Moving on to solids: Raising an adventurous eater

Dinner that evening (anchovy crostini, burrata drizzled with olive oil, and prosciutto-topped Neapolitan pizza) was already stimulating and shaping our child's tastes.

So was the vegetable burrito, drenched in hot sauce, she had eaten for lunch.

Julie Mennella

"Learning about food occurs long before the first taste of food," says Julie Mennella, a biopsychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia, where she studies how we learn and accept flavours.

"The flavours of the mother's diet get into the amniotic fluid." The same thing happens when the mother breastfeeds, she says.

We had already decided that Indira would be breastfed, and because her diet is nearly as varied as my own, she'd expose our child to a panoply of cuisines.

Born in January, Zephyr was a healthy little boy with a full head of hair and a ravenous hunger.

The next few months were a happy blur, and it wasn't long before we were talking about adding solid foods to his diet.

Though I have rudimentary cooking skills, I'm no culinary maestro. Before Zephyr was born, Indira did most of the cooking, but now the opposite was true. Because I work from home, I had more time to spend in the kitchen.

Still, I needed help crafting the purées that could be the bridge to more complex solids. After consulting our paediatrician, I contacted Tucker Yoder, the executive chef of the Clifton Inn in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a father of three. He agreed to come and teach me a few tricks.

Yoder and his wife have a few simple rules for feeding their children. "We try to give them what we're having," he says, "and we'll try giving them anything."

The children enjoy a wide variety of food, including kale-fortified breakfast smoothies and omelettes filled with freshly foraged mushrooms.

His next rule sounds identical to one that my mother enforced. "If it's on your plate, you've got to try it," he says.

"For me, it's if you don't eat it, you go to bed hungry." The couple shop seasonally and locally, and draw on their own garden for tomatoes, greens, herbs and root vegetables.

Placing Zephyr in his high chair that evening, I mentally crossed my fingers as I dipped his spoon into the pineapple-mango mixture and fed him solids for the first time. He looked confused for a moment.

Then his eyes lit up, he worked his jaw, and he swallowed. He pulled the spoon toward his mouth for seconds.

In his haste, Zephyr managed to smear most of the mixture on his hands, chin and bib, but another smidgeon made it into his mouth.

Trying the strawberry-beetroot purée the next evening, I experienced similarly success. Two days later, however, when I picked Zephyr up from nursery, they told me: "He didn't like the sweet potatoes. He spat them out."

I shouldn't have been surprised. Maybe we got too cocky putting crushed red pepper flakes in there, though it was just a few specks.

Indira has an insatiable appetite for spicy food, and I thought Zephyr might have inherited it but his palate wasn't ready.

Jenny Carenco

"They're not going to eat everything," Jenny Carenco, the author of Bébé Gourmet: 100 French-Inspired Baby Food Recipes for Raising an Adventurous Eater and the former owner of the French frozen baby food manufacturer Les Menus Bébé, reassured me. "My kids don't eat everything. My daughter hates courgettes."

Repetition is the key to winning children over to new tastes, says Carenco. "Just keep serving it and make it a positive experience," she says.

"The mistake is to stop serving it. If they don't like peas, it's not going to kill you to cook up and throw away a spoonful of peas after every meal. Serve them at every meal. And if they have one, it's a victory. Then they'll have two."

Heather Stouffer, the founder and chief executive of US company Mom Made Foods, agrees. "You've got to be patient, consistent and a good role model," she says.

The company launched in 2006, selling organically certified frozen puréed baby foods at a farmers market, though it has phased out those products. ("It was too niche a market," explains Stouffer.)

Now it produces frozen meals and snacks for children aged from two to 10 that are available in US grocery stores.

Stouffer is conscious of what she feeds her own children, eight-year-old Emory and three-year-old Audrey, and her pint-sized customers.

"I'm a huge believer in starting kids out from their very first bite through childhood with healthy, real foods," she says.

Like Yoder, she believes in feeding the children the same meal that she and her husband are eating, in a slightly modified form.

To see how that is accomplished, we met at my house to cook a tilapia fajita dinner with mango salsa and guacamole, then puréed some of the fruit and fish plus spinach for Zephyr.

Mashing some of the leftover avocado with a little water yielded him a small bowl of guacamole, too. Both were a hit, though his bib looked like a Jackson Pollock when he was finished.

As my wife and I laughed over his reaction while eating our own dinner, I thought back on something his paediatrician had said: "Make eating enjoyable, and do it as a family as much as you can."

This was just the beginning of Zephyr's appreciation for food, but so far, so good.

I was still smiling as I went to store the remainder of the peaches and cream. When I opened our refrigerator, the second shelf was filled with a rainbow of purées – not one of them beige.

