PH had a softball game yesterday, and as I was standing around chewing a hot dog and handing the onions to my baby, someone commented on the fact that he is a “good eater”.
He really is. So far.
I have never really found anything that Babby doesn’t like, with the exception of some spicy sausage that was a bit too hot for his taste.
The kid eats pickles. And lemons. LEMONS.
You know how, when you are looking at your food and you see the one thing on your plate that you don’t want to eat, you say “I’ll give it to the dog”?
Well, in our house, it’s “let’s give it to the baby.”
Don’t want the zucchini that came in my salad? Babby will eat it.
Don’t want the lemon from my diet coke? Babby will eat it.
Don’t want the yolks from my boiled eggs? Babby will eat them.
Too many sauteed onions on my hot dog? Babby will eat them.
I assume that his taste buds must not be fully developed, and I know that many kids begin pickiness in toddlerhood, so I’m not ready to gloat over my “good eater” baby yet.
I have to say, though, that I do agree with articles like this, which scold parents for succumbing to their child’s finickiness.
“Sneaking” vegetables into kids food seems to be all the rage these days, and while I agree with Dirt&Noise that it is always good to make all things as healthy as possible, I also agree that if you are always trying to trick your kid into eating healthy, your kid isn’t learning long term habits from it.
When I was in that Post Partum group, a nutritionist came to speak to us. She assurred all of the mothers, some of whom had babies or toddlers who were eating solids, that it was okay if their kid “just wouldn’t eat” certain foods. Then she said something that I have mentally tattoed across my brain for evermore:
It is the PARENT’S responsibility to provide healthy, nutritious, balanced meals at regular intervals. It is the CHILD’S responsibility to eat them.
She went on to say that if a child refuses to eat this or that occasionally, that’s ok. As long as you keep offering it, and as long as you offer other alternatives in the same category at other meals, he’ll be all right.
Forcing a child to eat something he hates won’t help, and neither will giving him something else instead. A child needs to be taught how to take responsibility for his own food choices.
“A child will not allow himself to starve,” she said, “and missing the occasional food group, or entire meal – or even several meals in a row – will not have a serious long term affect on his health. However, making him chicken nuggets when he turns his nose up at the salmon WILL have a long term affect on his eating habits in general, and that’s worse than going hungry now and then.”
Apparently this “eat or don’t, but it’s all your getting” approach even works on hardcore cases.
The Baby Led Weaning book that I bought says very much the same thing. It warns me not to mind if Babby won’t touch his food today, because he’ll very likely eat everything in sight tomorrow. It says that kids rarely eat a balanced meal all in one sitting, but rather balance their own meals by eating a lot of protein today, a lot of vegetables tomorrow, and a lot of grains the day after.
Studies show that when a kid is allowed to pick and choose, he does actually eat vegetables voluntarily. I am to offer him something from each food group each meal, and if he doesn’t want it, then fine. I will do it again next meal, and the next, and he will balance his own meals.
I have definitely found this to be true with Babby. Two days ago he turned his nose up at the egg that I offered him. He nibbled one piece and then deliberately dropped it onto the floor. Today he spent half an hour happily picking at the eggs I gave him.
A few days ago he ignored his vegetables and chowed down on piece after piece of meat. The next day he ignored his meat and gobbled green pepper after green pepper.
Babby is a “good eater”, but not because he eats everything all the time. He is a good eater because he eats something most times and eats most things most of the time.
The first time I gave him potato salad he wouldn’t touch it. The next day I offered him some again and he couldn’t get enough. Is that pickiness? Or just daily variation? I call it variation.
He probably will get pickier as he moves into toddlerhood, but I feel prepared, thanks to my BLW book and that god-sent nutritionist.
I know that I won’t panic when he refuses to eat his dinner, because I will know that he’ll make up for it at breakfast, or lunch, or dinner the next day. I will focus strongly on my responsibility: providing him with healthy and balanced options, and letting him do the rest.
I have heard of some parents who become slaves to their kids’ picky preferences, and it happens out of love. You don’t want your kid to starve, and if he WON’T eat his salmon, maybe you should cook him some chicken nuggets.
Only the nutritionist told me not to, and I won’t.
I don’t agree, though, with people who claim that pickiness is entirely to be blamed on the parent’s feeding methods. Studies have shown that some people (me included) are more sensitive to bitter flavours than others. Those kids are likely to be the picky kids, because stuff just tastes worse to them.
