Battling Neophobia

Healthy eating is a challenge facing America. With rising rates of heart disease, diabetes, and childhood obesity, healthy eating habits is an important area of research for parents and scientists.

Unfortunately, preschool-age children can be neophobic, especially with food. This means they are unwilling to taste or try foods they don’t know. Often times, this also tends to be healthy foods like fruits and veggies.

Developmental researchers have found that children who witness a peer or teacher try novel foods enthusiastically are more likely to be willing to try novel food. This means the neophobia is susceptible to perception. How the child views the food, or how others view it, will contribute to whether the child is willing to try it.

Based on this previous research, developmental scientists explored the idea that mindfulness techniques such as sensory explorations may be the key to battling neophobia in children.

In this study, children ages 3-5 were either place in a mindfulness condition or a control condition. In the mindfulness condition, they used their senses to explore novel food and toys. In the control condition, the children were exposed to the novel food, but engaged in other fun activities.

The results? Well, children in the mindfulness condition interacted with the novel food more, but didn’t necessarily eat more of it at post-test compared to the kids in the control condition. They did, however, eat more novel food while using mindfulness techniques, like smelling, touching, and examining the novel food.

From this we might tentatively conclude that allowing children to play with their food, might actually be the key to getting them to eat it!