Raising adopted children: Supportive Cooperation is more important than sexual orientation

A new study by psychology researchers suggests that whether parents are gay, lesbian or straight, how well they work together as a couple and support each other in parenting is linked to fewer behaviour problems among their adopted children and is more important than their sexual orientation.

Rachel H. Farr at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Charlotte J. Patterson at the University of Virginia report their findings from this first empirical examination of differences and similarities in co-parenting among lesbian, gay and heterosexual adoptive couples and associations with child behavior in the July/August issue of Child Development.

Farr, who led the study, says, "While actual divisions of childcare tasks such as feeding, dressing and taking time to play with kids were unrelated to children's adjustment, it was the parents who were most satisfied with their arrangements with each other who had children with fewer behaviour problems, such as acting out or showing aggressive behaviour."

"It appears that while children are not affected by how parents divide childcare tasks, it definitely does matter how harmonious the parents' relationships are with each other," she adds.

Farr and Patterson also observed differences in division of labour in lesbian and gay couples compared to heterosexual parents.

Rachel H. Farr

The study suggests that lesbian and gay couples may be creating new ways to live together and raise children outside of traditional gender roles, the authors say, and results are important to adoption professionals and others who work with adoptive families.

Further, the research is informative for those debating legal, political and policy questions about family dynamics and outcomes for children raised by same-sex couples.

For this study, Farr and Patterson recruited families from five adoption agencies across the United States.

In total, 104 families agreed to participate, 25 headed by lesbian partners, 29 by gay male partners and 50 by heterosexual couples.

Their adoptive children had been placed with them at birth or within the first few weeks of life; at the time of the study the children were all around three years old.

Charlotte J. Patterson

Parents were asked to report on the division of child-related labour between them and on factors of their child's adjustment.

They were also observed by researchers who coded their co-parenting behaviour during videotaped parent-child play sessions along scales rated for "supportive" and "undermining" interactions, using an established test.

The researchers discovered that lesbian and gay couples were more likely to equally share childcare tasks, while heterosexual couples were likely to specialise, with mothers doing more work than fathers in these families.

In addition, Farr says, from the videotaped observations of family interactions, "it was clear that other aspects of co-parenting, such as how supportive parents were of each other, or how much they competed, were connected with children's behavioral problems."

Parents' dissatisfaction with division of child-care labour, not the actual division of these tasks, was significantly associated with increased child behavior problems.

As the researchers had expected, supportive co-parenting interactions, such as greater pleasure and engagement between parents, were associated with positive child behaviour for all three types of parents.

Overall, whether parents shared child care tasks or had a more specialized division of this work was not related to children's adjustment.

The best predictor of child behaviour problems was competition between the parents and dissatisfaction with child care labour divisions, which were not related to parents' sexual orientation.

Why Some Fathers Are raising the Baby - report

A century old mystery as to why, for some animals, it's the father rather than the mother that takes care of their young has been cracked by researchers at the University of Sheffield.

Experts from the University, in collaboration with the University of Bath and Veszprém (Hungary) found that role reversal was caused by an imbalance in the numbers of males relative to females.

The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications. Darwin noted in 1871 that in most animals, it is the females that spend most time looking after the young, whilst males focus on competing with each other for females.

Evolutionary biologists argued that this was due to the female investing significant amounts of energy in producing eggs, and in the case of mammals, giving birth, and so it is in their interests to ensure their offspring's survival by caring for them.

However, in some species, such as seahorses, the sex roles are reversed where the females produce the eggs but then leave it to their male mates to care for their offspring.

Dr András Liker, Marie Curie Research Fellow from the University of Sheffield's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, said: "Sex-role reversal has been a formidable puzzle for evolutionary biologists ever since Darwin. Our study is the first supporting the idea that sex ratio plays an important part in the evolution of role reversal."

The researchers studied birds where the sex roles were reversed and found there was a higher ratio of males to females in the population, compared with the usual situation where females care for offspring.

Professor Tamás Székely, Professor of Biodiversity at the University of Bath, explained: "The research group has investigated sex role reversal for over 20 years, and was extremely pleasing to see such a clear cut result.

"Mathematical models suggest that these animals' behaviour is strongly influenced by their social environment, and our findings support these predictions.

"When there are lots of males in a population, it's harder to find females, so it benefits males to stay with their mate and look after the young.

"However, the females often take advantage of this and leave the male holding the baby, whilst they go and find another mate."

Females in the sex role reversed species also take on the traditional male role of being bigger and compete with each other for males.

The role reversal isn't usually seen in mammals: since males can't produce milk it's not as easy for them to take over the parenting completely.

However changes in sex role behaviour have been observed in humans when the sex ratio is imbalanced.

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Sheffield.