I didn’t know the term yet, but early in the second year of my daughter Karuna’s life, I’d fallen into something psychologists call normalcy bias: the tendency to assume that things will continue as they always have, that nothing in our future will diverge too far from what we expect. I already had two healthy children, and assumed that our third would be the same. 

My memories of Karuna’s first year of life are filled with joy. My younger son Sohaum  squeezed her cheeks while saying gleefully, “You’re just mine, you’re all mine,” as she giggled and wiggled on the shaggy carpet next to her crib. My older son Abhay carefully held both her hands in our living room as she tried to take her first steps and then let her go to give her a chance to walk by herself. And my wife, Amisha, who had never seemed so tired, had also never looked so full of unabashed love.

It was the kind of year that feels like it will never end. We had reached the pinnacle, and now we were here to stay. 

But a few months after her first birthday, Karuna began refusing meals. First, she refused the pureed vegetables, then the fruits. She was a bottomless pit for olives and loved rice and daal, but beyond that, she just didn’t eat much. She’s just a picky eater, I thought.

But a few months later, at her 18-month appointment, the standard graph that plotted a child’s weight against their age showed her weight slipping off the curve. She weighed less than 97% of children her age. We needed to do something about it, the pediatrician told us, but we still weren’t too worried.

We started consulting with a nutritionist to see if we could broaden her food preferences and started her on PediaSure to supplement her intake. She’ll be okay, I........

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