My Toddler Won’t Eat: How to Help Your Toddler Refusing to Eat
Toddlers are amazing, aren’t they?
One moment, they’re totally into something - the next, they want nothing to do with that thing anymore.
Kids at this age are figuring out their autonomy and independence, and nowhere is this more apparent than at mealtimes.
Suddenly, your toddler won’t eat, and you might be at a loss as to how to handle this.
Sound familiar, anyone?
Have you seen this in your own toddler? They might really love a certain food for awhile, but suddenly, want nothing to do with it anymore.
More commonly, you may see your toddler refusing to eat anything at all, which can strike a cord of fear and confusion in any parent.
In fact, one of the most common questions I get from parents is what to do when a child refuses to eat, and for good reason, too!
As parents, one of our primary responsibilities is to feed our children so they can grow and thrive. If a child isn’t eating or refuses food, this can create a power struggle as parents deal with worry and concern.
Whether your children constantly turn their noses at fruits and vegetables or refuses to eat anything but chicken nuggets or their tried-and-true favorite foods, know that you are not alone.
Let’s dive in to this topic to help you feel confident about feeding your kids and navigate times when they just don’t want to eat.
Expected Toddler Development and How This Impacts Eating
First, it’s important to step back and see the big picture of what’s happening for toddlers developmentally.
Compared to their first year of life and growth, toddlers are transitioning into a much slower and progressive period of growth.
While we still expect physical growth, the rate at which your toddler is growing has slowed down significantly compared to the first year of life.
Because of this slower growth period, it’s common to see an overall decreased appetite.
In addition to changes in your toddler physical development, there are cognitive and emotional changes happening that will also impact eating behaviors.
Normal toddler cognitive development includes things like:
Greater exploration with senses, including smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound
Increased curiosity in exploring and experimenting in unfamiliar territory
Inability to separate pretend from reality
Tendency toward repetition, such as wanting to sing the same song or read the same book repeatedly
Capable of following simple directions and instructions
Basic problem-solving skills through trial and error experimenting
Discovering individual autonomy that is separate from caregivers (for example, your toddler may wander into another room and come back to you)
Begin to develop a sense of self-awareness and individual preferences
Increased desire for independence and to do/try things on their own
Temperament and personality are emerging
Especially with increased autonomy, developing independence and self-awareness, toddlers can suddenly become very skeptical, erratic, and opinionated.
For example, your toddler may have been open to trying and eating new foods or whatever it is that you were serving for meals during infancy and when transitioning to solid food.
But now, in toddler years, you may notice that your child is suddenly much more cautious, opinionated, and unwilling to eat foods that may have been enjoyed as an infant.
You may have gone from an infant who is happy to try new foods to a toddler picky eater.
This is completely normal and expected, given the toddler developmental stages that are happening, in addition to toddler emotional development.
Understanding Normal Eating Patterns in Toddlers and Kids
No where are these toddler developmental changes more apparent than in a child’s eating behaviors.
With these developmental milestones happening in your toddler, it’s easier to see how this can impact eating patterns.
To begin, it’s important to take a look at what normal eating patterns might look like in toddlers and kids in general.
It’s easy to assume that kids should need to eat food at regular increments of time, including certain amounts of food in order to stay healthy.
The reality is that normal eating patterns in toddlers can look very erratic, especially through growth spurts and other new phases of learning and development.
Sometimes, normal eating in a toddler can look like:
Food refusal
Eating minimal amounts
Eating larger portions and amounts of food
Rejection of new foods increases
Losing interest in food after one bite
Not automatically liking new foods
Gradually experimenting with food
Tasting food and taking it out, or chewing and spitting
Sensitivity to strong flavors and textures
Food neophobia (fear of new foods)
Opinionated about food
Erratic eating (eating a lot at one meal and not much at another, or what they like on day, they don’t like the next)
Eating only 1 or 2 foods from what is served
Favoring a particular food group for a period of time, like carbohydrates
Difficult eating vegetables
Toddler refusing to eat anything but milk
In order to make peace with what your child’s normal eating patterns may look like, it’s important to bust the myth of the “balanced diet”. What does this mean?