So if your kid is picky, it isn’t your fault.
But it doesn’t follow that your child should have to subsist on cookies and french fries, either. You provide the healthy food, and if they won’t eat, they won’t eat.
I heard a story recently which strengthened my resolve to let Babby be picky if he wants to be, without falling into the trap of rewarding that pickiness.
A friend of mine was out with some friends and their three year old daughter at a fair. The mother asked the child, “what do you want to eat?”
(Open ended question – Danger! Danger!)
The kid said “Pizza!”
There is no pizza at the fair. Hotdogs, burgers, corndogs, mini doughnuts and cotton candy. No pizza.
They told her this, and she threw a tantrum, because she had already gotten it in her head that she wanted pizza. So then she refused to eat anything. The mother became so anxious over her child going hungry that she begged some cookies off of my friend, and plied the child with those.
“Here, honey, will you eat these?”
Really? You’re worried that you kid can’t survive without food for a couple of hours, so you give her sugar cookies? You do know that sugar cookies are not the same as burgers and hotdogs, right?
If the kid isn’t hungry enough to eat non-pizza food, then maybe the kid isn’t hungry enough.
They say that hunger is the best sauce.
When I worked at the service dog school, I can’t tell you how many puppy raisers anxiously told me at turn-in time that the dog was “picky”. I was sometimes given elaborate instructions on what was required to get the dog to eat. THIS kind of food only, he doesn’t like the other kind. Add some gravy. Give him the first few mouthfuls out of your hand. All kinds of nonsense like that.
We didn’t have time to beg Labradors to eat. We put them in the kennel with the others and gave them their daily rations. If they didn’t eat their meal, their kennel mate would.
Pickiness vanished overnight. Within days those “picky” dogs whose puppy raisers had spent months anxiously wheedling and coaxing to eat their meals were gobbling their meals in ten seconds flat.
Yeah, I’m glad that Babby is a “good eater” and I hope he stays that way, but if he doesn’t…
Eat it, or don’t eat, it’s your choice.
I can handle that.
How do you deal with your kid’s pickiness? Was your baby a “good eater” who turned picky, and what did you do?
I wasn’t allowed to be picky. The list of things I don’t like is pretty small, and I can’t help but think the two are related. Obviously I have no practical experience yet, but we have already discussed at length our philosophies concerning feeding kids, and it’s pretty much exactly what you’ve said.
But I did find the author of that article a bit smug, and I still think those black beans aren’t quite as publicized in the brownies as she’d have us think.
Ultimately, I don’t have to feed anyone’s child but my own, so I don’t really care what other people feed theirs.
Yes, I found her smug too – she seemed to think that he kids were good eaters because of her, and I don’t think that’s true. Pickiness has a proven genetic basis, and those of us who were picky kids can vouch that the dislike of those foods was very real.
However, she’s right that hiding vegetables in unhealthy-looking foods is not the way to teach your kids how to eat well. It puts too much of the onus on the parent and not enough on the child.
I can see a combination of the two being a good idea, though. Obviously I want my kid to appreciate vegetables in their actual form, but I can also see enhancing food with extra vitamins as a positive endeavor.
Absolutely. I mean, if we can make what we DO offer healthier, then why not do it?
Good points! My parents never made me a special meal…and while there were many things I didn’t like as a child, I now like almost everything (even devleoping a taste for melons on my last trip?!? I’ve never liked anything but watermelons before!).
There is a difference of course between not liking the taste of something and being allergic to it. My friend is allergic to pork, but grew up thinking she just didn’t like it…why didn’t she like it, because it made her mouth itchy!
As long as there are options of different things to eat (ie. don’t give your kids ONLY pickles one day and ONLY salami the next) I think that allowing them to decide what to eat is a good policy.
For the animals thing…sometimes pickyness is an allergy/sensitivity. I just thought my cats were picky eaters…but have since learned that they have a bad reaction to chicken. So now I just make sure that there is no chicken in any of their food and expect that they’ll eat it if they’re hungry and not if they’re not.
Yes, allergies are different. I always hated eggs, and my mother never pushed the issue (she was much more of a “fine, don’t eat it then, but I’m not making you anything else” parent than a “eat it or you don’t leave the table” parent) until I was served an omelette at a great aunt’s house.
