Good news for parents of fussy eaters! It’s not (entirely) your fault...

Racked with guilt over his children’s pickiness, Will Gore now finds he can pass the buck further down the family line

Mealtimes in our house can be a challenge (Getty Images)

Sometimes, rarely, there are moments as a parent when you sit back and feel a grand glow of satisfaction.

I experienced one such time about 13 years ago (I did say they were rare). We were in the process of weaning our daughter onto proper food and had presented her with a small plate of what we were having – a slow-cooked casserole of pork and vegetables, baked with cider to produce an aromatic sauce. Our daughter gave her mashed-up portion a suspicious stare – and then proceeded to eat the lot. We had evidently cracked it, we thought, as we watched on smugly.

Our eldest child’s adventurous approach to food was to last for about a year, perhaps less. Foods that were initially sure-fire winners gradually slipped off her menu. Healthy green veggies which we’d mixed in among proteins and carbs, were extracted and pushed to one side.

We tried all the usual things: eating together, persisting with foods which our daughter seemed to have gone off, as well as offering healthy alternatives. But it was to little avail. Thank God for fish fingers, eh?

It was a similar story with our son, whose culinary adventurism seemed even more pronounced when he was a tot. Gradually, however, he too fell into a narrow selection of reliable choices – though most of them end up being slathered in English mustard, which I’ll admit is an unusual choice for a nine-year-old. He’s also taken to sprinkling cayenne pepper onto bread and butter.

Mealtimes in our house can be a challenge. There are some dishes we all like, but even then we might do one vegetable for one child and peas for the other. On other occasions, the kids will have one meal, and we’ll have something entirely different. And before you ask, yes, we’ve tried playing hardball – but it turns out they’d rather go to bed hungry.

At other people’s homes, things can be downright embarrassing. Roast chicken will be a definite hit, we tell our parents in advance of an upcoming visit. But then it turns out that Granny’s potatoes aren’t the same variety as ours, and the gravy doesn’t taste quite right. At least our daughter is now old enough to understand the importance of worrying things down. My son simply indulges in stage whispers about how “gross” it all is.

For years, we’ve wondered where our parenting went wrong. We followed all the advice, tried every technique, went from good cop to bad cop and back again. But research released last week suggests it’s not our fault at all – or at least, not in the way we thought it was.

A UK study, reported in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, found that fussy eating is primarily about genetics, not about parenting – and can persist well into adolescence. In other words, our kids’ pickiness isn’t the result of anything we’ve done, but merely a consequence of who we are. Hurrah!

And it’s true that both my wife and I were fairly fussy eaters as children. My mother-in-law insists that my wife would eat “nothing but sausages” at the age of two (which sounds a tad unlikely, but still). I, meanwhile, refused to eat pasta until a holiday to Italy at the age of nine showed me how it could be done.

And that’s the key thing: eventually fussy eaters do tend to broaden their horizons, thanks to holiday experiences, meals out, and having to cook for themselves. For children whose parents don’t cook, or can’t cook, that can indeed be a revelation.

My mum is a good cook, but had a blind spot when it came to curries. After watching a BBC series by Madhur Jeffrey as young teenagers, my brother and I decided we could do better, and blithely told our mother we were taking over the spice rack. It got us into cooking, and it improved the family curry experience.

No doubt our kids will go the same way in their own sweet time. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to offer them the things they don’t like, as well as the things they do. And when either of our mothers grumbles about how irritating it is to try to cook for their grandchildren, we’ll gladly tell them that it runs in the family – so really, they’re as much to blame as we are.