For the majority of kids, it’s just not realistic for them to eat a balance of foods in the way that we might believe is appropriate for them.
This is especially true of toddlers.
You may continually make the effort to offer your child a balance of healthy foods at meals and snacks, but this doesn’t mean your child will necessarily eat in this way.
What is actually more common is for a child to vary in the types of foods they choose at meals/snacks and to eventually balance out what they need over time (think weeks and months, NOT days, and certainly NOT in single meals).
It’s also important to remember that eating is a skill that will take your child time to learn and develop.
Just like with learning how to ride a bike, a child needs repeated opportunities to try in order to build their confidence. This is similar to eating.
Your child has an innate desire to eat that is driven by their instinctual hunger and fullness cues (starting from birth). Learning HOW to eat new foods, different textures, etc. will all take time to develop.
With this in mind, it’s important to create space for your child to learn in an environment that is safe and nurturing.
Pressure to eat can create a food environment for your child that feels stressful; thereby making them less likely or inclined to want to eat at all.
A common source of frustration for parents is that the way their child may be eating doesn’t match up with their expectations of how their child should be eating.
The reality is that as parents, we’re constantly bombarded with an overwhelming amount of information when it comes to parenting, raising and feeding kids.
A lot of this information is strongly pushed by the dieting and “wellness” culture we live in, which has created rigid and arbitrary rules around food.
Sadly, this has infiltrated to feeding kids, where many parents feel fear or anxiety around feeding their kids or frustrated that their kids may not be eating up to par with expectations.
If you can relate to this, please know that you are absolutely not alone.
To help decrease mealtime stress for you and your child, especially if your child or toddler refuses to eat food, it’s important to put aside your own expectations of what and how you think they should be eating.
Understand that normal eating for toddlers and children includes variances in their eating patterns and appetites.
Generally speaking, toddlers and young children are much closer to their innate abilities to self-regulate their intake and are able to eat what they need from what is provided to grow at a rate that is appropriate for them.
What are normal portions of foods for toddlers?
Along with this, it may be helpful to remember what are “normal” portions for toddlers and young children.
While every toddler and child has different biological and nutritional needs, generally speaking, we tend to overestimate how much a child may need to eat.
Toddlers often need small portions in order to adequately meet their nutritional needs, and overestimating portion sizes could contribute to unrealistic expectations on what toddlers can reasonably eat.
Toddler Won’t Eat Meat
For example, protein is often a food that is hyper focused on for toddlers and young children, and yes, protein is an important macronutrient for growing children.
However, the protein needs a child has are often overestimated. On top of this, meat and poultry can be harder for toddlers to eat because of the texture or flavor.
If your toddler won’t eat meat, you might be worried about how this is impacting her nutrition.
Parents may be concerned that their child is not eating enough protein, when in fact, they may very well be getting adequate amounts of protein.
The average sized toddler may need anywhere between 13-18 grams of protein per day, which would easily be met with a cup of milk and 1 hard boiled egg.
There are multiple ways in which a toddler could meet their protein needs that would help them meet their requirements over the course of the week, including with plant-based protein options.
Protein options outside of meat and poultry include:
beans and lentils
nuts
seeds
dairy foods (like cheese, yogurt, and milk)
whole grains
soy products
eggs
potatoes, sweet potatoes
protein-rich vegetables, like broccoli and mushrooms
My Toddler Refuses to Eat Vegetables
A similar scenario that brings up concern for parents are when toddlers refuse to eat vegetables.
Even though a child may be eating other foods, parents may be worried about their child’s health when there is a refusal to touch, try, or taste anything that so much as resembles a vegetable. Am I right?
You might feel the same frustration, and no matter how you try to prepare, hide, or flavor your veggies, your toddler might outsmart your every attempt.
The reality is that for the most part, vegetables are generally harder for kids to eat, especially toddlers.
Toddlers tend to gravitate toward foods that are sweeter and slightly salty, while rejecting foods that might be bitter or sour.