I tried to eat it out of politeness and almost vomited on the first bite.
Many years later, going through my baby book, we discovered that I had had an allergic reaction to eggs the first time I ate them…
This is good stuff to think about for us.
The Bug used to be a champion eater. But it faded as he got older. I think much of it had to do with the fact that his communication skills caused so many problems. Food was our #1 source of meltdowns.
So for the past few months we’ve focused so heavily on communication and giving him what he asks for that now we’re having to actually start mapping out how to handle his meals since we can have a small bit of back and forth.
Sadly I think it’s still too early for us to just give him what he gets and leave it. Especially since he didn’t gain in the last 3 months. We’ve got to stuff some calories into this kid. And really, I can’t complain much. He eats fruit, veggies, dairy, grains. Only meat is the real problem with us. (Which I’m not cooking because I’m too sick right now anyway.)
But I need to keep this stuff in my head once we’ve got a few more pounds on him and we start a real routine.
I think autistic kids are well known for being picky about foods. I imagine there are probably different strategies to deal with special needs children.
This is the second post I’ve read on this topic in as many days… I think the starting assumption for most people is that parents SHOULD try to ensure that their children are not picky eaters. In some cases, that prescription can also become a judgment – if your child is picky, it’s because you did something wrong (and, conversely, if my child is not picky, it’s probably because I did something right!). To me, the question is WHY is it so important? Often the rationale is that picky eating in childhood will lead to unhealthy eating in adulthood. But my own experience (and the post I read yesterday, along with Eleanor’s comment) suggests that most picky children do naturally become more adventurous eaters in adulthood. As a former picky eater, I can vividly remember how sincere and deeply felt my aversions to food were. This was not some stunt I pulled to manipulate my parents or gain power – I would often dread meals because the experience of eating was so unpleasant, and my parents were quite reasonable – they didn’t force me to clean my plate or to eat foods I hated. As an adult, I eat a wide variety of foods (MUCH wider than I did in childhood) – and I greatly appreciate the fact that in my adult life, no one forces me to eat things against my will.
Another rationale is the assumption that a picky eater is an unhealthy eater. Bub is an extremely picky eater – he has a very short list of foods he will eat, most of which are brand specific (or have other restrictions – i.e. bananas, but only before they get brown spots). Among the foods he will not tolerate are chocolate, most baked goods (besides bread), candy, popsicles, etc. He doesn’t mind plain potato chips or french fries, but usually eats only a few, if any. He subsists on whole wheat bread, cereal, peas, raw baby carrots, baloney, chick peas, bananas, milk, yogourt, macaroni and cheese, and vanilla ice cream, with the occasional hot dog or cheese pizza. Occasionally he will swap out items (i.e. grilled cheese sandwiches go in, macaroni and cheese comes out). It’s not a varied or convenient diet, but I’m not convinced that it’s less healthy than Pie’s diet – she is a normal five-year-old in that she generally eats whatever is served and has the expected love of cookies and candy.
Sometimes the rationale is that the picky eater is too much work – parents are continually enslaved to the child’s demands. It’s definitely not convenient dealing with a picky eater – but I’m not convinced that the inconvenience weighs heavily enough to warrant the kind of suffering that would result if I attempted to force the issue through starvation. At age seven, Bub is now aware of the four food groups and taking increasing responsibility for his own nutrition – if he doesn’t like what the rest of the family is eating, he can often prepare his own meal, and he’s required to choose items from all four food groups. To me this is a better long-term plan than trying to use his hunger to force him to accept new foods.
I agree that pickiness is not a death knell or a sign of bad parenting. I think that the “convenience” factor is the parent’s problem – if you’re going to constantly be cooking two or three different meals at every meal time because your kids are picky, you have become a slave to their pickiness, and that’s your problem and not yours.
I was a picky kid myself. My mother was never a slave to my pickiness, though. Just as I do now with Babby, she shrugged her shoulders if I wouldn’t eat. It never became a matter of “forcing the issue through starvation”, though. Of course, most days my mother served foods that I liked. But if she and Dad decided to eat something that I didn’t like, well, I could eat it or not, it was my choice, but she wasn’t cooking me a separate meal.
If I didn’t want to eat my curry, I didn’t eat my curry. Maybe I was a little hungry, but I’d eat breakfast the next morning and that would be the end of it.
