. The thinking is that mums who vomited more during pregnancy have babies with an increased salt preference!
Eating includes all of the senses
Eating is a multi-sensory experience and smells are particularly important. Flavour is a mix of smell and taste. If there is an unpleasant smell, children at 12 months are less likely to enjoy that food. This is less marked for 22 month olds, so researchers think smells play a bigger and smaller part depending on the stage of development. ** Wagner et al. 2014).
How does your child feel after they eat?
Whether we enjoy food has as much to do with how we feel after eating as it does while eating. Take note of how your child acts and feels after they’ve finished eating so that you get a clearer picture of their post-injestion phase – as the food goes down, is it making them comfortable or uncomfortable?
Sweetness and familiarity are key
The two strongest predictors of whether your child will like a food are familiarity and sweetness. Babies are born with a natural fear and avoidance of new foods (neophobia), and they have to overcome this over the first 2-3 years of life. It is thought that your child needs to be exposed to a food 8-10 times for them to develop a preference for it.
How does your child let you know they’re enjoying their food
Your child will give you signs that they are enjoying a food even if they can’t actually say the words “yum yum” yet! They will….
- Turn up the corners of their mouths, which can look like a smile
- touch the food they like more than the food they don’t like (which they may only touch in order to drop it on the floor)
- Suck their lips and fingers – the more sucking there is, the more they like it
- Smack their lips together as they get ready to eat the delicious food
- Stick their tongue out in a rhythmic way
- Have relaxed faces with low muscle tension
- Spit more – we produce more saliva when we are eating something we like ( by the way, it is very normal for your child to spit a food out then put it back in their mouths to try again!)
A neutral face doesn’t mean your child is not enjoying their food – a neutral face can just mean your child is neither really enjoying it or really hating it. Which is a tick for that food!
How does your child let you know they are not enjoying their food
Your child’s food preferences are constantly changing so one day they may like a food and not the other. Keep giving them a range of tastes and textures so that they can continue to explore, but don’t worry if they don’t like some or a lot of it. This is perfectly normal too. Your child will let you know they don’t like a food by….
- Shaking their heads – it lets you know they don’t like a food and makes it very hard for you to actually get any of the food into their mouth!
- Turning their body or their head away from and looking away from the food.
- Throwing their arms about. Arm flailing is a common sign of food dislike and it also has the convenient consequence for your child of tipping the bowl of food over!
- Frowning and wrinkling their nose (have you ever tried to chew while frowning and wrinkling your nose – it’s impossible!)
- Pursing their lips. They will also turn their mouths down at the corners and won’t suck anywhere near as much as when they’re eating a food they like.
No wonder weaning is such a tricky process. Eating involves all the senses. It is also to do with genetics as well as the environment, as children develop and it can be a very messy, unpredictable time. But it is also an incredibly important time and one which can impact on your child for the rest of their life. Modelling a happy, healthy approach to food is one of the most important factors. For example, one study found that parent’s own eating behaviour was the best predictor of their child’s eating behaviour even after one year of living away from home
So, pay attention to your child as they are weaned so that you can pick up on the clues they give, and patiently offer a broad range of food throughout their childhood.