For this reason alone, vegetables are often harder for toddlers to manage, simply given their preferred flavors. On top of this, many vegetables may present with textures that they may be more complex to process.
Because of the pressure that parents are often faced with to raise healthy children, there can be disproportionate pressure to get toddlers to eat vegetables. However, again, it’s important to understand the big picture here.
Toddlers that are forced or pressured to eat vegetables will be more likely to grow up having an aversion to these foods.
Remember that forcing, coercing, bribing or tricking your toddler to eating vegetables will only build distrust between you and your child.
Preserving and building a positive feeding relationship is far more healthy for your child in the long term than getting them to eat vegetables. Just some food for thought if you are dealing with this often complicated issue.
Other things to consider is that your toddler still has an innate ability to self-regulate the nutrients needed to maintain growth.
This happens when a child is regularly offered a variety of foods without any pressure to eat said foods, including vegetables.
So even though your toddler is refusing to eat vegetables, you can still offer while maintaining a neutral stance - meaning, there is not any added pressure in any form, including positive or negative.
A positive form of pressure might look like saying, “Great job, honey! I see you eating your broccoli, and that makes me so proud of you!”.
On the contrary, negative pressure might look like asking your child to take so many bites of veggies before having dessert or bribing: “If you eat all your vegetables, you can have a cookie”.
Both forms are pressure that will negatively impact your child’s view and outlook on those foods and achieve the opposite effect you may be hoping to accomplish.
One important thing to keep in mind is that fruits and vegetables actually have very similar nutrient profiles.
So if your toddlers have an easier time eating fruits rather than vegetables, they are likely meeting their nutrient needs.
The portion sizes for vegetables that may be part of toddler meals should be small.
The average toddler-sized meal might include one to two tablespoons of fruit and/or vegetables to help them meet their nutrient needs over the course of a week.
You can see that this is a lot smaller than what is often “pushed” as healthy vegetable consumption.
Now, serving this amount for your toddler doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily eat it, and that is okay. Serving or offering a smaller amount can be helpful for a toddler learning to like different foods, like vegetables.
The repetitious offering of these foods without added pressure will also help increase the chances that they will consume what they need to meet their individual nutrient needs.
The bottom line here is that you don’t need to micromanage what your children are eating to ensure they are getting all the food groups in (or to potentially avoid what you don’t want them to eat).
Raising a healthy eater doesn’t mix well with a personal feeding agenda.
Are there feeding expectations that you may have for your toddler that you need to let go of? It may feel difficult to relinquish this control, but this is a necessary step to give your kids the space they need to explore food on their terms.
Is it Picky Eating When My Child Refuses to Eat?
It’s easy to assume that when toddlers start refusing food or becoming more selective about foods that they are willing to eat that this automatically makes them “picky”.
However, as we’ve discussed and reviewed, a toddler who refuses to eat or becomes more selective about food choices is likely exhibiting normal behavior and development for this age.
In fact, child food neophobia, or the fear of eating new foods, commonly surfaces in toddlerhood.
Food Neophobia Definition
Food neophobia can be described as the reluctance to eat, or the avoidance of new, unfamiliar foods.
Toddlers, who are naturally becoming more exploratory, curious, and skeptical, will commonly begin to exhibit food neophobic behaviors, though this doesn’t automatically define them as being a picky or fussy eater.
Pressure to eat or controlling feeding strategies can actually worsen food neophobic behaviors in children, which is why it’s never a good idea to force kids to eat anything, especially foods they may already be hesitant to eat or uncomfortable with.
It’s also important to be aware of any labels that you might be attaching to your children’s eating habits, preferences, or tendencies, as these labels can haunt them for years to come and negatively influence how they feel about food and their bodies.
Picky eating in toddlers can vary from typical to more extreme to anywhere in between, and there isn’t any specific criteria that would diagnose your toddler as a picky eater.
If you’re concerned about a toddler with a limited food selection or about how to get a picky toddler to eat, be sure to check out this post here for more helpful resources.
