I hear occasional complaints from parents: “My child wants to watch nothing but Frozen 22 times in a row, and eats nothing but macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets!”
How hard is it to expand a child’s taste in media and food?
It depends on the kid. I have 2, raised exactly the same. One has always been extremely adventurous in trying and liking new things, the other frustratingly limited.
It’s remarkable how early children develop certain tastes. My daughter loved watching CNN before she could even walk, I suspect because of all the dramatic music and graphics every time they showed an hourly update. I have a three-year-old nephew who loves playing with tools and a wood-burning iron. His idea of a grand day out is standing on the street watching workers lay down a new roadbed.
It also depends a lot on what you expose them to, and how you do it. For example, I tried reading the Harry Potter books to my daughter when she was six, and she wasn’t interested in the series at all. That changed real fast when she saw the first movie.
She spoke Russian like an adult by the time she was two because she had an older cousin to play with, but she still hadn’t learned much English. When she came to live with me full time, she was speaking perfect English within two months. She also taught herself to read Russian when she was three because her mother gave her a set of cards that matched pictures with the letters they start with. (Mind you, it’s a lot easier to learn Russian spelling than it is English.)
The trick is that you have to fool the kid into thinking that he or she is acquiring it voluntarily on their own. The moment they get the sense that you’re trying to impose it on them externally, they’ll inwardly rebel against it.
If they feel that they are the ones who developed a liking for something new, then they’ll go in for it.
But sometimes, you just got to let an obsession burn out on its own. If a kid watches Frozen 22 times in a row, then you may have no choice but to just let them watch it over and over even more until they finally tire of it and want something new.
I think a lot of it has to do with what kids are exposed to. If they never taste mac-n-cheese and chicken nuggets, they cannot get hooked on them. OTOH prohibiting anything can also lead to going overboard when finally exposed to it (e.g. sweets, alcohol). The trick is to expose them to a wide variety of food and other stimulus early and often, and let them sort-out what they like (as @Velocity states). If they start getting too dependent on a food and refuse to try anything new, then the parent should just go about making normal food and not make special meals for the toddler (under the idea that if they refuse to eat at meal time, they will eventually get hungry enough to do so after a few skipped meals - I acknowledge there are differing views of this practice). Anyway, the parent should determine how much inflexibility to tolerate.
Anecdotally, my son was a pretty picky eater when young, maybe around the ages of 5-15 years old. We did not make special dinner for him if he turned his nose up at what we were having - he just went to bed without eating, which is not a tragedy anyway, health wise. He’d make up ground at breakfast (cereal for the most part, that he could pick), and lunch (sack lunch, also that he had control over, with some limits). Today he’s a young adult and enjoys Mexican, sushi, ramen, BBQ, and lately he has taken to Indian. He still hates broccoli, tho. There may be some truth to the theory that taste buds change as we age so hopefully no one is solely eating nuggets when they walk down the aisle.
My kid has a Spotify playlist she listens to when going to sleep. I slip music in there that I think she should be exposed to. It was already a bizarre mix of Nightcore and Irish flutes when it was only her requests, so a little dad music won’t hurt.
Kids can also have remarkably catholic tastes and will latch onto anything they think is good. When my daughter was little, we had cable and satellite TV, and a VCR. By the time she was five, she had not only seen classic Russian cartoons but a lot of Disney movies and things like The Flumps, Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, Rocky and Bullwinkle, King of the Hill, The Simpsons, and Mr Bean. A lot of the time she also had her nose in a comic book, mostly the same Disney ones I read as a kid (like Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge).
At home, I had a lot of Enya tapes I would listen to while working. She says that’s one of her strongest memories from when she was growing up. Her mother also enrolled her in a bilingual public school where she learned French, and in afternoon and weekend courses at a private school for the performing and visual arts. This helped a lot at the high school she attended after we moved to Canada. I also made sure to at least expose her to classical music, which she seems to enjoy, but not quite to the degree I do (at least not yet).
Watching Jeopardy! and TCM together has helped expand both our cultural tastes as well.
It can be very easy or very difficult and it doesn’t seem to depend on parenting, exactly.
I have friends in London (where I live) that struggle to get their kids to eat anything other than a very limited diet. The parents have a varied diet, so it’s not a fault of modelling eating behaviour.
When it comes to media, kids just sometimes want to watch the same thing again and again and again (and it’s not a sign of autism; almost all kids do this now and then), but they might be happy to eat anything. The two experiences aren’t necessarily connected.
