I have heard of stories where parents offer children a set menu of food and if they don’t eat it, no alternatives, and face the consequence that they’d be hungry until the next meal. While fine in theory I have not found that particularly useful in practice. Younger kids, when hungry, just roll around on the floor and melt down, and the idea of dealing with hours of that just isn’t very appealing to me, and not worth the effort. Just makes lives miserable for everyone involved when kids are hungry.
But perhaps that may play a role in why my kids are somewhat picky.
But I should add that while my kids are kind of picky, if I actually count, they actually eat a fairly reasonable number of different foods, just not as wide of a range as I do now. And I don’t really remember what I ate and didn’t when I was at their age. That long term memory didn’t stick. I know by ages 7-10, I ate most of the items I was fed, and only didn’t really eat celery and some mustard greens. I still don’t choose to eat celery but don’t find it as repulsive as I used to.
