Your son or daughter never eats bread crusts and refuses to tough either peas or pasta sauce. Picky eater, right? Maybe not. As children age they develop preferences about their food, based on flavor, texture and, eventually, political and nutritional preferences. Simply because a child refuses a food once, they are not necessarily a picky eater. Often, a food will have to be offered to a toddler or child from 5 to 10 times before they become accustomed to it. The kids who eat the foods are not really picky eaters. No child has been fooled into eating a carrot because it was crunchy like a potato chip – and any parent whose child was “tricked” into that had a child that wasn’t entirely averse to the carrot in the first place.

The really picky eaters are the ones who refuse to eat anything beyond boxed macaroni and cheese and peanut butter sandwiches well into their teens, possibly into adulthood. These eaters become more and more reluctant to try new foods.

But there is one thing that can convince them, even when parents cannot: the “cool factor.”

Think of the “cool factor” as peer pressure. A teen who doesn’t eat the same types of food as his or her friends when they go out to eat is more likely to try new foods for fear of looking uncool in the eyes of their peers. A taunt or two from a friend is simply a push in the direction of a more developed palate. The first dinner at the home of a girlfriend might encourage your son to try a new pasta dish. A lunch out with friends may convince your daughter to try a burger with everything on it, instead of only ketchup. Next time your son or daughter wants to go out to eat with friends, try to (subtly) hint that they go somewhere other than the local burger joint, maybe a Thai or Indian restaurant, or at least somewhere that serves salads instead of hot dogs. You might get lucky and soon your kids will be trying to show you the new foods that all the cool kids are eating. They might be surprised to see that there parents think they're pretty cool, too.