It is a fact within children’s cognitive development that the way complementary feeding is introduced often determines aversion or preference for certain foods. Scientific literature also describes that, at first, babies show great enthusiasm for trying new things, which decreases as they gain motor autonomy. This is considered practically normal, to the point where they develop food neophobia (that is, rejection of certain foods), which generally disappears in most children once they start school.
The study of the characteristics of children who refuse to eat, or the way these selective traits toward food manifest, is intriguing. Why are there children who grow up to be picky adults? Is it a genetic issue, upbringing, or exposure to foods? The answer is complex, and as with most matters related to food, it is affected by various variables.
Among these variables, researchers have discovered that the cognitive development of preschoolers, especially those aged 1 to 3 years, directly affects how they accept foods. It is said that, because cognitive development is accelerated during the preschool years, children often reject food as a way to become interested in other aspects of the world around them.
It has also been found that children who have greater difficulty controlling their emotions are those who reject more foods. Emotional regulation is obviously far from mature at these ages. However, children who are accompanied not only in recognizing but also in processing their emotions are those who more easily accept different types of foods.
Furthermore, studies show that children with delayed language development also tend to reject more foods during these stages. Cognitive skills that have not matured, such as the ability to categorize based on different characteristics or inductive reasoning, also determine whether a child accepts new foods more readily. This works as the child becomes able, for example, to make associations between two things, like soup and spoon, or to distinguish that a food belongs to a category they can create themselves (based on color, origin, size, taste, or any other category that children with greater cognitive development can elaborate).
In addition to cognitive skills, children’s sensory capacity also affects how they accept or reject foods. Some children have different levels of concentration for identifying, for example, a flavor or texture in foods. Some may feel overstimulated by the sensations and perceptions that food provides, which leads them to reject it.
Based on all this evidence, we can conclude that accepting or rejecting food is shaped by various factors in childhood, and the treatment of certain disorders should be accompanied by an approach that stimulates children in areas complementary to mere acceptance and exposure to a food or repeated attempts to negotiate its consumption.
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.
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