Study: Children May Not Always Grow Out of Being Picky Eaters

Being overly restrictive with children’s diets might not be the best strategy; most finicky eaters maintain a healthy childhood weight. If your preschooler often pushes their dinner plate away or wages battles against taking another bite of a vegetable they don’t like, they may not grow out of it anytime soon. By age four, children could be established picky eaters, a new study suggests. And the more parents try to control and restrict children’s diets, the more finicky they may become, according to findings published in Pediatrics. “Picky eating is common during childhood and parents often hear that their children will eventually ‘grow out of it.’ But that’s not always the case,” says senior author Megan Pesch, M.D., a developmental behavioral pediatrician at Michigan Medicine C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.