Last Updated on April 27, 2026 by Daily News Staff

(Feature Impact)For families with young children, mealtimes can often feel like negotiations or even battles. If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Picky eating is one of the most universal challenges families face.

With the right strategies, parents can reduce stress, build healthier habits and help children become more confident, curious eaters. Dr. Lauren Loquasto, senior vice president and chief academic officer at The Goddard School, and registered dietitian Ali Bandier, founder of Senta Health and member of the Expert Council at Little Spoon, share these insights and guidance to help parents navigate picky eating.

Why Young Children are Picky Eaters

Picky eating isn’t just common; it’s an expected part of early childhood development. In fact, it would be more surprising if children didn’t experience a picky eating phase.

Picky eating is a natural expression of independence. As children enter toddlerhood, they discover they can assert control, and food becomes a typical place to do it. They can’t decide whether to go to school or take a bath, but they can decide whether to take a bite of broccoli.

Avoid the Power Struggle

The key for parents: stay calm, consistent and neutral. Pressuring children only makes picky eating worse.

Telling your child they must try one bite, celebrating excessively when they do eat a vegetable or resorting to negotiation (“three more bites then dessert”) can actually reduce their desire to eat. It also creates a dynamic that only reinforces the power struggle.

Instead, recognize the division of responsibility when it comes to eating. Parents decide what food is served, when it’s served and where meals happen. Children decide whether to eat and how much to eat. As a parent, you can’t force your child to eat; recognizing this is critical to reducing the mealtime tug‑of‑war and creating a calmer, more predictable environment for the entire family.

Exposure, Not Pressure

Young children often need repeated, low‑pressure exposure to a new food before trying it. Offering broccoli once likely isn’t enough. It’s important to offer it repeatedly, without commentary, bribing or coaxing.

Trying new foods is more than just ingesting them. Touching and smelling are steps toward tasting and acceptance. Involving children in food preparation – washing vegetables, stirring batter, mixing ingredients – lets them gain familiarity without the pressure of having to eat. Inclusion in this process increases curiosity and that curiosity is often followed by a willingness, or even desire, to try the food.

It’s also important for parents to model desired eating habits. If you want your child to try salmon but you’re eating pizza, they’re unlikely to want to eat the salmon. Daily family mealtimes – often dinner in busy households – where you’re modeling manners and eating the food you want your child to eat is key.

The Importance of Routines

For young children, routines provide structure, predictability and comfort. A consistent meal and snack schedule helps children learn what to expect and can reduce not only their anxiety around mealtimes, but parental anxiety, too.

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Notably, there is no right or wrong schedule; every family needs to figure out what works best for their circumstances. What matters is setting a schedule and maintaining consistency. For example, if you provide a snack between breakfast and lunch, do it every day, not just a few days a week. This helps children know what to expect and feel comfortable.

Schedules also help parents resist “secondhand cooking.” When a child refuses the meal offered, parents often scramble to make alternatives, but this teaches the child if they hold out long enough, a preferred food will arrive. Instead, calmly remind your child when the next snack or meal will be: “OK, you don’t want to have the yogurt and fruit. That’s fine, but I’m not going to make something else. Snack time is in two hours.” This builds trust and reduces anxiety for everyone.

With patience, low-pressure exposure and consistent routines, most picky eaters gradually broaden their palates and mealtimes become more enjoyable for the whole family. For more parenting guidance, including the Parenting with Goddard blog and webinar series, visit the Parent Resource Center at GoddardSchool.com.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock

SOURCE:

The Goddard School

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8 Ways to Help Protect Your Vision Right Now

(Feature Impact) As you get older, your risk for some eye diseases may increase. However, there are steps you can take to keep your eyes healthy – and it starts with taking care of your overall health.

Set yourself up for a lifetime of seeing your best with these eight tips from the experts at the National Eye Institute in honor of Healthy Vision Month:

1. Find an eye doctor you trust.
Many eye diseases don’t have any early symptoms, so you could have a problem and not know it. An eye doctor can help you stay on top of your eye health. Find an eye doctor you trust by asking friends and family if they like their doctors. You can also check with your health insurance plan to find eye doctors near you.

