How to Prevent Picky Eating from Ever Starting, Part I

Dec 14, 2011 by

“I don’t know what we did wrong with her,” my friend sheepishly told me, as she gave me my babysitting instructions and warnings about exactly what picky-eater actions her kids were going to take with the food planned for their lunch.

Kaylee was the little girl that used to eat everything. Her parents had been so proud that she ate everything.  At that earlier time, I had unconsciously thought, “Of course she eats everything. That’s normal. What do you expect?”

Maybe they were anticipating picky eating. That they seemed pleasantly surprised when their child wasn’t picky led me to think that they assumed it was normal for kids to become picky….

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Masterly Inactivity: Using Sphinx-Like Repose to End the Food Fight with Picky Eaters

Dec 30, 2008 by

If your kids don’t like the foods you want them to eat, you need to do less instead of more about it.

A “wise passiveness,” as William Wordsworth called it, is prescribed.

“Wise and purposeful letting alone is the best part of education,” writes educational reformer Charlotte Mason. That includes the education of taste and good habits in eating.

“Masterly inactivity,” an expression of Thomas Carlyle’s brought to life in detail by Mason, is the perfect balance between being a dictator and a doormat. It is a letting alone that is rooted in insight. A parent’s wise self-restraint is grounded in the authority and self-confidence of experience and knowledge, which the child lacks and needs.

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