Why Won’t My Toddler Eat?
Sometimes, it’s hard to not take things personally when you’re faced with a situation that involves your child or toddler refusing to eat or drink.
More than that though, many parents find themselves dealing with overwhelming anxiety or fear around what food refusal may mean for their child’s health.
In other scenarios, food refusal feels intrusive, impolite, or just bad behavior.
Whatever the reasons may be, I can assure you that it’s not a personal offense and more of a normal and natural part of your child learning how to self-regulate amounts of food that feel best in their bodies along with all the outside changes that may be happening.
A toddler refusing to eat is likely doing so because of the influence of one or more of the following:
Biological factors that influence appetite (growth changes, onset of illness, overly tired, teething, etc)
Environmental factors that influence appetite (frequent snacking throughout the day, a high number of milk feeds, change in surroundings or schedule, etc)
Toddler cognitive or emotional developments: A child’s
Disruptions in the feeding relationship (controlling or forceful feeding tactics between caregiver and child)
Let’s dive into this more.
In the same way that it’s normal for you, as an adult, to experience natural fluctuations in your appetite, this is something toddlers and children will experience as well
In some cases, young children who are refusing to eat may do so in attempt to find their voice and independence.
Particularly toddlers, who are developmentally becoming more autonomous and discovering their abilities to do things on their own, will suddenly want to exercise more of a say over their food.
This may especially be true for toddlers who may not have space or safe opportunities to exert their opinions or try new experiences.
In other scenarios, a toddler or child who doesn’t have structured meals and snacks throughout the day and who is allowed to continuously graze may not have the opportunity to work up an appetite or feel hungry at mealtimes.
Food refusal can also be linked to slower periods of growth (where a child’s food needs may be decreased), or illness, which can affect appetite.
Lastly, sometimes food refusal is associated with stressors in the feeding relationship between the child and the caregiver.
Parental practices or feeding styles may play a role in how a child feels about food or could potentially exacerbate feeding difficulties.
For example, a toddler who may have sensory sensitivities may find it more challenging to eat certain foods, due to flavors and textures. If this child is forced or pressured to eat in any shape or form, this can amplify food refusal.
Child Refuses to Eat Food: Common Reasons Why
In summary, some of the common reasons why your toddler may be refusing to eat might include:
Onset of an illness, fever, or infection (like an ear infection)
Toddler refusing to eat after illness
Irregularities in the feeding relationship
Toddler aversions to flavors or textures
Lack of meal and snack schedule, frequent grazing throughout the day
Toddlers who are having more milk feedings that solid food during the day (either breastmilk or formula)
Abrupt change in environment or surroundings
Should I Force My Child to Eat?
I realize it may seem counterintuitive, but if you want your toddlers to eat, forcing food is a surefire way to further deter them from eating.
Research has found that parental pressure to eat has been positively associated to food avoidance as well as with lower child weight status.
Again, I understand how concerning and stressful it feels when you see your child refuse to eat.
This can be a major stressor that might trigger underlying feelings you have yet to resolve.
If you have multiple children, food refusal is likely impacting your family dynamics, especially at mealtimes.
It may even get to the point that you avoid family meals or deter them altogether because you’re exhausted from the stress from the food battles.
Let me be the first to say that you’re not alone.
It’s also important to take an honest look at what your options are for approaching these behaviors in your own children.
You could engage in feeding tactics that pressure your child to eat, but even in the event these work, you’ve not created long term strategies that support a healthy relationship with food in your child.
On the other hand, you can respect your child’s growing autonomy and understand that at the end of the day, it’s not your job to get your child to eat.
Ultimately, if you allow your children to eat on their terms (from the regularly scheduled meals and snacks that you provide) without any added pressure to eat, you will create the space they need to build confidence with food and their bodies.
When you can stay in your own lane in respect to your feeding responsibilities, things will go much better with eating.
Every feeding challenge you may be encountering with your children happens within the context of the feeding relationship.
This is true, even in the face of medical, behavioral, sensory, and developmental issues.