2. Ask how often you need a dilated eye exam.
Getting a dilated eye exam is the single best thing you can do for your eye health. It’s the only way to find eye diseases early, when they’re easier to treat – and before they cause vision loss. Your eye doctor will decide how often you need an exam based on your risk for eye diseases.

3. Add more movement to your day.
Physical activity can lower your risk for health conditions that can affect your vision, like diabetes and high blood pressure. If you have trouble finding time for physical activity, try building it into other activities. Walk around while you’re on the phone, do push-ups or stretch while you watch TV or dance while you’re doing chores. Anything that gets your heart pumping counts.

4. Get your family talking about eye health history.
Some eye diseases – like glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration – can run in families. While it may not be the most exciting topic of conversation, talking about your family health history can help everyone stay healthy. The next time you’re chatting with relatives, ask if anyone knows about eye problems in your family. Be sure to share what you learn with your eye doctor to see if you need to take steps to lower your risk.

5. Step up your healthy eating game.
Eating healthy foods helps prevent health conditions – like diabetes or high blood pressure – that can put you at risk for eye problems. Eat right for your sight by adding more eye-healthy foods to your plate, such as dark, leafy greens like spinach, kale and collard greens, and fish high in omega-3 fatty acids like halibut, salmon or tuna.

6. Make a habit of wearing your sunglasses – even on cloudy days.
The sun’s UV rays can not only harm your skin, but the same goes for your eyes. However, wearing sunglasses that block 99-100% of both UVA and UVB radiation can protect your eyes and lower your risk for cataracts.

7. Stay on top of long-term health conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure.
Diabetes and high blood pressure can increase your risk for some eye diseases, like glaucoma. If you have diabetes or high blood pressure, ask your doctor about steps you can take to manage your condition and lower your risk of vision loss.

8. If you smoke, make a plan to quit.
Quitting smoking is good for your entire body, including your eyes. Kicking the habit can help lower your risk for eye diseases like macular degeneration and cataracts. Quitting smoking is hard, but it’s possible – and a plan can help.

Test your eye health knowledge with a quick quiz and find more vision resources at nei.nih.gov/hvm.

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Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

SOURCE:

National Eye Institute

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Marie Helweg-Larsen, Dickinson College

Smoking is really bad for you. Most people know that. Even smokers think smoking is bad for one’s health. But most people don’t know just how bad it is.

More people in the United States die every year from smoking than from alcohol, illegal drug use, car accidents, suicides and murders combined. Cigarette smoking costs an estimated US$240 billion annually in health care costs, which harm not only smokers but also nonsmokers, communities and the economy. Smoking is the top preventable cause of death and disease in the U.S. and worldwide.

The number of smokers in the U.S. has declined from 41% in 1944 to 11% in 2024. However, over 25 million Americans still smoke.

This drop is partly the result of many smoking laws enacted in the past 50 years. They include national bans on cigarette advertising on television and radio (1971), smoking on commercial flights (2000), sale of fruit- or candy-flavored cigarettes (2009), and sale of cigarettes to people ages 18 to 20 (2019). New policies might seem as strange or unfamiliar as these measures did at the time.

One potentially transformative idea – creating a tobacco-free generation – would build on these past laws. It would phase out smoking by banning it permanently for anyone born after a specific date. For example, a law could make it illegal for anyone under 21 to ever buy cigarettes, whereas people age 21 or older at the time would not be affected. The focus would be on tobacco sales, which already require age verification in the U.S., not on criminalizing tobacco use.

As a psychological scientist, I have studied for decades how people think about smoking. In my view, the key obstacle to creating future generations of nonsmokers is that people do not fully understand how dangerous smoking is and do not realize the formidable influence of the tobacco industry.

Creating a tobacco-free generation

The idea of creating a tobacco-free generation was first proposed by health researchers in 2010. In 2021 the town of Brookline, Massachusetts, became the first U.S. community to adopt it. Brookline’s ordinance prohibits tobacco and vape sales to anyone born on or after Jan. 1, 2000. It has survived a legal challenge and has been emulated in 22 more Massachusetts towns.

As of early 2026, Hawaii and Massachusetts are considering statewide tobacco-free generation bills. Abroad, the Maldives enacted the first countrywide ban in 2025.

