Brief research suggests it is a vexed question, but that "attempting" in general requires a specific intention, not just recklessness.
In the Gibbins and Proctor case, the man and his mistress were found by the jury to have intentionally starved Gibbins' child and thereby intended serious harm to her (not necessarily intending death, but it's sufficient for murder that serious harm is intended). Proctor was said to positively hate the child, and Gibbins was unwilling to challenge Proctor or provide food to the child directly.
The intention to starve was not at issue, the question was whether it was murderous to withhold food from a child in your charge - it was.
The confounding questions of the case were that (a) neglecting to provide food seems like an omission rather than an action, (b) that Proctor was neither Gibbins' wife nor the child's mother, (c) that Gibbins had certainly furnished sufficient resources to Proctor that she could have fed the child, and (d) that Gibbins had never acted to prevent the child being fed by Proctor.
In other words, Gibbins was arguing that he had fulfilled the typical responsible behaviours of a man of a household - not feeding the child personally, but providing the resources to the woman of the household so that the feeding could be done.
And I assume Proctor took the line that, being neither the wife nor the mother, she was not the child's guardian and could not be obligated.
The court effectively found that both Gibbins and Proctor, as adults in the same household and in charge of children, had an obligation to act to make sure the child was fed, and that when they each willed not to act to feed the child, knowing as fully sensible people that the child was starving, they thereby intended harm.
On this logic, intentionally starving a child to within an inch of their lives could well be attempted murder.
But the jury would have to find that there was in fact an intention to starve so as to inflict harm.
Mere recklessness and neglect - as might be typical of parents who are deranged in terms of their ability to direct their own attention, anticipate consequences, or discern environmental conditions - would not be sufficient.