When you focus on building a trusting feeding relationship with your children, many of these feeding challenges will subside, including battles over eating and food refusal.
Keep these things in mind to help you cultivate a positive feeding relationship with your child:
Your job with feeding includes:
Providing a consistent structure with regular meals and snacks
Offering a variety of foods
Fostering positive eating experiences with your child
Modeling healthy eating behaviors around food
Respecting your child’s appetite and food choices from what you’ve provided
Your job with feeding does NOT include:
Micromanaging your child’s food choices and intake
Pressuring, forcing, bribing, negotiating or coercing your child to eat
Telling your child how much or what to eat from the foods you’ve provided
When you’ve done your job with feeding, you can step back and trust that the ball is now in your child’s court, with respect to eating.
Are you Feeding Out of Fear or Trust?
One aspect to look at here while reframing your feeding jobs is how you are feeding your kids.
When you offer food to your children, are you feeding them from a place of fear or trust?
When you lead mealtimes and feeding from a place of fear, you will inevitably cross boundaries in an attempt to do your kids’ jobs of eating.
This never ends well and is a quick way to erode trust between you and your children, which is a crucial element for helping your children have a positive relationship with food and their bodies.
On the contrary, if you feed your children from a place of trust, you are more likely to make decisions that help them build confidence with food and most importantly, in their own bodies.
How to Feed a Child Who Refuses to Eat
So with all these things in mind, we can now look at some helpful strategies for food refusal.
Knowing that forcing or pressuring a child to eat is not a long-term solution, what should you do?
Here are some suggestions that can help you create positive mealtime experiences for your family, even if your toddler is refusing to eat.
More importantly, these approaches and feeding strategies are effective for giving your child a healthy foundation for building a positive relationship with food and decreasing the risk of further food challenges later in life.
How to Get a Child to Eat When They Refuse
If you’re wondering how to feed a toddler who refuses to eat, try implementing some of these suggestions:
Start with Structured Meals and Snacks
An important place to start is with one of your key responsibilities in the feeding relationship with you and your child.
Your toddler is relying on you to provide regular meals and snacks with a consistent feeding schedule.
This doesn’t mean you have to be rigid or that you can’t have any flexibility.
Ideally, your toddler should have multiple opportunities to eat throughout the day in the form of structured meals and snacks to support their overall growth and nutrition.
In this way, if your child won’t eat at any given meal or snack, you know that they will have other chances to eat in the very near future.
For example, if your toddler won’t eat dinner, you know she will have the chance to eat again at breakfast. In the same scenario, if you have a scheduled afternoon snack for your toddler, this will also give her an opportunity to eat in the case that she doesn’t eat very much dinner.
Toddlers in particular, can generally hold a smaller volume of food at any given time.
For this reason, offering a meal or snack about every couple of hours can give them ample of opportunities to get what they need throughout the day to meet their nutritional needs.
Keep in mind that food should be offered regularly, but this doesn’t necessarily mean your child will eat at these times.
A sample meal schedule that you might implement for your kids may include (customize in a way that works best for your family):
8:00 am: Breakfast
10:30 am: Morning Snack
12:30 pm: Lunch
3:00 pm: Afternoon Snack
5:30 pm: Dinner
7:30 pm: Night Snack
Consider offering meals and snacks in a consistent place, like the family table, with minimal distractions, including tablets, phones, or television.
This can help them learn that eating is a social experience and can boost family interactions during mealtimes, which are significant for support their overall health and wellbeing.
Structured meals and snacks also help kids better regulate their intake and build an appetite between eating times.
If children are allowed to graze throughout the day or are constantly panhandling for food in the pantry and fridge, they will be less likely to eat at actual mealtimes.
2. Consider Implementing Family Style Meals
Offering family style meals (where foods offered are all put out and everyone self-serves) can be a helpful way to support your child’s autonomy while removing any outside pressure to eat.
For skeptical toddlers who may be refusing to eat, this can be a way to help them build confidence around food and eat on their terms.
Family style meals can also help expose your children to foods that they are still learning how to eat.
