Fifteen exposures, and what they mean
Somewhere between the health visitor and the internet, most parents pick up a number. Ten tries. Fifteen. Twenty. The number changes; the promise attached to it does not — keep offering, and eventually the child eats it.
The number is real enough. What it means is almost always misread, and the misreading is what makes it exhausting.
What the number is not
It is not a countdown. Nobody has established that the fifteenth encounter is the one that works, and a child who has refused fourteen times is not fourteen fifteenths of the way to broccoli.
It is not a rule about your child either. Numbers like this come from averages across groups of children, and averages describe groups. Yours might be four. Yours might be forty. Neither is a verdict.
And it is not a target you can hit faster by trying harder. This is the part that costs parents the most: fifteen offers in fifteen days, each one a little more insistent than the last, is not the same treatment fifteen times. It is one long escalation, and by the end the food means something different than it did at the start.
What it is
It is a description of how familiarity works. Something unfamiliar is treated as suspect; something seen repeatedly stops being unfamiliar. That is all. It runs on encounters, not on effort, and the encounters count whether or not anything was eaten.
Which means the useful reading is nearly the opposite of the usual one. Not "fifteen chances to get this right", but "this will take longer than one meal, so stop spending anything on each one".
The condition attached to it
Repetition works when nothing is riding on it. If each appearance comes with a request, an audience and a result, then what is being repeated is not the food — it is the pressure. That does get learned, quickly, and it does not fade.
A green bean that turns up on the table every few days and is allowed to go back untouched is a green bean getting familiar. The same bean with "just try it" attached is a negotiation getting familiar.
What to count instead
If you want a number to hold on to, count the steps rather than the tries.
Was the food on the table at all? Did the child stay in the room with it? Did they touch it, move it, put it on their own plate, lick it? Each of those is a real change in the relationship, and each of them happens long before anything is eaten.
This is also the honest version of progress. A month of "no" tells you nothing. A month in which "no from the doorway" became "no from the table" tells you the thing is working.
Taste a Day counts exactly those steps, and it counts them because they are the ones that move. It is a game and a habit tracker, not a treatment, and it makes no promise about your child in particular.
If eating is affecting your child's health or growth, that is a conversation for a paediatrician, not an app.