The best children’s food is the result of adults controlling the nutrition, but children controlling what they put in their mouths.

Whatever their core condition may be, these children cannot behave at the table because the food is causing them such distress.

But in these vast quantities, the milk leaves children anemic (because calcium in the cow’s milk blocks the absorption of iron) and badly constipated, not to mention at risk for obesity from the excess calories. The constipation and the fact that the milk is so filling leave the children with little appetite for proper meals. As a result, they fail

is girls more than boys who need the most hemoglobin-boosting foods. And boys more than girls are lacking in salad and vegetables. “Girl food” and “boy food” are dangerous nonsense that prevent us from seeing the real problems of feeding boys and girls.

Cooke found that if parents could do tasting sessions with children outside of meals, it could take emotion out of it. In addition, they only asked children to try pea-sized amounts of food, which reduces the feeling of pressure. “The demands on the child have to be very low.” A whole plate of cauliflower is a horrible prospect if you don’t like

Our tastes are learned in the context of immense social influences, whether from our family, our friends, or the cheery font on a bottle of soda. Yet it’s still possible, as Duncker showed, to carve out new tastes for ourselves. We can put the impressionable nature of our likes to good use. If we expose ourselves enough times to enough different

It’s that waiting until six months to wean is to miss two months in which a child could be tasting different vegetables every day, which would prepare the child for a recognition—and hence liking—of those same vegetables at a later stage. The second mistake parents make—and they are encouraged to do this by those baby-feeding guides with their

Talk of empathy is not touchy-feely in this context. It can be the difference between kill and cure.

ketchup became a beloved children’s food partly because it is one of the few elements in a meal a child can add themselves.