If they want to watch the same thing for the twentieth time, why not? If they insist on you sitting and watching it with them then you might need to explain that not everyone has the same need to watch it again, and you’ll be off doing something else, but they can still watch it.
In my experience, all you can do is expose the kid to as much quality stuff as possible. But you couldn’t guarantee what - if any - of it they end up liking.
In the longterm, all 3 of mine seem able to distinguish and appreciate quality, tho their tastes differ pretty vastly from mine.
You know , it’s funny- my picky kid didn’t touch either mac-n-cheese or chicken nuggets.( the non-picky one ate those ) However she did eat fish and seafood and rice and salad. And chicken feet and jellyfish. Which means you might still end up with a picky kid even if they never taste mac and cheese or chicken nuggets.
In my parents’ house when I was a child, this is what was for dinner, and you ate that or nothing. I remember sitting at the table for hours after dinner was over until I managed to choke down some vegetable I didn’t want to eat. I learned to eat the things I didn’t like first, so I could end the meal on things I did like. By the time I was a teen and hungry all the time, all that had long ceased to be an issue.
With cultural matters, again there were a lot fewer choices. We kids watched a hell of a lot of junk on TV when I was little, and believe me, nostalgia aside, 50’s TV was full of junk programming for children. The only thing my parents controlled, when they weren’t actually watching the TV themselves (in which case they picked the programs of course) was how many hours we spent watching. However, the TV was off during meals, and classical music was playing on the radio in the background. It sunk in by osmosis. These days this part must be much harder with all the different media and players around, but giving in to children’s entertainment demands has probably never been a good strategy for child-rearing. Says the 72-year-old who never had children of his own.
When my daughter was one year old, she suddenly developed a taste for ketchup. It had to be on everything! She ate it until she broke out in eczema, and threw a fit when she couldn’t have it any more. (Of course, she’s fine now, 25 years later.)
Sometimes you have to wean kids off of something they’ve acquired a taste for (or just cut them off cold turkey). This is a lot harder to do than getting them acclimated to it.
I was a picky eater as a kid, and remain so, I haven’t changed a jot since then. I still eat largely the same stuff as I did when I was 5. My parents despaired at first, and tried the “eat veges or nothing at all” and I chose nothing. Eventually they capitulated, after a Doctor said that as long as my dietary choices weren’t making me sick, then it was fine. And this remains true, I am just fine, in many ways better than most.
So I don’t think it matters all that much if your kids don’t eat certain things. Have it available, encourage but don’t insist, monitor their health, and whatever happens happens.
I was not particularly picky, per se. Frex, only veggies I refuse to eat that I am not allergic to [mushrooms, coconut/palm] are because I dislike the taste - zucchini, eggplant, okra, kale. If I have not yet tried it, I will try whatever it is I am offered, you can’t decide you don’t like something if you don’t try it.
My brother and I ate the exact same stuff my parents ate, and my mom didn’t serve us canned spinach because as she put it it was nothing but green slime in a can. We only got it in season out of the garden done German fried bacon warm salad style. We both liked lima beans, brussels sprouts [again, out of the garden and not boiled to mush - cut into quarters and sauteed with bacon and dressed with cider vinegar] and were the only kids I knew in small town western NY who had ever eaten artichokes.
I heard online [I know, shitty reference] that if your mother eats a lot of something, you will like it when you are finally outside and on solid food. No idea, but I posit that when you are fed en famille and offered food off your mom’s plate you will try it and probably not refuse to eat it unlike if you are presented something strange on a spoon that nobody else you see is eating. I know my mom would feed my much younger cousins off her plate when they were in the starting to self wean process and grab for something off her plate. I know I will let laplings grab off my plate if I am babysitting during a meal.
[And I had food issues growing up, never had a typical appetite, I would graze off dinner and in a sense still do - there are many days that I will have something carby for breakfast, oatmeal made with raisins and cinnamon is my common breakfast, a bunch of whatever veggies I have on hand [yesterday’s lunch was fresh beansprouts and canned water chestnuts and a single of mandarin oranges in a bowl dressed with soy sauce] and dinner would be a single serve of protein. Sucks when you are diabetic, but they are more concerned I don’t go over 1800 cal, and generally I don’t - but I also don’t go for candy, it is all ‘real’ food. My nutritionist says that I seem to graze my food in a manner that I seem to have a complete meal over the course of a day. And some days I manage to do 3 normal meals a day.]