Lead
You clear the dinner table and look at the plate: vegetables barely touched, again. The question moves through you before you can stop it — is my child actually getting enough nutrition?
The strange thing is that earlier in the same week, there was a day when they asked for a second helping of rice with fermented soybeans, and another when they came home from nursery school having finished every drop of soup. Those days exist, somewhere. But the memory of the untouched plate is the one that stays sharp.
This asymmetry is not a reflection of your attentiveness as a parent. It is the way human memory works. This article looks at that mechanism and argues for a specific and modest response: writing down what your child actually eats, because the act of recording is structurally better suited to calming food-related anxiety than trying to fix the eating.