Having a child who turns their nose up at a variety of foods, which often includes fruit and vegetables, can be a huge stress for parents trying to give their child a balanced diet. How can you tell whether it's a fussy eating phase or a restricted eating problem? And if it persists how and where do you seek help? We get some advice from Massey University nutrition lecturer Dr Cathryn Conlon and Massey University speech and language clinician Emily Jones, who runs the ACTIVEating Clinic which treats children with restrictive eating.

Having a child who turns their nose up at a variety of foods, which often includes fruit and vegetables, can be a huge stress for parents trying to give their child a balanced diet.

How can you tell whether it's a fussy eating phase or a restricted eating problem? And if it persists how and where do you seek help?

We get some advice from Massey University nutrition lecturer Dr Cathryn Conlon and Massey University speech and language clinician Emily Jones, who runs the ACTIVEating Clinic which treats children with restrictive eating.

Fussy eating is something most parents have to face at some point, Conlon says.

"It's a really common developmental stage about one in three children are probably going to face some kind of food restriction or food refusal at some point, so there isn't really one characteristic that defines a fussy eater or a restrictive eater."

She is more concerned about the variety of food a child eats.

"For a normal fussy eater, as long as they are having a variety of foods so they get all the nutrients they require you can be assured."

But children who restrict a number of foods, or a whole food group such as vegetables and fruit or dairy, are more of a cause for concern, she says.

Jones says another red flag is when a child has less than 20 base foods in their diet.

"If they were restricting whole food groups or food textures or having trouble with hard-to-chew foods ... or had more immature eating skills."

Conlon says the age range at which children tend to have the most problems is between 18 months and 3 years.

A problem persisting beyond that is possibly a sign that a child is having difficulty.

By grouping foods into carbs, vegetables, proteins, etc parents can see how many base foods a child is or isn't eating, they say.

"Sometimes what you'll see is they have a lot of those carb foods; so breads and crackers and things like that, but are missing proteins and missing fruit and veg," Jones says.

Conlon says vegetables are the most common hard-to-eat food, along with meat if it's not been processed…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details