Every day, children are exposed to messages - whether on giant hoardings and TV ads or from looking in friends’ lunchboxes - telling them that they should like the very foods that will do them the most harm.

Every culture seems to have certain challenging vegetables that children find hard to love at first bite.

What children need is to develop the skills to navigate the environment for themselves.

Large numbers of adults as well as children have now become habituated to eating a version of ‘kid food’ over a whole lifetime: sweet, salty, undemanding to chew and swallow and heavily processed.

When parents as well as children are eating ‘kid food’, perhaps it’s time to call not something else. ‘Kid food’ started off as something separate and different from normal food. Now it is close to being the new normal for all age groups. The danger is that when adults have childish tastes too, it becomes very difficult for anyone to break the cycle and learn the pleasures of real food.

The cereals marketed for children are consistently the most sugary and highly processed in the whole cereal aisle.

Feeding children is an immense responsibility.

Feeding children too often can make them forget what their own hunger feels like. Large portions lead to overeating. And giving food to calm a distressed child teaches them that unhappiness is a reason to eat.

Force-feeding is a crime of passion, driven by a parent’s desire to see a child eat; as with other crimes of passion, the perpetrator has lost sight of the loved one’s autonomy.