Similar proposals have faced pushback elsewhere. In New Zealand, a ban was adopted in 2022 but repealed in 2024. The United Kingdom is considering a similar bill after an earlier version was scrapped due to a snap election.

Why people underestimate harm from cigarettes

It is hard to visualize what exactly it means that 480,000 people in the U.S. die from smoking every year or that each cigarette that you smoke shortens your life by 20 minutes. It is also easy to feel optimistically biased about one’s personal risk as a smoker and believe that others are more likely to become addicted or die prematurely.

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Studies show that nonsmokers, former smokers and current smokers underestimate smoking risks. One likely reason is messaging by the tobacco industry, which claimed for decades that cigarettes were safe, even though tobacco industry scientists knew as early as 1953 that smoking caused lung cancer.

Another factor is glamorization of cigarettes in movies. Fully half of the top films released in 2024 showed tobacco imagery, typically of cigarettes. Research shows that adolescents and young adults who watch smoking in movies are more interested in taking up smoking.

Finally, smoking deaths may seem to be unremarkable because some of the illnesses that cigarette smoking causes, such as heart disease or cancer, are commonplace. And unlike deaths from drug overdoses, we do not always see the consequences of a lifetime of smoking. https://www.youtube.com/embed/2mKyosQbFNY?wmode=transparent&start=0 Smoking imagery is widespread in popular culture and may be one driver of tobacco use, especially among young Americans.

What about freedom of choice?

A common argument against laws that regulate personal choices, such as whether to smoke or wear seat belts, is that people prize their autonomy and don’t like governments telling them how to live. This isn’t a new challenge for public health policies, which often restrict private citizens’ freedom to do as they wish.

People can be persuaded that community action should trump individual choice if a behavior, such as smoking cigarettes or driving while drunk, harms others who don’t engage in it. Many public health laws are designed to protect people who are innocent or vulnerable. For example, current smoking laws have been enacted in part to protect nonsmokers who are exposed to secondhand smoke, especially children. And smoking increases health care costs for everyone, not just smokers.

By preventing people in the U.S. who cannot legally buy cigarettes now from ever doing so, generational smoking bans balance the rights of current adult smokers against the major public health benefits of a phased smoking ban that will eventually end the smoking epidemic.

Arguments against generational smoking laws

The tobacco industry’s attempts to undermine tobacco health policies are well documented and follow a predictable pattern. For example, when the U.K. government considered a generational smoking policy in 2023, tobacco companies and their supporters argued that smoking was a minor problem, that individuals should be responsible for their own choices, and that a nationwide ban would lead to illegal behavior or hurt business profits.

In a 2025 study assessing how Belgian politicians viewed generational smoking bans, researchers heard similar arguments. Respondents across the political spectrum valued personal freedom and informed individual choice more highly than protecting children. The politicians also believed that young people could understand how smoking affected their health, and that raising awareness was more important than bans. These arguments aligned with tobacco industry positions.

However, research shows that young people hold many optimistic beliefs about smoking, especially with respect to the addictiveness of nicotine and the likelihood that they will avoid becoming lifelong smokers. Studies have also found that adolescents don’t know enough to make an informed choice to smoke. These findings matter because the tobacco industry routinely targets young people in an effort to create lifelong smokers.

The tobacco industry’s harm reduction approach frames e-cigarettes, also known as vapes, as a way to create a smoke-free future by transitioning smokers to other nicotine products. But research shows that the tobacco industry actively markets nicotine products such as vapes to young people to create a new generation of nicotine users.

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Not a silver bullet

Curbing the use of an addictive product is challenging, and there are ways for young people to obtain cigarettes illegally, as they do now in places where cigarette buyers must be at least 21. Tactics include shopping at stores that don’t check IDs, having older friends buy cigarettes and purchasing cigarettes illegally online.

Tobacco-free generation policies aren’t a silver bullet. They work most effectively in conjunction with other measures, such as plain packaging; high prices; bans on displays, advertising and flavored products; smoking cessation support; and public health messages making clear that cigarettes are unsafe at any age.

Still, health experts and groups including the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology argue that creating a tobacco-free generation could dramatically reduce preventable deaths and secure a healthier future for today’s children and future generations. In my view, understanding the obstacles to change is a critical step toward achieving this goal.

Marie Helweg-Larsen, Professor of Psychology, Dickinson College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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