Ever wonder why a 9-month-old will put anything in her mouth and the same 19-month-old refuses to eat anything new? This activity is so common that there’s even a name for it – neophobia or “the fear of new things”.

After observing my patients go through this over and over again I had to ask myself why? And I came to the conclusion kids were actually designed that way.

In this week’s video, I describe food neophobia and why it has an important place in childhood development.

If you have a baby who is still in the “hummm, let’s see what dust-bunnies taste like” phase of life, i.e. about six months old to about the time she begins to walk, here’s some great information to help you keep her from becoming a picky eater. If your child has already entered into the food neophobia phase and has a limited palate, there are ways make changes that will help you and your child though it.

Either way, I’d love to hear your picky eater story.

When was the last time you asked your child to dine with you? Probably never if you’re like most people.

Truth be told, I haven’t either.

In fact I just had a Mommy/Daughter dinner date with my 7 year old and I didn’t even ask her to go to dinner, I just assumed (correctly so I might add) that she would be on board with my plan. In retrospect I think how lovely she would have felt if I had extended a dinner invitation rather than just laying out where we were going. It was Souplantation by the way, and she just happens to love eating a good salad, especially if she gets to build it.

Anyway, I got to thinking about how I’ve used lots of tips I’ve read to help our family enjoy one another’s company at the dinner table, and it transformed our often upside down dinners into pleasant experiences. I want to share those tips with you, because they’ve worked for me when I’ve remembered to use them.

Eat dinner at the Same Hour Every Evening

There might be nothing else more dreaded than the cranky toddler who is hungry and dinner is still 20 minutes out. The funny thing is it’s not just the kids this affects. The adults in the house are less cranky when dinner is at the same time every night as well.

Have your Child Assist in Planning and Prepping the Meal

This one is the hardest one for me to implement with 3 eager-to-do-everything kids. I learned that prepping can also include setting the table. Ever notice how much a child loves choosing their meal from a menu at a restaurant? Just bring that idea home! Type up your 3 meal options, pictures work best for the younger crowd, and when you’re thinking about what to have for dinner and it’s lunch time, ask for your child’s input! Pull out the faux menu and allow them to place their order. I can see this going over really well for birthday dinners!

Create a Colorful Plate

I started being more aware of this after meeting my friend Kia Robertson of Today I Ate a Rainbow on Twitter. It is amazing the difference in appeal of the dinner when it is vibrant and rich in color. One of our old stand by meals hardly ever makes an appearance any more; plain chicken breast, mashed potatoes and frozen corn. Now my goal is to always avoid something that drab looking. If it looks boring on the plate chances are slim that YOU are enthused to eat it, never mind your child.

Have an Appetizer

When we go out to dinner it is almost expected that something will come before the meal to tide everyone over until the dinner arrives. This is actually an easy thing to add to the family dinner at home. The ideal choice here is a variety of fresh veggies, maybe some ranch dip that you make a la Deceptively Delicious. A homemade ranch dip where you sneak good stuff in is smart. It also generally gets kids eating more veggies!

Ever since my husband put the moratorium on pre dinner snacking (essentially anything after 4pm) I found myself wanting to snack, probably just because there was this rule in place. (We instituted the rule because our kids were often eating just a couple bites of their dinner, claiming they filled up on xyz snack.) Anyway we adapted the rule, veggies and certain fruits are allowed. Veggies don’t kill their appetite. Sometimes when the kids wander into the kitchen they are told they can pick a veggie if they are hungry and sometimes they turn right around and go back to playing. Other times the veggies are gobbled up gleefully.

Share Your Favorite Part of the Day

We’ve been doing this most nights for nearly 2 years. Each person goes around and shares their favorite part of the day. It’s really just a conversation starter. We are in such a groove with “Favorite part of the Day” that Owen, my youngest who’s 4, will begin before everyone is even at the table. Owen loves to share several things he favored from the day, sometimes he interrupts others, eager to get his turn. This practice has done more than get us talking around the dinner table, it is a lesson in manners for my preschooler in waiting his turn, it is a practice of caring as when one person has shared they move on to ask another family member “What was your favorite part of the day?”

It can be a practice in patience, as I mentioned, Owen loves to jumpstart our dinner conversation. When the kids are busy talking and listening to one another, there is less opportunity for them to bicker. I’m glad that we’ve built this into a family tradition. I literally stole the concept from the movie “The Story of Us” where they shared their “high/low” for the day.

Play Signing Games!

