Are your children fussier about food than YOU were as a child?

[MrsMerryHenry]

My DS (aged 3) will eat everything that we eat. With two exceptions: mushrooms and aubergines. Compared to his peers this is small potatoes, so we let him off and pick those bits of veg out of his bowl. I have it on good authority (i.e. from parents of more than one child) that his broad food tastes are not down to my skill as a mother and cook, but purely a stroke of good fortune. So I bow to their greater wisdom and await the food tastes of DC no 2 with bated breath.

But then I think back to when I was a child - I hated some of the food I was given - spinach (love it now), liver (still think it's vile), just about every school dinner (just the thought is enough to make me retch today) - yet my siblings and I still managed to force it down under strict orders from our no-messing parents - and lived to tell the tale. I'm curious about other families - were your households the same when you were growing up?

If as children we (and our parents, and their parents, etc) did manage to eat a broader range of food than our children, why do we regard it as normal and acceptable for our children to be much fussier about food? Our children are not human in a fundamentally different way from us that makes their taste buds more sensitive than our own, so why don't we just start them off from day 1 by insisting that they 'eat what you're given and nothing more'? Perhaps in part the demands of life for working mothers make us more likely to cave in where our own mothers wouldn't have (though to be fair, my own mother worked all her life and brought up four kids - making me feel very inadequate with my p/t job and one child!). And I've never understood why some women will cook more than one meal - that, IMO is well and truly crossing the line of acceptability (I know someone who cooks 3-4 meals a go!).

I've heard that there's something about the breadth of the mother's palate during pregnancy, that babies who taste a wide range of foods through amniotic fluid will be more likely to have broad tastes outside the womb - anyone know anything about that?

So is it just down to us as parents allowing a level of fussiness that our parents wouldn't have permitted? I can't help but think that we must somehow be shooting ourselves in the foot but until I have another child I suppose I can't fully understand how this works. To come back to my unborn DC2, I plan to treat him/her the same as DS1 when it comes to food, so I'll soon find out for myself!

No-one could be fussier than I was as a child. I lived on marmite toast and water and was thin but healthy.

Now I'll eat anything at all or at least give it a try - so don't lose hope all ye with fussy DCs!

God, my kids are much broader eaters than I was - or dh

I basically ate peanbut butter sandwiches and roast dinner and not much else for years. Oh, and dog biscuits
DH was so fussy that his mum took him to the doctor in desperation because he would only eat biscuits.

DS & dd are both very unfussy - ds won't eat cheese and neither of them like baked beans. That's pretty much it.

Agree with Colditz et al that making children finish things they genuinely don't want/like is counter productive and doesn't help them learn to stop eating once they are full. I was expected to try/eat a little of everything, and that's what I do with my kids.

I was very fussy when I was a child. It was actually DH who got me out of that. Actually pregnancy got me liking some of my most hated foods so I give the credit to DH and DS lol.
I was determined not to let DS be fussy and have always (obviously from suitable age) given him what we had. He is getting to a point now where he moans about certain foods but he eats them....I think he is just testing to see if he can get his favourites more often though!!!
The worst thing I find is when other adults say things like "I did some chicken nuggets/fish fingers/sausages...for him, I don't know if he will like what we are having" etc.. Just give him anything and he will eat it, tell him he might not like it and he probably won't

I remember always being hungry as a child - not through any particular hardship - but just ravenous. So, I'd hoover up anything that came my way apart from celery.

My dcs are a bit fussy about things like crusts and ratatouille (too slimy apparently) but generally ok. I think they know that if they don't eat, there's nothing else available to them.

But this is a hot potato of a subject here...bit like the "If your child is unruly and objectionable, it's all the parents fault" thread the other day.

I was always hungry too. But that is probably because in the hols I was out of the house at 8am, out all day until it got dark or I heard my granny threatening me with a wooden spoon if I didn't get back in the house now. My brother and I were out down the field making rope swings, dens, having pretend Olympics, with all the other local kids. We lived in the suburb of a smallish city in the south west, in the seventies, and that is what everyone did. I wouldn't want to start on the old "kids today don't know what they're missing" stuff but we did lead more active outdoor lives. My mother is now terrified if I tell her that ds and I have walked to Tesco "What about the traffic, wasn't it dark" etc etc.

Today's children need to reclaim the streets!