Remember that learning to try and like new foods is not something that happens quickly for toddlers. Learning to try new foods is a process that progresses in small steps.
Your child needs to have multiple interactions with a new food before even considering trying it or potentially eating it.
In the case that you’re dealing with food jags, sensory sensitivities, or food refusal, allowing opportunities for food exposure without any outside pressure to eat are going to be crucial for your toddlers.
Family style meals can be an excellent way to help facilitate these exposures.
With family style meals, your child will interact with food by:
Seeing new/unfamiliar foods on the table
Seeing others eat foods that are new/unfamiliar
Passing dishes with food to other family members
Self-serving food on an individual plate
Using utensils or fingers to touch food
It’s just important to remember that kids need to decide what they want to serve/eat from the food that’s been provided.
It’s helpful to make mealtimes enjoyable to take the pressure off of your kids to eat and help them feel welcomed at the table to share in the family meal experience - regardless of whether or not they decide to eat or how much they decide to eat.
For toddlers, you may need to offer some assistance with self-serving. Sometimes, eager toddlers may be more excited about self-serving than the actual (especially if it’s with an interesting tool, like tongs).
This is perfectly okay, and again, another way to help build their exposure. Encourage small portions to begin with, so your kids don’t feel overwhelmed by any amount of food on their plates.
Family meals can also be a powerful tool for modeling.
In their early, formative years, toddlers are observing what those around them are doing and may imitate what they see others doing.
If your toddler sees you and other family members eating and enjoying their food, they will likely be encouraged to do the same.
Ultimately, family style dining to help kids feel empowered to trust their own intuition with food.
3. Allow Food Play to Encourage Exposure
You can help your toddler refusing to eat by allowing repeated exposure to food without having to actually eat a food (especially helpful for kids who may have sensory sensitivities to food or for more extreme picky eating).
Toddlers in particular, are learning about their environment through play.
This includes food and eating.
So if your child is allowed opportunities to interact with their food without added pressure to eat, this can help boost their confidence and comfortability with food.
For example, you might allow your child to stack foods (like cucumber slices) and point out how tall your tower is, or you might show your child how you can squish a food, like a blueberry or grape.
These types of activities will encourage your child to engage with the food, learn about the food, and feel more comfortable at the table.
These things are essential to helping your child build skills with new foods.
The key is to remain neutral and not add any verbal or non-verbal pressure to eat.
Your toddler may naturally start trying or eating foods with which they are playing without any prompting, simply because they’ve become interested.
Having finger foods available can be another practical way to encourage food play and increase food exposure/interactions.
4. Keep Language Neutral
How do you talk about food around your child? What words might you use to describe your toddler to others?
Remember that little ears are listening, and language around food matters.
As much as possible, try to refrain from food labeling, especially around your children.
Using polarizing terms, like “good” versus “bad”, or “unhealthy” versus “healthy”, can create confusion, even chaos, around food and eating.
It’s common to use these terms as an attempt to get a child to eat, but any language that involves force, bribes, or coercion can have a negative impact on a child.
Instead, focus on refraining from food talk and bring up conversations with your child at mealtime that don’t have anything to do with the food itself.
5. Stay Grounded in Trust and Patience
Toddlers are learning how to do things on their own terms, and this inevitably will take longer than we might have patience for.
Remember that feeding and cultivating a positive experience around food is a long-term game. You’re in this for the long haul, and certain processes just can’t be rushed.
Like the toddler that wants to put their shoes on “by myself”, there are things you may just have to let go of in order to create space for your child to learn.
This is where it’s so important to examine your own hidden agendas or unspoken expectations that could be putting a damper on your feeding experiences with your child.
Ultimately, if you stick to your jobs with feeding and trust your children to do their part with eating, things will unfold just as they are meant to be.
You can learn to trust your child’s appetite and know that your child will reach a healthy weight that is right for him and her without pressure to eat or micromanaging of food intake.
6. Planning Foods for Picky Toddlers
“What to feed a picky toddler?”
That is the million dollar question.
