When my son was two, he would only eat rice cakes and apples and bananas and grapes and carrots and oranges and mangoes and the list could go on. He was pretty much Peter Rabbit.

From the outside I was proud of his preferences but after a while I had this fear that something was wrong (saying that now makes me giggle). My eldest daughter definitely ate more meals, she definitely had snacks, she definitely drank lots of water…

And there is the problem.

Have you ever tried one of these diets that “will suit your lifestyle”, are easy to follow and accessible for all. Well I certainly have. They really work wonders once you’ve studied the diet, understood the rules and been inspired by other customer experiences. This may be different for individuals but for me, I can only follow a diet for so long and then I become an unruly member who wants to cook fried chicken and rice and peas from scratch. For me, I struggle to pull back from my need to cook creatively or satisfy my craving for certain foods!

This is in no way an anti diet post but it’s a call to analyse and understand our own perspective on eating habits, especially when it comes to our children. It’s taken me seven years to figure out that actually children don’t like rules. They are born as an unique individual who develop their own taste by trial and error… but eventually they become three-nangers who know who they are, what they like and what they want. As a Mum it’s part of our make up to want our children to be nourished – after all that’s how they grow physically and mentally. For us, this stage can be challenging and often cause a phase of anxiety that is unpredictable and can inevitably reflect onto our children.

In hope of releasing some of this anxiety that I know many Mamas deal with. I want to ask, do the recipe books for babies really help or do they create a barrier between your eating and your child’s. It’s essential that we educate ourselves with what babies can and can’t eat and at what age, for safety purposes. But if we step back and recognise the anxieties related to our childrens eating, we begin the process of trusting our own instinct and put the books away for a rainy day. Most importantly we cease trying make our children walk the same path as their siblings.

Preferences are always going to change, so let’s not get too attached to those go-to’s but also let’s maintain a discipline by limiting the amount of options we offer. After all “Mummy’s house is not a restaurant”