Bub’s case is a little different – like Jessica above, autism I’m sure probably leads to special needs in the eating area, and I don’t think the nutritionist was speaking for kids with special needs.
I can’t really speak to this topic as Violet is not, and has never been a picky eater. One of her favourite snacks is Kalamata olives. The only thing that she was adament about surrounding food was that she insisted on feeding herself. Oh, and she’s always hated sweet potatoes. Which I’ve found to be a bit bizzare, because what kid doesn’t like sweet potatoes? They’re sweet, and colourful and delicious! But even as a baby, at the point where they really aren’t supposed to like or dislike things, she’s shown distain for the sweet potato. I keep trying them at different points, made different ways put them in different things, and it’s always the same. The sweet potatoes always get left on the plate.
Well, I can’t get Babby to eat banana bread, so I guess I’ve found the weird thing he won’t eat.
Meanwhile, at dinner today, he not only sucked on a lemon happily, he ATE some of the rind.
Hey, you know what? I get the sweet potato thing! Though I enjoy the flavour, I find the texture off-putting. I eat them, I even deliberately cook meals with them, but I have to get over the mealiness every time.
I think the reason having a picky eater gets blamed on bad parenting has two facets.
1. Almost every child goes through a picky period, and parenting has a lot to do with how quickly most kids get out of it again. Or, rather, a poor response almost guarantees the pickyness will persist much longer than it would otherwise.
2. As a result, when people see picky eaters, they are not usually seeing parents like yours, Carol, who made a meal and let you make the choice to eat it or not. They are usually seeing people who have always taken the child’s responsibility to eat upon themselves, and end up becoming the family’s short-order cook, churning out this and that dependent on the whims of their six-year-old’s food fad of the week. And too often six-year-olds who have never been permitted to choose not to eat become power-hungry food tyrants. The power-hungry food tyrant? THAT is the result of poor parenting.
But the fact that certain people dislike certain foods, very strongly, that’s just normal. Who among us doesn’t have a few very strong food dislikes? Even the smell of liver cooking makes me nauseous. Dislikes become a problem only when what you will eat is so restricted that you don’t eat healthfully, or your life is restricted by your refusals. Most people don’t take it that far.
I have little experience with special needs children, so I can’t say how those generalizations apply, or don’t, to them.
Yes, I do think there could be two kinds of picky eaters – those made, and those created.
The Baby Led Weaning book talks a lot about how spoon feeding and parents fretting over their child going through a non-eating stage can turn meal time into a power battle.
Meals are never like that for us!
I have one picky eater and one terrible eater, and I agree with everything Bea said. I won’t bother retyping what she’s already written so well except to repeat that, while I’ve known many picky children (and was one myself), I’ve really only known ONE picky eating adult. I think it really is just a stage many children go through, and they’ll get more adventurous as they get older. Toddlers and preschoolers are known for being resistant to change and preferring routine in most aspects of life. 😉
My older son was introduced to solids in the typical way, starting with *gasp!* rice cereal, followed by homemade pureed/mashed vegetables and then fruits. He ate fairly well until he turned three, then started refusing to eat things like chili and rice and certain fruits he used to eat just fine. He also stopped eating bread crusts and will only eat vegetables in casserole form, as that’s what he’s most used to. I don’t worry about him, though. Over the course of a day, he gets a variety of foods and we make sure his bread is whole grain and so on.
My second born is a different story. With him, I tried the baby-led weaning approach of soft chunks of whatever we were eating at the time, starting around six months. He refused to actually chew and swallow ANYTHING until he was over eight months old, and then it had to be the smoothest of purees. I couldn’t even give him the same homemade food I gave the other kid. Nope, I had to buy overpriced jars of mush with smiling babies on the labels from the store, and even then he would only actually eat a small variety of flavors. My smugness and judgement of parents who “couldn’t be bothered to even make their own baby food” went right out the window!
As time went on, he accepted regular food. But at almost two, he still has a very limited menu and also doesn’t eat much at all. A quarter of a bagel or pancake is his breakfast. A few (cut up) grapes and Liam’s bread crusts with pb&j are lunch. Supper is a half a baby carrot, a couple of peas (if we’re lucky), some crackers, and a few tablespoons of apple sauce. Snacks are half a banana, half a yogurt, half a toddler cereal bar, or a tiny box of raisins. If we’re really, really lucky, he’ll eat most of a piece of pizza on a good day. He usually really likes pizza (though sometimes even that is refused).