Trying to plan a meal that your toddler might actually eat can feel like a lot of guesswork because you never know where the dice might fall.
A food that your toddler previously enjoyed can suddenly become something he’s no longer willing to eat anymore. This can be frustrating when you’re trying to plan out meals.
Remember that you should be in charge of planning the menu for your family meals.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t take your toddler’s like and preferences into consideration.
Because these preferences are likely to change from one day to the next, you shouldn’t base meal options solely on what they might like in that moment.
If you only offer and serve what they’re wanting that day, you’ll be doing them a disservice by not giving them opportunities to learn how to eat new foods; on top of which, you might literally lose your sanity. It’s just not sustainable.
Stick to your meal schedule and don’t cater to what your child wants in that moment.
Instead, continue to offer a variety of foods based on a menu you find suitable for your whole family, and include 1-2 familiar foods that are comfortable for your toddler.
Offering safe “anchor” foods alongside other foods they are learning to eat will help your child feel more comfortable at mealtimes, especially when they can see something on the table they are familiar with.
Toddler Meals for Picky Eaters: How to Plan Out a Meal When Your Child is Refusing to Eat
For example, say you want to make a chicken and vegetable stir fry for your family for dinner, but your toddler hasn’t been keen on eating much meat or vegetables lately.
Don’t let this deter you from making this meal for your family. Instead, plug in 1-2 food components that your child may already be familiar with.
This may include a starch component, like rice, pasta or bread, alongside the stir-fry. You can also offer milk and fruit, which may be other food components that your child is more comfortable with.
At meal time, let them decide what they want to have from these foods that you have offered without any outside pressure to try or eat anything they don’t want.
7. Keep the Big Picture in Mind
If your toddler is refusing to eat at any given meal or snack time, keep in mind that this likely is NOT an indicator that:
Your child is going to lose weight
Your child’s growth will be negatively affected
Your child will have poor nutrition intake
Your child’s growth will be stunted
More than likely, your child is probably exhibiting normal behavior for their age, and implementing some of the above strategies, you can help decrease their risk of experiencing more complicated feeding issues down the road.
When Should I Be Concerned About My Child Refusing Food?
In the cases of an extremely picky eater toddler or when a child is underweight, there may be more concern about a toddler refusing to eat.
One important clue to determine how food intake is impacting a child’s health is to look at growth charts. Looking at trends on overall growth charts that examine height and weight can help determine if refusing food is associated with poor growth.
If this is something you might be concerned with, be sure to have your pediatrician or pediatric registered dietitian review your child’s growth charts to assess her overall growth trend.
Any abrupt shifts or changes in your child’s growth pattern may indicate that something should be looked at more closely.
Remember that all feeding challenges are occurring in the context of the overall feeding relationship.
So even if your child is experiencing medical, behavioral, or sensory issues that impact eating and/or growth, this doesn’t change the overall need for positive feeding strategies.
Even in the case of an underweight toddler, force feeding is never a long-term solution for helping a child thrive.
As we’ve seen in research, this tactic almost always creates the opposite effect.
Instead, stay attuned with your child’s cues, stick to your jobs with feeding, and feed with trust.
You can trust that good nutrition and health will be the natural outcome of a positive feeding relationship with your child.
Respecting your child’s autonomy with feeding builds their trust and confidence with eating, they will get the nutrition they need to grow at a rate that is right for them.
Managing Your Own Anxieties and Stress Around Toddler Food Refusal
Remember - it’s not your job to get your child to eat.
Ultimately, you want to raise children who can listen to and honor their own bodies’ needs - however that might look to the outside world is irrelevant.
Having awareness of any feelings that might be coming up for you can help you better navigate this situation.
What feelings does it bring up for you when your child refuses to eat?
Is it difficult to let go of control or to trust your child’s appetite?
If this is somehow connected to underlying issues for you, it may be helpful to explore this area to help make peace with food - for yourself and your children.
At the end of the day, building trust between you and your children through feeding can help create a stable foundation for a positive relationship with food that will allow them to flourish and grow at a rate that is best for them.