- Dr Annie Wertz and Dr Karen Wynn carried out the study at Yale University
- 47 eight to 18-month-olds tested with plants and man-made objects
- Children showed 'striking reluctance' to touch plants
Study: Academics say children could be refusing to eat their greens because of a survival instinct
Dr Annie Wertz and Dr Karen Wynn, both pyschologists at America's Yale University, wrote the study on how children behave around plants.
The academics studied toddlers playing with different objects and realised youngsters didn't pick up natural things, like plants, as much as they played with plastic or metal objects.
At the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University, 47 eight to 18-month-old children were observed and the psychologists who put them in front of two real plants, two realistic-looking artificial plants, and two other objects.
The children in the experiment showed a 'striking reluctance' to touch plants, the doctors noted.
They believe this behaviour is progammed into children from birth to avoid them being harmed or poisoned by flowers or plants.
'This behavioral strategy would protect infants from the dangers posed by plants by decreasing the likelihood of ingesting plant toxins (by either consuming plant parts or ingesting toxins rubbed off on their hands from damaged plant parts), or incurring injuries from plants' physical defenses (e.g., fine hairs, thorns, or noxious oils).' The study says.
The same findings can translate to the frustrations many parents face when trying to get their toddlers to eat fruit and vegetables, the psychologists say.
Explaining the findings, the report says: 'In modern Western circumstances, plants are often peripheral to daily life. They may be encountered only in well-manicured lawns and parks, or as already-harvested fruits and vegetables in the grocery store.
'Throughout human evolution, plants have been essential to human existence.
'Yet, for all of these benefits, plants have always posed very real dangers.'
The study says that defence and survival mechanisms, teaching humans not to grab dangerous plants, could be why children are reluctant to eat leafy, green vegetables.
'Plants produce toxins as defenses against predators that can be harmful, or even deadly, if ingested,' the paper continues, 'The costs associated with plant defenses have shaped the physiology and behavior of many non-human animal species.'
However, the built-in reluctance could be changed, they said.
'The current results suggest that human infants, like other non-human animals, possess strategies for mitigating the ancestrally recurrent dangers posed by plants.
'We suspect that this initial avoidance may be a default strategy that can be overturned by social information indicating that a given plant is safe to eat or use for some other purpose.
'We are not suggesting that infants are actively afraid of plants. Rather we propose that once infants identify an object as a plant, they deploy a behavioral strategy of inhibited manual exploration, which serves to help protect them from plants' potential dangers.'
Vegetables: The study says that defence and survival mechanisms, teaching humans not to grab dangerous plants, could be why children are reluctant to eat leafy, green vegetables
Another possibility is that they know that plants are alive and don't wish to harm them. That only happens when they start their institutional "education".