My Weird Prompts
Daniel Rosehill
Podcast
Episodes
Listen, download, subscribe
Why Your Toddler Dunks Crackers in Water
A fifteen-month-old drops a cracker into his water cup, stirs it, drinks the cloudy water, then eats the cracker. His parents call it raccoon behavior. Pediatric feeding specialists at Solid Starts call it normal exploration — and the research suggests they're right. This episode digs into what's actually driving the behavior: why teething turns out to be the weakest explanation, how the Infant and Toddler Sensory Profile explains why some toddlers mix and pour while others couldn't care less, and what Piaget's tertiary circular reactions tell us about a kid who isn't eating so much as running a procedure. We also look at the exposure research — ten tastings, a seven-week intervention, intake up hundreds of percent — and ask whether the mess at the dinner table might be doing developmental work that's hard to replicate any other way. Key sources: • Solid Starts, How to Teach Baby to Drink from a Cup — https://solidstarts.com/cup-drinking/ • BabyCenter community thread, dipping food in water or putting it in cup — https://community.babycenter.com/post/a4014915/dipping_food_in_water_or_putting_it_in_cup • Tournier C, Demonteil L, Canon F et al., A new masticatory performance assessment method for infants: A feasibility study, *Journal of Texture Studies*, 2019, PMID 30667063 — https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30667063/ Episode 5919 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5919 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/913929)
My Weird Prompts RSS Feed
