Nursery World - A Unique Child: Nutrition

Understanding ‘picky eaters’ will help practitioners get children eating healthily, says Mary Llewellin

Getting young children to eat a variety of foods to make up a healthy, balanced diet can sometimes feel like a challenge, and I am sure in nursery we have all had children who won’t touch a vegetable or only want to eat pasta.

I have just read a fascinating book by Bea Wilson in which she explores the complex nature of our relationship with food and the way we form our taste preferences. First Bite: How We Learn to Eat takes us through the many and varied influences on our perception of flavour, beginning from before we are even born.

She explains how even inside the womb we are introduced to the flavour of the food our mother eats via the amniotic fluid that surrounds us, so that by the time we are born we have already learned a preference for certain foods based on familiarity. So, it seems that nutrition during pregnancy – and while breast-feeding, as the same applies to breast milk – is not just about giving the baby the right building blocks for development, but also about helping to shape the child’s eating habits later on.

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