He will not eat vegetables for the most part, and never anything that resembles a “meal”. No casseroles or soups or stews. No eggs, or cheese. He likes fruit, but only a very few kinds. He used to eat beans and pasta, but won’t anymore. We don’t eat meat, but he didn’t like veggie weiners, burgers or nuggets when we tried.
So, what can we do? We try to keep things whole grain. We offer fruit before the breads and crackers. We give him the high-protein Greek-style yogurt. And we have a lot of pizza. 😛 Yup, I cater to him. We still try to keep offering broccoli and eggs and spinach and strawberries and blueberries and pineapple and pasta and on and on, but there’s only so much food waste I can stand. “They” say it can take up to twenty times of exposure before a kid will accept and like a new food. That’s a lot of broccoli going in my compost bin. It’s too wasteful and expensive, to me, to do that at every single meal.
So what is there left to do? The whole “Eat or don’t eat, it’s your choice” thing? Nope. Doesn’t work for me at the moment. If I let Jonah walk away from foods he won’t try, he’ll just nurse more. Like all night long. Then I don’t get any sleep. I NEED him to have as full of a belly as possible for my sanity. I try to fill him with stuff like bananas and yogurt and raisins and pears first, but in the end if it takes a bowlful of goldfish crackers to fill him up, that’s what he gets. And I’ll also keep “sneaking” veggies into the pasta and pizza sauce and KD, because what does it hurt? 😉 (Did you know that the “Sneaky Chef” herself — Missy Chase Lapine, the author of the original book — recommends this method as a SUPPLEMENT to other healthy food habits? Not as a replacement at all, just an extra nutritional boost to kid-favorite meals like mac ‘n cheese and chicken nuggets and pasta and so on? With broccoli served on the side? It’s true!)
We all have our parenting challenges. Some kids are “bad eaters”. Some kids are “bad sleepers”. (Hey, I got both! Lucky me!) Some kids are a nightmare to take out in public. (Not mine! Yay!) Some kids are so resistant to changes in their routine you can’t take them on vacation because they need their own beds and toilets and toys. (Again, not mine, thank goodness!) And just as we all have our own crosses to bear, we all have our own ways of handling them. Like Babby’s “sleep suit”, for example. 😉 Many people might say they’d never use such a “crutch” and too bad, so sad; he needs to sleep so stick him in a crib and make him cry it out. That’s THEIR limit and their way of handling it. You choose to do things a bit differently, as do I. YOU don’t believe in being a “short order cook” and will prepare one meal, and if Babby doesn’t eat it, well, he’ll eat at the next meal. I prefer, for now, to make my older kid a pb&j if he won’t eat the meal I’ve prepared (no short order “cook” for me, either, technically) and feed my younger son snack foods if that’s all he’ll eat. Again, FOR NOW. It’s what works for us.
I know they’ll eat better when they’re older. Just like the older one has become a good sleeper (though he still needs very little and stays up late, unfortunately). The younger one will, too. All in good time. 🙂
Sorry, I think some people are misreading what I have said, and I recommend re-reading if you feel you have:
I DO NOT believe in making dinner time a battle ground. The “eat or don’t eat” thing is about NOT fighting with your kids about finishing their plates, or starving them until they eat something they detest. It’s simply about accepting that missing the occasional meal is not a big deal, or that picking the carrots off of their plate at dinner is not something to fight over.
The idea is to provide them with a variety of food – what the rest of the family is eating – and to let them pick and choose what they want off of that plate. If they don’t want to eat their carrots, fine. If they don’t want to eat their broccoli, fine. It’ll balance out in the end.
Like I’ve said many times, I don’t believe that parents make picky eaters. *I* was a picky eater. Unlike Dirt&Noise, I don’t think that a parent has control over that, so don’t read her smug tone and attribute it to me!
However, as MaryP has said, some parents turn dinner into a battle of wills, while others panic and start offering other options immediately, lest their darling miss a single meal and starve.
Until you’ve met one of those parents who cooks the same meal for their kid day in and day out, while the rest of the family eats normally, it’s hard to understand how extreme it can go.
