It is a scenario many nursery practitioners are familiar with: a young child normally happily eats all of their chicken, but when it is prepared even a little bit differently, they refuse.
We are used to thinking that our job as practitioners is to fight against this and encourage children to eat a varied diet right from the start – by smuggling vegetables onto their plate, smothered in sauce so they don't see them, or bribing them with pudding afterwards.
In fact, though, recent advances from neuroscience suggest that this might not be the best approach and could even have the opposite effect to what you are trying to achieve. It may be that, the more you allow a child to eat a restricted diet early in development, the faster they will spontaneously try new food when they are older – and that tricking or bribing children might slow down the rate at which they do this.
To understand this, we need to know about recent advances in our understanding of early brain development that offer insights into why some young children can be so selective in what they eat, and why so many want to eat the same food, over and over again. These insights reveal that the roots of such behaviour lie in the way our brains learn, particularly in how we generate and test predictions about the world around us.
This prediction-making behaviour is also important for explaining not just why children seek out other types of predictability – such as banging a spoon on a table over and over again, or dropping something repeatedly on the floor for you to pick up – but also why young children can tax your patience by asking to read the same book, or watch the same TV show repeatedly.
PREDICTIVE LEARNING
At the core of our brain's learning process is its ability to make predictions (Friston 2009). Before we even taste something, our brain makes a guess about what it will taste like, based on past experiences. When we finally taste the food, our brain assesses whether the experience matched the prediction. If the taste is as expected, our brain's predictions are reinforced; if not, the brain adjusts its expectations for next time.
This predictive mechanism doesn't just apply to tasting food – it guides virtually all forms of learning (Köster et al. 2020). Whether we are learning to walk, talk or play a musical instrument, the brain continually makes predictions, tests them and refines its understanding based on the results.
Brains learn most effectively in situations where there is an intermediate level of predictability (Poli et al. 2020). If something is too easy and my brain is always correctly predicting what is going to happen, very little learning takes place. But if sois too difficult and my brain can never predict what is going to happen, I don't learn much from that either. The best learning happens when my brain's predictions are sometimes right but sometimes wrong – this sweet spot encourages the brain to stay engaged and continue refining its understanding. It is sometimes known as the ‘Goldilocks zone’ (Kidd 2012) – although it is related to older psychological terms such as Vygotsky's ‘zone of proximal development’ (Yasnitsky 2018).
WHY CHILDREN PREFER FAMILIAR FOODS
For young learners, their brain's ability to make accurate predictions is still at a very early stage. They are less experienced and, therefore, find it harder to predict what something will taste, look or feel like. As a result, young children often seek out learning situations where the outcome is highly predictable (Köster et al. 2019). Even if it is super-simple – like guessing how a carrot stick is going to taste – their young and inexperienced brain will only guess it right some of the time.
So it is a good learning task for them. This is one of the key reasons why young children often prefer to eat the same food over and over again (Harris and Shea 2018).
As children's brains get better at making predictions, they are gradually able to always predict what the carrot stick will taste like. At this point, it gets too easy for them and they stop learning anything new from eating the same thing. This is the point where they start trying new foods.
When a young child insists on eating only ‘normal chicken’, it is not just about a preference for a particular taste or texture; their brain is seeking out a situation where it can confidently predict what will happen, which is essential for effective learning at the particular developmental stage the child is at. Each time they eat the same chicken prepared in the same way, their brain's prediction mechanism is reinforced, helping them build a stable understanding of what chicken should taste like. The more times they eat exactly the same mouthful, the faster they learn.
This need for predictability also explains why many young children, even after you have persuaded them to have three different foods on their plate at once (say, chicken, noodles and cucumber), will still insist on eating them one after the other – eating all of the chicken, then all of the noodles, then all of the cucumber (Harris and Shea 2018).
This is because just eating one ingredient at a time makes it easier for their brains to predict what each successive mouthful will taste like. It is also why many young children might happily eat the ingredients for a rice salad individually while you are making the salad, but then are reluctant to eat the salad when it is finished. It is because when the ingredients are presented individually, it is easy to guess what they will taste like – but when they are all mixed in together, it is harder to predict.
STRATEGIES FOR HELPING FUSSY EATERS
Understanding why young children seek out predictability also explains some of the strategies that help with fussy eaters. One proven strategy is to present the same food repeatedly, even if the child refuses it the first few times (Appleton et al. 2018). But why does this work? It may be because repetition builds familiarity, and as the brain becomes more confident in predicting what the food will taste like, the child may become more willing to try it.
Another effective approach, which is increasingly popular in some nurseries, is to involve children in food preparation (Broad et al. 2021). Allowing children to touch, smell and even play with food before they taste it gives their brain more opportunities to learn about it in different ways, such as the way it smells and its texture. This hands-on exploration may help build a more comprehensive understanding of the food, making it less unpredictable when they finally taste it.
Consistently offering the same foods and encouraging hands-on interaction can help shift a child's perception of unfamiliar food from ‘I've never seen this before, I've got no idea what it's going to taste like’ to ‘I think I can guess what this will taste like, so maybe I'll give it a go’.
BENEFITS OF EARLY FOOD FAMILIARITY
Most children will move away from restricted eating eventually. Some, such as children with autism, may not (Harris and Shea 2018; Suarez and Crinion 2015). Autism is characterised by atypical predictive learning – but that is a story for another article (Cannon et al. 2021). But for all children, it is true that observing when children spontaneously start seeking out predictability, and when they start seeking out variety, can tell you lots about where they are at on their individual learning journey. What might strike you as an unreasonable behaviour, that you should try to talk a child out of, might in fact be completely reasonable, based on optimising their learning for the particular developmental stage that they are at.
making meal times predictable
- Ensure that the same consistent range of healthy snacks is available each day.
- Ensure the menu has a range of dishes to suit different tastes and that it repeats frequently (every two or three weeks).
- Use a visual timetable to show when snack/meal times are approaching.
- Discuss/show children (with images/photos if the food is prepared elsewhere) what they will be eating.
- Show the food in the serving dishes before it is served, talking about each.
- Use individual place mats to show children where to sit.
- Present food on the same sort of plate each time.
- Involve children in serving and narrate how the food is being served.
- If the child is unlikely to try everything on their plate, place it so that their preferred food item is closest to the child.
- If the child does not want to try something new, let them focus fully on what they do want to eat.
- Eat with the children and model positive responses to what you eat.
MORE INFORMATION
- Find out more about the neuroscience of education at nestkids.co.uk
- Go to nurseryworld.co.uk for a longer version of this article and full list of references
