Kids aren't picking — we're just bad parents

It's not my fault that my kids are picky eaters, I learned today. But it's my fault if I don't fix it. That's what I gleaned from a recent article by Helen Zoe Veit, the author of a forthcoming book called "Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History." Children are not naturally picky, Veit tells us in her piece. Not at all. In fact, children are voracious eaters of vinegar and raw oysters and tiny crabs still in the shells. They are not engineered to demand Lunchables, then only eat the cheese out of the package and the second you cave and buy 10 of the ones they like, decide that they actually don't even like the cheese anymore, either. Kids are not born only able to digest chicken nuggets in the shape of a stegosaurus. No. Children are celebrators of turnips and worshippers of cabbage. As with so many things in life, it's us. The parents, of course, who did it. We made them picky, over generations, through the combination of processed food and lazy mothering. It occurred to me while reading this treatise that the writer has either not met a 6-month-old who won't eat that boiled asparagus you lovingly pureed or she believes that the baby's parents have managed to ruin their child's budding palate in less time than it takes to properly cure a Christmas fruitcake. Parents, she argues, are delivering food the kids don't even want. Throughout her article (and, one would presume, her book), Veit sidesteps the largest difference between children in 2026 versus children in 1926: How hungry they were. She does admit that kids used to get more exercise and ate fewer snacks, but skates right over the fact that parents sometimes couldn't afford to fill their children's bellies, let alone cater to their desires. If being a mom has taught me anything, it's that loving a child means occasionally erring on the soft side, if you have the privilege to do so. Plus, kids are really annoying when they're hungry. Our tolerance for our offspring's discomfort is much lower than it used to be, but things have changed in a lot of areas. Parents of 100 years ago smacked their children and dosed them with opium when they had a cough, too. On top of that, there's a lower risk these days that a child in the United States will have no access to food at all. Veit recounts the good cheer with which children of decades past used to encounter unpalatable food, mentioning — without hint of sarcasm — the low rates of obesity and eating disorders at the time. It appears to have never occurred to her that for the vast majority of human history, and for many currently alive today, dying of starvation was a much more likely fate than having so much food that you could consider letting any of it go to waste. People weren't turning down measles vaccines or willingly drinking unpasteurized milk much, either. It all smacks of the forced nostalgia that modern middle-class parenting advice is rife with. Things used to be so great, the idea goes, back before TV or air fryers or mac and cheese. As with all nostalgia, this culinary nostalgia is a liar. Kids 100 years ago had diets that were so restricted that nutritional disorders were common. People got goiters from not eating enough iodine, and rickets from lack of vitamin D. Thousands died of pellagra in the first half of the 20th century. Diets were monotonous and not particularly nutritious, and kids, like adults, ate the same few foods, mostly carbs, for every meal and every day. The outlier kids mentioned by Veit were apparently just that: Noteworthy not for the normalcy of their diets, but for their oddity. The whole argument tires me, relying as it does on the distressingly common tactics of scolding and blaming parents, who should never allow their child to decline any type of food. I suppose, in some ways, I am a worse mother than my 1920s counterpart. I am more willing to make a second (or, God help me, on certain rare occasions, a third) different meal for my kids. But in other, slightly more important ways, I am a much better mother than I would have been 100 years ago. Besides, I believe that one day, my kids will grow up and their palates will expand. In fact, they already have. They've developed a taste for my lasagna, for seaweed and tofu, for the carrots in homemade chicken noodle soup. In the meantime, then, you'll pardon me if I trade some dietary daring for a bit of parental sanity. I'll just be over here, thank you very much, picking the peas out of their spaghetti carbonara.