It's becoming more frequent that my 18 month old daughter has started refusing the dinner we give her without trying it. Our best guess at why, is because it contains green things.
We always check the food and it is damn tasty, and she does like it if she tries it, but obviously explaining this to an 18 month old is difficult.
We know she is hungry, because in the past we have given her a replacement of something like toast and she'll gobble that down.
What is the best way to handle this? We don't want her to think that she can always swap her healthy dinner for toast, so the method we have currently been using is, if after 15 minutes she is still not eating, we'll get her down and say something like "You haven't eaten your dinner, you must not be hungry". If, later she decides she does want the food, we'll put here back on her chair and let her eat.
Is this a good way to handle it? Would there be a better method? We don't want her to grow up having "food issues"