Never had kids of my own, but both of my nieces were extremely picky eaters at that age. I remember going in to a pizza place with my then 9 year old niece and having her order Mac & cheese. :smack: She’s 24 now and she turned out fine. My other niece is 11 going on 7 (some issues there) and is a little better about it, but still won’t touch a lot of stuff.
But yeah, the whole Ballet and body styles thing may be going on. Best to look into it.
Yeah, my mother would intentionally make shit that she KNEW everyone else at the table hated because she wanted it and dammit, she was going to make it and we were going to eat it.
MoL, I agree with you, but I think that **WhyNot **has a valid point here - if mom doesn’t freak out about this, then all the daughter is getting is a visit with a nutritionist and her doctor, a little bit of emphasis on the “puberty makes your body change and that’s OK” speech, and perhaps a counterbalancing attitude towards body shape than that at ballet (where thin and straight and light is everything). Even if she’s not got an eating disorder, none of that is going to hurt her any.
I don’t think anyone wants mom to freak out and stage a huge medical intervention, but having a nutritionist to talk to for a few moments isn’t a huge medical intervention.
My own suggestion? Go to the nutritionist, and tell her/him that your daughter is now going to be in charge of creating some of the family dinners. Make sure to get the tools daughter needs to choose healthy foods, then sit down, let her plan out a meal that she likes and is healthy, and then go shopping together for the ingredients and prepare it together. It may just be that her tastes are very different from mom’s. Mom may also find that a little control over dinner choices makes a very big difference in her attitude towards food.
My mom was convinced that I’d never eat *any *vegetables in my whole life, but then she never *made *any that weren’t cooked into sodden masses. I swore I hated spinach until I learned you can eat it raw, or inside lasagne, or in soup. I didn’t know that you could use beans as ingredients IN things, instead of just cooking them by themselves in a boring mess of soggy smush. It also makes a difference being able to say - no, I don’t feel like salad today, I’d rather have a sweet potato, and having the power to make that choice, instead of being stuck with something that maybe you do like, but just don’t like that day.
Tweens suck - give the kid a little support and control to help her through it.
I’ve never cooked for kids, but have done that to my husband (super-picky) a time or two. “This is what I want to eat. You can eat this, check out leftovers in the fridge, or zap a frozen dinner.” Most of the time, I can figure out stuff to make that we both like (I’m a lot less picky), so he’s fine with me doing that occasionally, as long as there is something around he likes (I do make sure of that).
Find a Dietitian, not a Nutritionist. Almost anyone can call themselves a Nutritionist yet not have any qualifications (it differs from country to country, and US state to state).
If she eats things she likes, and she’s not unhealthily skinny, she probably doesn’t have an actual eating disorder. “Picky eater” can be called an eating issue if you want to get technical about it.
Watch out for ballet. There are lots of misinformed girls (usually girls, I don’t think boys are as concerned about it) who will share helpful information about, say, eating whatever you want and then throwing up. In general ballet is great but it’s not the teachers you have to worry about so much as the fellow dancers.
But at 10 I would say, watch, but don’t make a big deal about it, because making a big deal about it at this point is probably worse than ignoring it.
What you might do is get her involved in the meal planning and cooking. This way she can tell you what she wants to eat, and learn to make her own meals if you’re not cooking what she wants to eat at a particular moment (and then you won’t have to become a short-order household cook).
ETA: I was a picky eater as a kid and I still am, but less so. I also think it is good to be thin–note that I’m not saying it’s good to starve yourself, but there’s really not much downside in being a couple of pounds underweight, or on the low end of the scale. If she’s getting enough nourishment to do ballet, which requires strength and stamina, she’s probably all right.
I was like that at her age. In general, I didn’t really enjoy eating and never had much of an appetite. It wasn’t about body issues at all (and I also took ballet at that age). I was pretty scrawny for my age as a result but not unhealthily so.
One of the problems is that there are 6 people in our family, and she is the odd one out over food. Tonight I made black bean enchiladas, and everyone else just inhaled them, but she just refused to eat them and had an apple instead. Nothing wrong with eating an apple, but it’s not much to have for dinner. I can get her to eat if I cook only the things she wants, but there are 5 others to think about, and I want us to have a nice decent dinner together, not just eating ramen because that’s one of the few things she;ll eat.
