Finicky eating is normal

There are days - most days actually - when I feel like a short-order cook. The kids are all ravenous - but never at the same time. And they go through phases where none of them will eat the same things as the others. At the moment, one child will eat only pasta. Or a bowl of peas. Another wants toasted cheese. The pasta child sees the toasted cheese and wants that too. Then the eldest wants cauliflower of all things, and turns her nose up at the roast chicken that I sneak in as an accompaniment. When cooked carrots appear, the youngest wants raw ones.

The other day I found myself making three different meals for three children (pizza, burgers and egg-and-chips). Then, while I was trying to wrest my little diners away from Digimon, the dog jumped up on the table and devoured the whole thing. I had to start again.

And that's just meal times. All day the fridge door is opening and closing as three voracious youngsters graze on yoghurts, juice and apples.

Tall stools are employed in the precarious search for the chocolate biscuits hidden on top of the cupboard. Peanut butter sandwiches are made, and the crusts and crumbs left for Mum to clean up.

This is crazy, I tell myself. So I did a little research into finicky eating. I found out that there's finicky, and then there's normal - and that's finicky too.

Young children's stomachs are no larger than the size of your fist and they fill up quickly. What we parents tend to see as a "square meal" is way too much for them. Toddlers need no more than one main meal a day - then lots of grazing. A two-year-old is growing at one 10th the rate of a baby and needs less food. Young children need to eat small amounts every three hours to get enough energy to keep them going. Which means that grazing - or snacking - is actually what they should be doing. Erratic and "eccentric" eating is completely normal. If your child goes two months without eating vegetables, brain development will continue as if nothing happened. You only have a problem if your child stops growing. And you know what? They don't. I know a rugby player who grew up eating nothing but peas.

Part of the finicky eating syndrome is in parents' heads. We tend to think of "snacking" as being synonymous with unhealthy eating and the trick with young children - says Ursula O'Dwyer, consultant dietician with the Department of Health and Children - is to turn that around and make the snacking healthy. "Habits - good or bad - usually remain when they are started early," she says.

The other major issue is this: how you deal with food goes to the heart of your parenting skills. Faddy eating usually starts when toddlers learn to say "no". "Be patient and tolerant," O'Dwyer advises, "A hungry child will eat so wait until the child is ready. Don't be overanxious and don't bribe with treats."

Never make children clean their plates and never use food as a reward or a comfort, she warns. Both these parenting patterns are associated with adult obesity because they teach children not to trust their own instincts and appetites.

Telling children that they can have chocolate or kiwi fruit or biscuits or whatever if they finish their meal is giving them a message that the chocolate or kiwi or biscuit is a higher value food - and that's a mistake, she says. Instead, you have to act like the food you're serving for the main meal is the treat, so that apples become the best thing since Monster Munch. "It's as much about psychology as it is about putting the right food on the table," says O'Dwyer.

So when children are finicky - daresay eccentric - eaters, how do you get them to eat healthily?

Since children can get by on one main meal a day, you have to be creative in the way you get dairy products, fruit and vegetables into them the rest of the time. Each day, a two-year-old needs only one or two small servings of meat, fish or other high-protein alternatives and only two or three small servings of fruit and vegetables (including fruit juice). So if, for a main meal, you can get a couple of high quality (i.e. low fat variety) chicken nuggets into the child, with a few peas and some mashed potato you're doing well.

After that, all the child needs is cereal and milk for breakfast, then cereal and milk for an evening meal, with "snacks" during the day, which could be yoghurt, fromage frais, cheese, bread, fruit or fruit juice.

Up to the age of about four, children need breakfast, a snack, lunch, another snack, dinner, another snack and then supper. That's seven pit stops in the day. You need a bit of organisation to keep healthy snacks on tap, but it's worth putting time into it if you really want your children to learn to snack on healthy foods instead of biscuits.

If you have more than one child, the short-order-cook syndrome is easy to fall into, but a bad habit for everyone. Put a varied meal on the table (protein, vegetables, fruit, potatoes, pasta or bread) and let the kids pick and choose. If they don't eat anything after 20 minutes, forget it. It's not the end of the world. If you turn mealtime into a battle royale, you're on a loser. The child will learn to never like the food you are forcing him or her to eat. So just play it cool. The child will be hungry eventually.

What your child wants and what you see as "healthy" might be at variance.

However, while pasta with tomato ketchup or grated cheese might not be your idea of sophisticated dining, it is a healthy meal. So is pizza. And if your child will only eat tinned fruit? Fine. Avoid imposing your adult tastes on your kids. Babies and toddlers like to eat with their fingers and dip and dunk. Raw carrot sticks with yoghurt? Let them at it.

Sugar is what most children seem to want. The good news is, that there is actually nothing wrong with five sugar "hits" per day. Sugar sprinkled on cereal or fruit is okay. A sweet yoghurt is good, too. The occasional biscuit or chocolate bar is not going to be harmful. The key principle of keeping sugar within the realm of a healthy diet is to always make sugar part of the meal. Sugar is most likely to cause tooth decay when it is eaten on its own.

There's a reason children like sugar. Babies are genetically hard-wired to find sugary foods more appealing. It goes back to when we were hunter-gatherers and had to avoid poisonous foods, which tend to be bitter and sour.

When feeding a baby (never start solids before five or six months - before that you raise baby's risk of heart disease), don't give up the first time the baby rejects vegetables. Try each food five times, even if the baby only spits it out. On the sixth time - according to research - the baby will get a taste for the food.

Parents can unintentionally "train" their children to like sweet or salty foods, which is why babies should never have sugar or salt added to their food. They like bland dishes - so keep them that way. Children can become obese on salty, high-fat "savoury" foods as easily as they can on sweet foods.

For parents to feel relaxed about what their children are eating, the most important message is to understand that children need to graze. An interesting US study found that when given a choice of healthy foods and left to their own devices, children inevitably picked a balanced diet without being prompted. Food choices on an individual day might seem a bit weird, but over the week it balances out. A child's body knows what it needs. The problems start when parents get uptight about it.