Food & Eating

Helping your child try new foods

A new food on the plate can feel genuinely alarming. Curiosity grows faster than pressure does.

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What your child may be practising

Looking at and smelling a new food without pressure
Describing it instead of judging it
Taking one small taste on their own terms
Knowing it is fine to say no thank you

How a Maple Kids story approaches it

1The story removes the pressure and keeps the curiosity.
2The hero explores the food with their senses first.
3The Parent Guide keeps mealtime language neutral and warm.
4The practice is one tiny, low-stakes tasting step.

Story preview · Page 3

The green thing looked strange. Hessam gave it a sniff. “It smells like grass and rain,” he laughed. Laughing made it less scary.

Parent Guide preview

What this page is doing

Moving the child from judging a food to describing it, which lowers the pressure.

Ask

“What did Hessam notice about the new food?”“What would you say it smells like?”

Words to repeat

“You don't have to eat it. You can look at it with me.”

Try it in real life

Put one new food on the table with no expectation to taste it.

Why stories can help with this

Shared Reading & Development
The American Academy of Pediatrics states that shared reading can support parent-child relationships and social-emotional, cognitive, language and literacy development.
Klass P, Miller-Fitzwater A, High PC, et al. “Literacy Promotion: An Essential Component of Primary Care Pediatric Practice.” Pediatrics. 2024;154(6):e2024069090.
DOI: 10.1542/peds.2024-069090
Stories & Emotion Regulation
Structured emotion-themed picture-book activities have been associated with improvements in preschool children's emotion recognition, expression and regulation strategies.
Wang L, Cui R, Wan N, Hu W. “Reshaping the Ability–Strategy Link in Emotion Regulation: The Role of a Structured Picture-Book Intervention for Preschoolers.” Behavioral Sciences. 2025;15(8):1137.
DOI: 10.3390/bs15081137

These studies examine shared reading and picture books in general. They did not test Maple Kids. Maple Kids is an educational parenting tool and not medical, psychological, diagnostic or therapeutic care.

Read the Research

Ready to build a story around trying new foods?