Just to echo what Marienee said, and heraldgwena too - your son could actually need medical attention. I have some friends who’s 1-year-old just will not eat solid foods. They have to literally do a song and dance at feeding time, complete with flashing-lights toys. It’s pretty sad.
They’ve done all sorts of medical tests to make sure that she can eat, and now that she’s been declared healthy they’ve moved on to occupational therapy to get her to eat.
Anyway, I’m convinced that trying what everyone else has suggested will help you. But if that doesn’t work you can bring up the idea of going to the doctor to fix his eating problem if he can’t do it on his own. If the idea of the doctor doesn’t help things along, you would actually want to follow through on it and take him to a doctor to see if he’s not really having a medical issue with eating.
Let me elaborate on this point. We’ve got 3 somewhat picky kids. They must cabal in their rooms and decide whose turn it is to complain about the dinner being served as one of them inevitably will kvetsch. I’ve tried to make notes of who the fussy one is for each dish and then have them cook it with me the next time. They seem to take more ownership of the food and with a little bit of praise on a “job-well-cooked”, they’ll eat it up.
Our son is picky and my wife was always making chicken nuggets, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese. I couldn’t stand it anymore and I insisted that we all eat the same thing.
I laid out three rules: No yelling, you have to try it before you say you don’t like it, and don’t push the plate away even if you don’t like it (this rule is just to avoid messes).
He usually says that he doesn’t like what we are serving before he tries it. So we talk. I ask him about school or what he built with Legos today. Half the time he forgets that he’s fighting us and he starts eating. He ate a hamburger a few days ago. He has never been willing to try one before. He ate real chicken, another thing he would never try. We’ve been doing this for just a few weeks and it is getting easier every day.
I usually don’t like to use games to get a kid to eat, but a friend has one that is fun, very effective, and doesn’t seem to be habit-forming (that is, the kids don’t need someone to do it to get them to eat). She says, “Don’t eat that broccoli [or whatever it is]” in a playful manner. They eat it without fail.
Echo the advice of not making him eat if he doesn’t want it…but when he wants a snack later, pull out his plate and offer what he passed on from the earlier meal. Eventually he will eat what you serve.
First off, take a deep breath. Stay calm. Encourage tasting new things but don’t force your son to eat. A lot of kids will only eat from what I call “the beige food group.” Interestingly, these are the same foods they serve at elementary school cafeterias - coincidence? My sister’s kids will still only eat chicken fingers and French fries and they are in their late teens/early twenties and seem to be healthy.
Kids are very sensitive to texture. They seem to like homogenized types of food with no odd lumps. Compare a chicken nugget with a chicken leg. One has weird bits of fat and gristle (yuk!), the other has the same texture throughout and dipping sauce! Find new ways to make food smooth and beige.
If you give in and let him eat only the foods he likes, he will never develop a taste for the rest. Follow the advice of the others here. He won’t starve, but her will learn to like more foods.
If you cater to him and he grows up to be a bad eater, you will forever wonder if you could have avoided it by doing it the other way.
I skipped a bunch of posts so this may have already been covered, but we had a slow eater and bought a kitchen timer. We set it to a certain time (generally half an hour) and once it went off, dinner was taken away. She learned to eat faster within days.
Really? You think it is okay to be in your twenties and only willing to eat chicken fingers and french fries? I have a hard time believing that they are healthy and they certainly aren’t setting them up for being healthy later in life. Even if they are “healthy” what happens when they have an important business dinner and order the chicken fingers? While I agree that some kids are just picky…I can’t believe that it is good to continue that behavior into adulthood.
I find that kids eat what they are used too. Put green on the plate every night, and once they are used to it, they will eat it.
I have to echo the sentiments of those who suggest nipping this now. Offer dinner and a reasonable time. When supper is over, it’s over.
We had this same issue when our son was around five or six. He gradually stopped eating most things. He is fourteen now and he only has about five things that he will eat. That is trending down, still. I desperately wish we had been more proactive when he was little.
It is a control issue. We have a daughter (older than the boy) who demands a LOT of attention. She is extremely high-maintenance and has, shall we say, “issues”. She is twenty years old now and, IMHO, will one day be diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. Anyway, with the chaos in our house, our son found the one thing in his life he could control and his sister couldn’t take it away from him. Over the years, it has manifested itself into a problem that, again in my opinion, affects his life. He stresses out about social events that involve eating. He cannot visit a friend’s house if a meal is involved unless he knows what the meal is. He is very polite and he knows that refusing the meal would be rude. But, he cannot bring himself to actually eat it.
It is also a trust issue. Fool him once and he won’t ever trust again. He used to love McDonald’s hamburgers. He always orders them without onion. Well, once, they put onion on it. That was years ago. He will not go near a McDonald’s burger ever again.
Frustrating does not even begin to describe it.
