When a child refuses a food, most of us assume it is about taste. In practice, taste is only one part of what is going on, and often not the part causing the problem.
Eating is a very complex sensory task. Children with sensory sensitivities often find food challenging because they are over responsive or under responsive to it.
Every sense is involved
Eating involves all of the senses that we have. Not just smell and taste, but also:
- Touch. How a food feels on the hands and in the mouth.
- Sound. The noise a food makes when it is bitten or chewed.
- Vestibular. This is about balance and coordination.
- Proprioception. This is body awareness.
- Interoception. This is your internal cues.
So it goes well beyond taste. A child could gag at the sight of a food, or dislike the touch of food on their hands. It is a genuinely multi-faceted sensory task.
Children are still learning what to expect
Adults subconsciously know what to expect from foods. We pick something up and our brain has already predicted the weight, the texture, the temperature and the taste before it reaches our mouth.
Children are still learning all of that. When the food does not match what they were expecting, it gets rejected. This is why a bruised banana or a broken biscuit can be refused outright. The food is not wrong, but it is not what they predicted.
Some dislikes are built in
A lot of children dislike bitter tasting foods, and that is an evolutionary dislike. Bitter foods would have been potentially poisonous, so a wariness of them made sense.
Foods with stringy bits or slimy textures also tend to be disliked. If your child rejects those consistently, they are in good company, and it is not a sign that something is wrong.
What this means for how you offer food
Do not hide it
Generally I would not hide foods. Children need to see what the food is actually like, rather than having it disguised. It is fine to have sauces with vegetables naturally in them. But if you always offer vegetables that way, your child never gets used to seeing what the actual vegetable looks like, and that visual familiarity is part of the learning.
Let them touch it
Encourage self feeding as much as possible. Clean up after they have left the table rather than during, and try not to show them that you are stressed about the mess. Handling food is part of learning about it.
Offer new foods on a side plate
Putting a new food on a side plate works for some children, because it does not contaminate the rest of the meal. Self serve, family style meals also help, and lots of nurseries do this. Nothing is automatically portioned up, and it is more of a help yourself arrangement.
Give it time and repetition
Repeated offering is really boring, but some children need 15 or 20 exposures to a food, and some children need an awful lot more than that. Sensory learning takes time.
Set the environment up properly
Comfortable chairs are really important, with footrests, so children have the right position for feeding. That is a physical support point rather than a preference, and it is easy to overlook at home.
Some children also benefit from something that prepares them for the task. Starting with a song or some movement, or tidying up toys first, works well. It is almost like preparing the brain for the next task, and children like knowing what to expect.
When sensory difficulty is more than preference
Most children experience some degree of fussiness, and it is very common. It is worth getting advice if your child is visibly disgusted by food, has very strong reactions to other children eating, is eating fewer than 20 foods in total, or is gagging and vomiting in a way that is not resolving after several weeks.
Gagging in the early stages of weaning is completely normal and expected. Ongoing gagging is a different matter, and worth raising.
