How normal is fussy eating in toddlers?

[ArtemisBean]

My now two-year-old used to eat anything I offered him when he was weaning. We gradually graduated him from blended up versions of our adult meals to small bitesize pieces of carrot, chicken etc and for a while this worked, but over the last few months he's started refusing lots of things he used to like. The most frustrating thing is that he won't eat any form of vegetable unless it's blended up in pasta sauce, although fruit is no problem. It's such a dramatic change from last year. As the tastes haven't changed I'm presuming it's a texture thing, but I really don't want to regress to blending things up again as he needs to get used to 'grown up' food. I guess I'm just interested to know if this is pretty normal fussiness for a just turned two-year-old? And if so, what does it take to get them eating more variety??

When children become (around) 2 they start to realise they have choices and test the boundaries. There is also a theory about food pickiness being a throw back to when cave children started to be independent and being more wary about which foods they found and ate (in case they were poisonous).

Just keep offering a variety of food (sitting at the table as a family all eating the same food can help). If cooked carrots are being rejected, try raw carrot sticks, dips, etc. Just keep offering a little bit of everything. If they haven't eaten many veg for a couple of days, then blending some into a sauce, or base of a meal is fine. Try not to make a big deal about refused food, as long as they are not just rejecting their dinner to move on to something sweet.

In my experience, most 2 year olds respond best when eating with others and not talking too much about the food they're eating.

We had a phase like this; I just carried on as normal; if my DD refused a particular meal 3 times in a row then I wouldn’t offer it any more but often she’d refuse something twice then eat it the next time or just randomly eat things some times. I found the sweeter vegetables like carrots, corn on the cob and things like cucumber were more successful and I didn’t mind that.
I wouldn’t start blending things up again as it’ll likely just create more problems later on.