I think there’s a few ways to approach this part of the issue. When you cook something she likes and will eat, cook enough that she can have leftovers the next night (or 2 nights even). Then there’s a night or two when you can cook for the rest of the family.
Maybe there’s also more she can eat if she doesn’t like the dinner - instead of just peas, or just an apple, what else would she eat? Can you keep sandwich fixings, smoothie fixings, etc?
Another suggestion I read was to make sure there’s milk, bread, and fruit with meals, as well as vegetables and the main part.
IANAChild Psychologist (or even a parent, for that matter).
Superficially, to me it doesn’t sound like an eating disorder, just a picky eater. Expose her to a wide range of foods and she’ll eventually find something she likes.
There ya go. Whether she has issues or not, this is a great time for her to start learning how to cook.
I snipped the part about the nutritionist, and at this point, I wouldn’t even harp on the healthy part too much. Just producing dinner for a family of six is a challenge, and I bet it will kindle her interest (well, at least for the meal she helps create)!
Yeah, with more details, I’m leaning closer to “picky eater” and/or “family control issues around food”, too.
But there’s just not a good way to tell without being around the girl and talking to her, and so I’m sticking with the suggestion to have it checked out by professionals. If it’s not an eating disorder, awesome. It’s worth the $100 office visit to know you’re not missing something that could kill her.
And yeah, if she’s not cooking at least some of the family meals by now, she should be. As should anyone else who eats in your house and can reach the countertop.
My sister and I were both picky eaters as tweens/teens. My sister went through a phase of no vegetables other than carrots and corn. Eventually we discovered my sister had problems with nightshade vegetables, so her “issues” were she really was sensitive to certain foods. Salads were an issue because a lot of dressings have dried peppers or tomato in them. As an adult, she uses oil and vinegar or brings her own salad dressing (the one she knows won’t give her problems). Our pasta nights were hellish for her, we only ever had spaghetti and red sauce. As she has gotten older, she likes pasta because she knows she can eat it with olive oil and parmesan cheese or something other than red sauce.
I went through a phase of no meat other than boneless skinless chicken breast. I’m still not a big meat eater, but as I grew older I realized I hate pork (which my parents ate a lot) and they like their red meat bloody rare, I like mine cooked more. My stepdad was not a big fan of tuna and salmon, so we never had those growing up. I love tuna and salmon, but never knew cause I wasn’t exposed to them.
Neither one of us had an eating disorder, we just needed to find what we liked. What we liked was not necessarily what my parents ate.
Kids taste things differently that adults, and have more sensitive taste buds. And according to a new German study, obese children may have less sensitive taste buds and need to eat more to get the same taste sensations. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_129463.html
I know that my 11 year old hates anything even remotely spicy and she’s fairly skinny.
Yeah I loved the way that article didn’t go into any detail about who the study groups were (i.e., people have been known to waste away before dying, people have been known to do some extremely damaging stuff in order to lose weight) and then ended with “pass the pizza.”
Anorexia is bad. Being on the low end of the growth scale, weight-wise, is not bad. Note that I didn’t say being overweight was tantamount to death. I just said being a bit underweight doesn’t have a down side.
Sorry, but numerous other studies show the same conclusions, and researchers won’t do something as silly as use starving people to try to claim the being thin is bad for you. Here is another example that suggests the minimum “healthy” BMI should be 20 instead of 18.5 (this also shows that BMI outside of the range 20-30 has a much bigger effect on men than women). Of course, we don’t really know what Palo Verde’s daughter’s BMI is, but them seem concerned.
I’m pretty sure 10-year-olds have a huge range of possible healthy weights, but I don’t know that they would be on BMI charts. And kids that age change really fast.
Oddly, the only thing I saw in the linked article to suggest that being below a certain BMI was unhealthy was the chart itself. It was pretty clear about the benefits of reducing body weight in the obese. It didn’t address whether the people with the low BMI who died were wasting away, starving, or anything like that.
