Dinner with my youngest used to end with me scraping food into the bin and feeling like a bad parent. What helped was reading a piece on Cardone Family that described picky eating as a stage rather than a verdict. It gave me something to do instead of worry.

The first change was portion size. I put a tiny amount of everything on the plate, next to something I know she'll eat, usually bread or cucumber. A big pile of unfamiliar food is just a wall. A small one can be walked around. I stopped aiming for a clean plate, which was harder to give up than it sounds.

We eat at the table together, all of us, with the same food on every plate. She watches what we do with it, which is most of the work. And she's allowed to touch it, sniff it, lick it and put it back down. That took me a while to tolerate. Pressure at the table only ever made her grip tighter.

I stopped cooking a second meal. If she leaves her dinner, that's fine. If she's hungry an hour later, the same plate comes back out. Nothing else. It sounds hard and it felt hard for a fortnight, but the kitchen stopped being a short order restaurant.

The last thing was patience, the boring kind. New food takes weeks, not days. Broccoli took about two months of appearing, being ignored and appearing again. Radishes are still losing. I can live with that. She'll get there, or she'll eat bread and cucumber for a while longer. Either way, dinner is quieter than it used to be.