This is especially useful when out to eat. If you’ve been signing with your baby, you are about to cash in all the chips with this tip. Often toddlers are not too keen on the activity sheets and crayons the hostess brings for your little one. This can be a problem if your little one is so hungry they’ll eat anything, including crayons! I’m typically not a proponent of “Quiz the Baby” type of activities, but in the scenario of being at a restaurant, waiting for a meal to arrive, asking your baby to demonstrate the sign for objects you know they know can save everyone in the restaurant, including the parents, a bit of stress.

Toddlers were built for figuring out how to use their bodies, hence they do not like to sit for long periods of time. When you keep a baby’s mind busy, engaged in conversation, this leads to greater patience. You get creative freedom here in making up your own signing game. Personally I like to point at objects I see all over the restaurant and ask my toddler “what’s the sign for xyz?” It works wonders! And you might even see your child point out new objects that they want to know the sign for. Great way to take turns and keep building your signing vocabulary!

It occurred to me that part of being a great host is to engage your dinner guest in conversation. Imagine if we treated our toddlers as dinner guests at meal time:

1. Extend a dinner invitation
2. Eat dinner at the same time
3. Include them in the planning
4. Steer clear of boring meals
5. Have an appetizer
6. Favorite Part of the Day conversation starter
7. Play Signing Games

How would dinner look in your house if you implemented just one of these things?

You probably already know that our kids are growing up in a pretty tough world, and part of the challenge is being certain what to feed your young ones.

Since the mid-1990s, food allergies have gone from a relative rarity to becoming increasingly commonplace.

What is responsible? Well, it just so happens that in 1996 GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) were introduced into our food supply. In 2000, 1% of the corn planted in the US had been genetically engineered; today it’s 90% – and 93% of all soy. These show up as ingredients in an enormous number of foods and sodas, under one name or another (think high fructose corn syrup or dextrose, for instance).

Does this mean GMOs are to blame? There is research indicates that this may be the case, but it’s not conclusive (details in the video below).

Of course, GMOs aren’t the only thing that has changed in our diets over the last 15-20 years. Many of our food choices these days are pretty questionable.

In fact, lots of our food practices are downright backward!

For instance, one nutrient widely known for its health benefits in adults has been all but eradicated from children’s diets, even though it is tremendously for helping kids to build healthy immune systems.

Watch the video below to learn which foods are best to avoid during your child’s first year of life – and what foods your kids should be getting more of.

What do you think – are GMOs to blame for the increase in food allergies?

Or could these allergies be part of a broad shift in our culture towards less healthy lifestyles?

And perhaps most importantly, what steps can you take to keep yourself and your family eating right? Leave us a comment with your thoughts!

As parents begin to introduce foods to their babies, many of them are giving signals to their baby without even realizing it.  Babies look at the human face for longer periods of time in comparison to other objects. The human face is the primary means for learning at this young age. When we sit down face to face to feed our babies we have extended eye contact and our hands are free from holding baby, so it is a common setting to begin signing with our babies.

Because eating is a novel experience or one that baby looks forward to, it may be an appropriate time to introduce some signs for foods.

Without even realizing it we tend to convey our own thoughts and feelings about the food we’re feeding our babies through facial expressions and other nonverbal cues. Just think about the face you make when something is bitter. How about when something is sweet? And something sour? Have you ever been witness to a baby tasting a lemon slice for the first time? That is something to see! Now, not every food we consume causes us to react with such distinct faces, but those extreme cases surely make an impression.

Have you ever seen the proverbial rubbing of the belly to indicate that something is yummy? Parents might even smack their lips to express food is tasty. I happen to love that the sign for YUMMY is the rubbing of the belly. This is one of those iconic signs, the sign makes sense in relation to the word.

Yummy Yucky by Leslie Patricelli is part of the Sign4Baby Signing Story Time series “All About Food” and I invite you to watch, laugh and giggle with your little one, all while learning a few new food signs!

What food does your child find especially YUMMY?

Dr. Greene’s Answer:

By some estimates, 98% of kids don’t regularly eat the recommended number of servings of different food groups each day. As a result, even though the typical American child eats too many calories, the typical child is getting suboptimal levels of many key nutrients. There are thirteen major, named micronutrients, that I’ve labeled “the Greene 13”, that concern me the most:

1. Calcium
2. Fiber
3. Folic acid
4. Iron
5. Magnesium
6. Omega 3 fatty acids (especially DHA)
7. Phosphorous (except for kids who drink carbonated beverages and get too much)
8. Potassium
9. Vitamin A
10. Vitamin C
11. Vitamin D
12. Vitamin E
13. Zinc

Most kids don’t get enough of at least one of these. One in six girls get iron at levels low enough to affect their test scores. Seven out of ten boys and nine out of ten girls don’t get enough calcium at key times of growth.