I believe, with no real reason, that this all began with one little thing. Many years ago, we were having dinner and he didn’t like what we were having. This was before his picky-ness started. He just didn’t like the meal. So, my wife told him to fix a peanut butter sandwich. Nothing has been the same since. One time is all it took.
Whoa, that’s what I envisioned in my future with my beige eater, but I tried to keep perspective and promote nutrition, variety and yes, rewards.
anyway, I’m on board with injecting humorous drama into toddler/kid eating scenario,
veggies are garnish don’t eat it!
Go ahead put salt on it!
Want some coffee?
They don’t have to like or even try it , but rudeness about it will not be tolerated. it’s all about modeling the behavior right, it sure got my husbad back on track with showing a littl e respect for the cook.
I don’t think I made a judgement call on the way my sister’s children eat. I just pointed out that they haven’t died yet from eating habits that some posters seem to think is specially designed to personally offend them.
I watched my dad and sister go at it over food for years. She wouldn’t eat anything that she didn’t want to and he was going to make her eat it, by God, if it was the last thing he ever did. Fortunately I didn’t have to sit at the table for hours while she made up her mind to eat the stupid whatever, although some of that crap was hard to get down. Now her kids are the exact same way.
I know for a fact that some kids would sit at an empty table for an hour every night than rather than eat a mushroom. That is a pointless fight for an adult to start.
But make sure it’s a real test, and not one of the numerous types of quackery associated with food allergies. Some practitioners do things like “test for food allergies” by seeing how hard it is to push the kid’s arm down while he’s holding the food in question (really). The results of that kind of “testing” will probably have more to do with the practitioner’s prejudices about which foods are “good” or “bad” than they will have to do with any real health problems he might have.
Something that’s not a food allergy but may be an issue with him eating is a food aversion. Basically, you eat some food, you get sick (possibly having nothing to do with the food), and from then on that food makes you feel sick. Lots of people have an aversion to at least one food, and they’re not easy to get rid of even if you want to. If he has some other problem that makes him susceptible to vomiting, that might be causing food aversions.
Have you talked to his pediatrician about the possibility of sensory integration issues? I think you need to cover your bases there and with food allergies. I don’t have personal experience with this, but a friend’s 3 yo son does. He just can’t physically tolerate the sensations that come with new foods, especially those with complicated textures.
FWIW, in our house, the rule is that you can always have a bowl of cereal if you don’t like the other options available. I might have stricter policies, except that Mr.Q and I very rarely eat the same foods.
Nausea is a common symptom of anxiety. It can set up a vicious cycle where a parent fights with a kid at the dinner table over not eating a particular food, the kid gets anxious and feels nauseous, breaks down and eats the food, but gets a food aversion from the nausea (or, even if they don’t eat the food, they could get an aversion to the smell of it). Make sure you’re not making him anxious to the point of nausea at meal times, and bear in mind that different people can have different levels of anxiety in response to the same thing.
Try cooking some things in different ways. He might not hate all brussels sprouts, just brussels sprouts made the way you usually cook them. Is there a characteristic method of cooking (ie, you always boil vegetables) or flavor or combination of flavors that you use a lot? He might not care for that, but might like the same foods cooked in a different way. Obviously, you want to look for healthy cooking techniques and flavorings- you can probably get him to eat anything by deep-frying it and serving it with lots of salt and sugar, but there are problems with that.
You might need to serve sauces on the side (better yet, as dips, since dips are more fun for kids than sauces are), or keep food from “touching” on the plate.
I know he’s only three, but would involving the child in the food choices be useful in a case like this? Not “what do you want for dinner”, which he’ll always name his favourite foods for, but something along the lines of “broccoli or brussel sprouts?”. He might not like either, but between the two choices, he probably is more willing to eat one or the other. I know that I hate brussel spouts, but love broccoli! I think different recipes can make a difference too - I don’t like steamed asparagus nearly as much as when they are fried a little, and I grew up thinking I hated spaghetti sauce until I discovered that it was just my mother’s way of preparing it that I couldn’t stand.
My mom is a bit of an indifferent cook, and I grew up in a time (the 70’s and 80’s) when there were some awful trends in cooking. I could give you a long list of foods I hated as a kid, but now eat (though I still generally don’t eat them the way I grew up eating them). Plus, my mom grew up in a home where butter, salt, sugar, and pepper (for the adventurous only) were pretty much the only flavorings, and I’m not much into butter.
Are there foods he’ll eat away from home, but won’t eat at home? That’s a big hint that he might not dislike the food, but might dislike the way you prepare it.
Don’t take it personally if he doesn’t like something you cook. Everybody, including little kids, has their own individual tastes in food. Don’t drag issues into this that don’t belong.
Don’t give him attention, either positive or negative, for eating slowly. A lot of kids crave attention. If they can’t get positive attention, they’ll settle for negative. If you’re paying more attention to him when he eats slowly than you do when he wolfs food down, you may be inadvertently reinforcing the behavior.