I found an old home video recently, of my aunt’s step-granddaughter when she was three. The rest of us were eating a normal meal, but her mother was laboriously picking the raisins out of a raisin bran muffin – and I remembered that that kid ate nothing but muffins and yoghurt for EVERY MEAL.
Her mother didn’t even try to get her to eat other food – just served her with the same stuff every meal, and when the kid fussed that she didn’t like the raisins in her muffin, her mother picked them out for her. Her mother whispered and cajoled every single bite into that kid.
It was disturbing to watch it in retrospect, because when that little kid became a teenager, she became a hard-core anorexic and nearly died. It took years and years of living in a special facility for her to get her even partially recovered, and even so, every bite is a battle for her.
Do I think her mother somehow turned her into an anorexic? No. You can’t make someone starve themselves to death simply by feeding them nothing but muffins. Anorexia is an illness, and it runs in that family, apparently, so I think she inherited a certain amount of it. There are always special cases.
What does bother me, though, in watching the video, is how solicitous her mother is. Very “poor darling, she doesn’t LIKE it”, which seems like an extreme overreaction. So your kid doesn’t like this or that. It’s not a big deal. I would shrug and move on. But to this mother (again, with anorexic tendencies herself), disliking food was a BIG deal, and she needed to save her baby from the nasty bad tastes.
Parents with that attitude probably often do end up “creating” picky eaters even if they aren’t saddled with naturally picky eaters, or prolonging the natural “picky” phase that most toddlers go through, because they don’t keep offering a disliked food again and again, like you do.
Meal time should never become a battle of wills. I don’t plan to serve my son muffins with every meal – I’d rather just serve them at breakfast and offer him something else the other two meals – but I don’t plan to force him to eat something he hates, either.
That’s why I like the “child’s responsibility” thing. It takes the weight off of my shoulders. You don’t like your carrots? Okay. You’ll be that much hungrier, but that’s your decision. Tomorrow I’ll be serving something else, and maybe you’ll like that, will eat a lot of it, and will balance things out that way.
That means I don’t have to worry, I don’t have to be anxious. I just have to trust my child to eat what he needs, and all I have to do is keep offering him a variety of stuff from each food group, so that he can decide on what he likes or doesn’t likes, for himself.
But man, if my kid gets as extreme as Ms. Muffins-Every-Meal, I’m calling in a doctor, because the nutritionist says that it a normal, healthy child, that doesn’t happen unless the parent lets it happen, or something is seriously wrong.
No, I actually DO do that.
Not to the extreme of that aunt and ONLY muffins. But Jonah gets fed completely differently from the rest of us most of the time (for supper, anyway). I cater to his limited palate because the alternative is him nursing all night long, so it’s not an option I’m willing to take at this time. My sleep is already disrupted enough. I feed him what he’ll eat so I can get a break and get sleep.
I’m concerned about him, but unsure of what else to do until he weans, which we’re not ready to do just yet.
I knew what you meant, and agree it’s a good way to go when children are older. (Though hungry older kids can wake up in the night, too. My nephew is going through that if he doesn’t eat enough of his dinner, so HIS parents choose to make him sit at the table till he eats “enough”. Again, not the on-paper ideal, but they’re doing what actually works for THEM. In the end, real life is often different than we plan or read about.)
Tots his age are notorious for pickiness, so that’s hardly a worry. It’s not the same as a nearly-four year old who STILL will not eating anything but muffins. That’s either a case of a medical problem, or a really permissive parent, and I will stick by that.
And it’s true, too, that while he’s nursing he can get additional nutrients from you. I bet when he no longer has that as back-up, he’ll start to expand his palate on his own.
I really, really hope so!
Greyson would eat anything and everything, until he turned 2… now he eats barely anything. He’s not picky, he just doesn’t eat. He’ll have a few bites, and then he’s “all done”. How ever he still craps like he eats a cow a day! I’m definitely not a giver inner, but if he has barely eaten anything that day he will get something that i know he likes… but not in relation to another meal. I mean he’ll get a bowl of cereal, or a bowl of berries as a snack before bed or something.
Bribing also works well, because Violette is in the eat everything phase we say “look, Vi ate all her food, she gets dessert now”…. sometimes it’s enough to get him to eat some more.