A daily multivitamin is more than a safety net for occasional nutritional accidents. It is more similar to spackle to fill in the nutritional holes, gaps, and cracks that many children develop every day because they fall into the 98% of kids who don’t eat a diverse amount of real foods. And beyond this a multivitamin can help a child thrive.

Frustrated that your kids won’t eat their greens? Ever try drinking them? Green Smoothies are all the rage for a reason and this drink treat may just be the answer to your prayers.

This Green Monster Smoothie recipe, also featured in my book, is my fool proof solution. Get your kids making these healthy and delicious drinks with you and when it comes to mealtime, green may start being their most favorite color!

On a vegetable nutrition ranking, spinach is way up at the top in terms of vitamin and mineral richness. Packed with Vitamins K and A, magnesium and folate — just to name just a few — there’s no doubt why Popeye ate so much of the stuff.

Spinach gives this delicious drink a beautiful green color as well as a mild, sweet flavor that will surprise you. With the added (healthy) sweetness from banana and honey or agave, this smoothie will be the perfect treat for your kids and their friends this summer.

• Makes: 4 Servings
• Ready In: 2 mins
• Prep Time: 2 mins
• Cook Time:

Instead of always feeling like you want your kids to eat their greens, drink them up instead with this green monster smoothie!

There have been plenty of sleep deprived mornings where I’ve got to get everyone out the door to school and work and wearily reach for my box of Kodiak Cakes whole wheat pancake mix. Don’t get me wrong, I love Kodiak Cakes. They are easy to make, made from wholesome ingredients and turn out awesome pancakes every time. But at almost $6 on box, I resolved to come up with my own simple, make-ahead mix that I could keep in the pantry.

It took me a bit of trail and error, but I’m finally over the moon — I mean really over the moon — with this recipe. It actually may be one of my favorite weelicious recipes because of how versatile it is: I used the mix to make waffles this morning and the kids actually said they were the best I’d ever made!

This recipe makes a bit more mix than what you would normally find in a box of the pre-made stuff, but that’s a plus, especially if you have a house full of pancake lovers. Just keep the mix in a sealed container and anytime you want to make these, just add an egg, milk, a touch of oil and a scoop of mix for whole wheat pancakes or waffles that are sure to please!

You know some days are going to be packed — so packed there’s hardly time to eat breakfast, much less cook breakfast. Enter make-the-night-before meals!

Back when I first had Kenya, I discovered my crock pot, a wedding gift that had sat unopened in our closet through two moves. After years collecting dust, it quickly endeared itself to me and became my best friend in the kitchen. It’s so easy and efficient to use, I try to find a way to make everything in it, including oatmeal.

With my husband leaving for work before 6am and the kids and I not eating our breakfast until around 7:30 am, I loved the idea of preparing something the night before. No matter what time each of us fed ourselves in the morning, the meal would seem totally fresh and special.

As hard as this all may sound, it was one of the easiest breakfasts I’ve ever made. All I did was toss steel cut oats and the other ingredients into the crock pot, stir it up and the next morning we were enjoying a perfect nutritious meal to start our day. The added benefit was that the kitchen smelled so amazing in the morning that even the kids stopped to remark, “what’s for breakfast, Mom?”

I’ve now made this recipe five days in a row, so there must be something about it that everyone loves!

Kids go through different motivational stages. Right now my kids are into things that makes them feel smart or strong and that includes food. For example, if I put something like roast carrots on their plates and they linger uneaten, all I have to say is, “they’ll help you see better,” and they’re gobbled up in a jiff.

All too often, kids (and many adults) aren’t aware of the important health benefits certain foods offer their bodies and minds. Yet when we start to understand the positive effects different foods have on our bodies, we tend to make better choices, and in many ways, start to enjoy eating more.

We’re big Greek yogurt eaters in my house. Greek yogurt is packed with protein, calcium and most contain natural probiotics which are great for our digestive health and can even boost our immune systems. Combine it with two other super foods like blueberries and walnuts, omega-3 and fiber-packed flax seeds, and a few other naturally sweet ingredients like apples and honey and you’ve got a true power breakfast that will give your body and mind a big boost first thing in the morning — when you need it most.

How smart do you feel now knowing that? And to make you feel even smarter, try my Brainy Breakfast recipe.