This is the first in a series on why so many children have limited diets and what has gotten them there.

When I was a child, long, long ago, after the age of two or so, kids just ate what everyone else was eating at dinner. They didn't have a choice.

But something has changed in the last few decades. Children, especially young children, often only want to eat mac and cheese or pasta and butter and many parents are providing these.

But many parents are extremely frustrated. They don't want to serve pasta every night. But, at the same time, their children are saying no to everything else.

Often parents feel that they just can't figure out what to put on the table. They're afraid that either their children won't eat what they prepare or they won't have time to prepare it.

I have been wondering what has happened to family eating habits and why it has happened — so I decided to read some of the scholarly literature on the subject to see if I could find any clues.

I found a few — but not enough to satisfy me.

So I have to rely on my own thoughts, sprinkled with data. This will be the subject of a series of posts on children, their food choices, meal preparation, and how to handle all of it.

To start with, I think that parenting practices started to change a lot during the 1950's and 60's with the advent of more child-centered parenting. Dr. Benjamin Spock and his famous book, Baby and Childcare, got this started — partly because of what he said, but also just because he said it. Suddenly parents wanted to hear from an expert about how to raise their children.
Mothers, in particular, began to raise their children according to what they learned rather than according to what their own mothers had done with them.

Dr. Spock was a Yale and Columbia-trained pediatrician who also had training in psychoanalysis. His book was said to have sold so many copies that it was second in sales only to the Bible.

He had been raised by an authoritarian father and, no doubt, at least partially as a result of his own experience, he advocated treating children as individuals, hugging them often, and telling them they were special. He wanted parents to be flexible and, for example, he suggested that mothers who wanted to potty train their toddlers at eighteen months (typical at the time) hold off a little until the toddler was more ready.

All of this was new.

Prior to this, parenting had usually been quite rule-based and authoritarian, and children's thoughts and feelings were not generally taken into account.

Dr. Spock was the beginning of child-centered parenting.

And this philosophy has grown and grown until we........

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