My brother and his wife on the other hand are “giver inners”. My nephew played the picky eater thing, and even goes as far as gagging when he smells foods he “doesn’t like”… So because of them giving in to his shenanigans my nephew only eats: mushroom soup, crackers (plain soda), bacon and toast (has to be the right kind of bread)… there are a few fruits and vegetables thrown in there that he’ll maybe eat. I think they’ve made some progress, but i’m not sure they’re trying too hard. another thing i don’t agree with, but really it’s not my kid so i don’t put too much energy into thinking about it is, they don’t have a family eating arrangement. he eats by himself at a kids size table, at a different time as mom and dad eat, and he watches his little portable dvd player. so they’ve started some odd eating routines… but oh well, if they’re willing to keep up with it it’s his normal, so is it really that bad?
i dunno, off topic i know.
as for pickiness, it will come and go, the only thing we can do is keep offering and one day they’ll eat it. 🙂
Yep, they say all toddlers go through a picky stage. I think I’m stubborn enough to weather through it all right – the dog trainer hates to lose a battle of wills :-p
I was a lemon-eater.
Damnit. This is not where I wanted this reply to go. Poop.
I don’t like the way this layout does replies, I must say.
I was raked over the coals by a certain DoCo member regarding this subject, but I am a “This is what we are eating and I am not making you a separate meal” mom. My oldest (4) has gone through many stages with eating, but all in all, we haven’t made a huge issue out of food and he is typically a good eater. Last night he ate beets, sauteed beet greens, brown rice and grilled chicken with pineapple. So did the baby.
Unfortunately, we have a lot of food restrictions in this house due to sensitivities (wheat, dairy… you know, all the good stuff) so we don’t get the option to eat all the yummy quick food (no more pizza for dinner once a week- boo). It has turned into a bit of a blessing though, because we are all trying new healthy foods and I am cooking every meal (wait, how is that beneficial?). In short, my kids eat well because no one is offering salty, greasy, yummy stuff as an option (because we will all break out into massive hives and eczema). I can only hope that this kind of eating will stick with them throughout their lives. Oddly enough, no one has gone hungry or appears to be malnourished either…..
Now, take a trip to Colorado so that I can snuggle that adorable Babby and watch him eat my sauteed beet greens! 😛
He totally would, too!
I totally do that! I fawn and fuss over my cats when they refuse to eat. I have three different (hah! four) kinds of food that I switch between to make sure they eat. To be fair, my older cat lost a lot of weight a couple of years ago when she refused to eat. But I like this idea, it’s my responsibility to provide them with good, nutritious food, but theirs to eat it.
On a more serious note though, my parents were not quite as thoughtful. In general, we weren’t allowed to leave the table unless we ate our food (although, this was by no means a consistently enforced rule.) I have one very vivid memory of my dad physically forcing my brother to eat apple pie (my brother hated any baked good with fruit inside.) I still hate my mother’s food, just the smell of her rice makes me gag. To me it seems quite kind (although I understand the reasoning for its misguidedness) to make your kids chicken nuggets!
Ugh, yes, that’s a bad way to be. First of all, since over-eating is a common problem in our society, forcing a child to eat more than they want is just a bad plan, because then you are breaking down that natural feedback loop which says “stop eating” when you are full.
Secondly, as you have experienced, it can traumatise the kid and often turn them OFF of the food you are trying to get them to eat – especially bad if it’s their vegetables!
This is like the permissive parent/authoritarian parent problem. Both are bad in their own ways. The force-feeding parent turns their kid off of good food and can give them an over-eating problem. The have-some-junk-food-instead parent can end up rewarding the kid for turning their nose up at healthy food, which also does not instill healthy eating habits.
Both kids will have a great deal of difficulty EVER stomaching their veggies.
The nutritionist said that the best is (as always) a happy medium – serve them with good food, and don’t make a fuss if they won’t eat it.
Cats are funny creatures. They fall in that category of animals that make me say “how did these evolve”? (sheep are also in that category) because they are so fragile.
Cats actually do need to be force-fed occasionally, especially fat ones. If they go without eating for few days their body starts to break down their fat and for some inexplicable reason this makes them lose their appetite. It’s a vicious cycle which is only solvable by force-feeding.
So if you ever think your cats are suffering from that, stuff ’em. But for the most part – in my experience, a hungry cat WILL usually eat, especially if it’s a food they are used to and have eaten before.
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