The Yummy Mummy’s Family Handbook. Liz Fraser

Liam refused to eat peas or carrots for almost a year. I thought I had tried everything and was getting so desperate for him to eat easy-to-cook vegetables. He then suggested mashing the whole lot together and putting cheese on top, and he loves it! It looks disgusting, but I don’t care if he eats it.

      

Pick ‘n’ mix. This kind of meal often fools the most stubborn eaters into consuming rather a lot. Put lots of different foods on plates and in small bowls, and let them help themselves. Anything from grated cheese, cherry tomatoes, corn on the cob, chicken drumsticks, cups with breadsticks in, little bowls of pasta or couscous will do. Your kitchen will look like a Harvester, but that’s the appeal for children: it looks more interesting and is more fun to eat than a meal handed to them on a plate.

      

Fry me a rainbow. Actually, don’t fry me anything, but grill or roast me a rainbow and I’ll be happy. If their dinner has lots of (natural) colour in it, kids find it much more appealing, and it’s healthier too. Yellow sweet corn, red tomatoes, green broccoli, orange peppers—try anything that looks vibrant and you might find yourself serving them seconds.

      The Food Wars

      There is a deeply rooted instinct in all parents, and I think possibly more so in mothers because we can breastfeed, to want to feed our children. Whether they are particularly hungry or not, whether they are clearly well-nourished or even overfed, we want them to eat: to nurture them, make them grow stronger and healthier and become better able to fend for themselves when they finally leave us alone to enjoy some uninterrupted gardening and jazz music. Or whatever we will do when we are bored, middle-aged and undersexed.

      Children know this. They know it from birth, and, because they are cleverer than a very sly fox, they also know that this gives them a colossal amount of power over us. We want them to eat, so by refusing to eat they are causing us much anguish and pain.

      Mothers are constantly telling other mothers how well their babies eat, how fast they are growing and how they physically cannot produce enough milk to satisfy the needs of their calciumguzzling balls of baby-fat. This continues throughout the early years, and on into school, where the tallest, strongest-looking children are consistently praised for being so tall and strong-looking. You rarely hear, ‘Hello darling—my, you’re looking so pasty and small today’, do you?

      Children who refuse food are often doing no more than playing a power game with you, and going into battle with large helpings of filling food will almost certainly backfire. Much better to try and think of why this stand-off has occurred in the first place. (Are you still giving him enough attention? Is there some bullying happening at nursery or school? Does he really, really want the Power Ranger you have said no to?) Chances are if you play it cool and don’t make a big issue out of it, he will soon tire of trying to annoy you, and start eating normally.

      Small but perfectly formed

      Not all children like eating. This sounds ridiculous to a grown woman who would happily eat two tubs of Häagen-Dazs and an entire Sunday roast for breakfast, and is regularly on some kind of fat-busting, bikini-wearing, stomach-shrinking diet or other, but it’s true. There are kids out there for whom eating is less interesting than visiting Byzantine churches on Saturday afternoons when they could be at a friend’s house playing Cover Me in Blankets and Jump on Me.

      I have one of these kids. She has always been totally uninterested in food, could go for a whole day on nothing more than a few Shreddies and will almost never ask for something to eat. At the age of six she is still quite small and has a tiny frame with not an ounce of fat on her. But she does eat. She eats well, and regularly, and I have absolutely no worries about her at all. She just needs reminding that it’s time for more fuel, and then she realises she’s starving and eats like a horse. She is how she is, and forcing her to eat more than she wants or drawing attention to the issue would be a terrible idea that might result in big problems.

      So if you have a child who doesn’t seem to eat as much as you might think they need, or is not at all interested in food, don’t worry. So long as they are getting some of all the food groups, still have three healthy meals a day and are roughly within the normal size range for kids their age, you probably just have a small one. If you have any concerns go to your doctor.

      Eat your greens! How to get their daily five portions down the hatch

      Unless you have been living in Outer Mongolia for the last two years, or watch no telly, read no newspapers and never eavesdrop in cafés, you will know that we are all supposed to be eating at least five potions of fruit or vegetables every day, according to the People Who Know. If we don’t, and live on lattes and cigarettes instead, we will shrivel up, get scurvy, look really ugly after the age of forty and die young, so it’s advice worth following. This advice goes for children too, although obviously three mummy-sized potions is equivalent to five kiddy ones, so don’t worry if they’re not quite fulfilling their quota. Scurvy is some way off yet if they’re eating any at all.

      This is nothing very new, in fact: children have been told to ‘Eat Your Greens!’ for decades, and today’s young mange-tout munchers have it luckier than their predecessors, because the range and quality of fresh fruit and veg is really fabulous. No longer are bendy carrots and Granny Smiths the only options: these days a child can also refuse to eat bean sprouts, shiitake mushrooms, mangoes and passion fruit.

      But however fresh, crunchy, tasty or ripe the food on offer, the age-old question of how to get kids to eat this stuff remains. Here are some ideas we have tried and have found to work: