It's Tuesday. The same pasta that was fine last week is on the plate, and your four-year-old is looking at it the way you'd look at a parking fine.
Nothing has changed. Same bowl, same sauce, same everything. Last Tuesday she asked for more.
Somewhere between two and six, most children get narrower rather than broader. Foods that were fine become suspicious. The list of accepted things shrinks, and it usually shrinks in the direction of beige.
This has a name — food neophobia — and it's a stage rather than a behaviour problem. There's a sensible theory about why it exists. A child who has just learned to walk, and who will put almost anything in their mouth, is safer being suspicious of unfamiliar food than curious about it. The caution turns up at exactly the age it's useful.
So it isn't a verdict on your cooking, and you didn't cause it by giving in once at the end of a long day. If the list keeps shrinking month after month rather than holding steady, or a child is losing weight, that's one for your doctor rather than a phase to sit out. Most of the time it's the phase.
Here's the part that actually changes how the week goes.
A child often needs to meet a new food many times before it stops registering as new. Eight, ten, sometimes more. Not eat it — meet it. See it on the plate, push it around, watch somebody else have it.
Most of us stop at three. The third refusal looks like proof, so the food comes off the list, and the list gets shorter every month. It wasn't rejected. It was withdrawn before it had a chance.
Bargaining. Three more bites, then pudding.
It works at that table on that evening, and it works against you over months. Making one food the price of another teaches exactly that: the vegetable is the cost, the pudding is the reward. You've explained the ranking rather than changed it.
The alternative is duller and harder. Put it there, say nothing, take it away without a discussion. No praise for eating it, no reaction for leaving it. Staying neutral is difficult when you're tired, and it's the thing that works.
If a child's reference point for tomato is a sauce that's mostly sweet, then tomato tastes sweet, and an actual tomato is the strange one. That isn't fussiness. That's a palate working properly, calibrated to the wrong thing.
Which is the argument for letting real flavours be the ordinary ones — plain vegetables, herbs, things that taste of themselves — even while half of what your child eats is beige and you are not fighting that battle this week.
It's also the thinking behind a change to our own menu. Six of the twelve dishes each week are now fully organic, including some of the ones children reach for, and they're made without flavour enhancers. A dish tastes of what's in it, which matters more than usual when someone small is still working out what things are supposed to taste like. You can see which ones they are on this week's menu.
None of this is fast. A stage that lasts two years doesn't turn around in a fortnight, and the evenings where dinner is toast are going to keep happening.
But it ends, for almost everyone. And the children who come out of it eating the widest range are usually not the ones who were made to finish their plate. They're the ones who kept being offered things, calmly, long after it looked pointless.
Feeding someone who changes their mind weekly? Have a look at this week's menu — twelve dishes, a different line-up every week, and you can skip any week you don't need it.
Read next: Dinner in the first weeks of school: how to keep it simple