How do you handle a child that is a very picky eater?

In My Humble Opinion
81

And sorry, but you’re gonna get it in two posts, because Discourse told me that there’s a limit of 3500 characters and I’d entered 4800-something.

How about out of genuine inability to keep the food down?

Yes, it is starving them if you won’t offer them anything they can stomach!

How old is the kid? Anybody over about four can learn to make themselves something basic, even if it’s just cheese on a slice of bread.

She should definitely stop making multiple meals, and teach him how to make his own.

This, also. Some people, even as adults, taste things differently than other people do. And children often taste things differently from adults; such tastes may change with age, at least if they haven’t been driven into a defensive reflex from having been forced to eat the thing.

This thread started off about a specific kid, and neither you nor any of the rest of us know what issues that specific kid may have.

Being genuinely repelled by some foods isn’t all that rare an issue. Don’t you know any food, even right now with adult tastebuds, that you can’t stand to eat?

And forcing children to eat seems more likely to result in picky adults than not forcing them. I now cheerfully eat most of what I couldn’t eat as a child, and will try nearly anything. (Still not eating spaghetti, though.)

82

I’m a hyper-sensitive person, which is a physical trait, not a mental one, it is not something amenable to acts of will, or obedience, or any other mental thing. Just imagine for one bloody minute being in a prison, where you have absolutely no say over what you must eat to survive. What you are served is dog eyeballs in a pool of regurgitated blood. Then the guards stand there and watch you eat it. Then you must thank them.

For me, as a child, most mealtimes were like this. Despite my mother being pretty lax for a 1950’s mom, meals with others unless I get to choose exactly what I want from a menu and I don’t have to eat with the cooks, are a source of deep anxiety for me to this day. Every meal, as a child, was filled with the fear that there would be nothing on my plate that I could face eating.

. I was extremely thin as a child because of all the foods that frightened me. I taste things differently than most people – generally things that other people find mildly stimulating, like spices, carbonation, peppers, mustard, raw onions, I find overwhelming or painful. Things like rare meat or fish nauseate me. A tiny piece of gristle, or grit, or a tough stem, will end the meal for me. Desserts are often too sweet.

I’m not only like this with food but pretty much everything – loud noises, crowds, jarring music, bad smells – it’s a long list. It is not something I want to do, it is not an artistic stance or a rebellious act. It is actually rather horrible and constricts my life enormously. Even so, I have managed to do okay, and I eat a wide variety of foods within the enforced boundaries of my sensitivity.

I have a great empathy and pity for children who cannot easily fit into adult strictures and rules of behavior, particularly those who cannot eat adults’ ideas of foods.

My own child went through many narrowed eating phases in her childhood, including Only White Foods, and I Can Only Drink Applejuice, and quite a few others that I don’t remember well because frankly, I let her eat whatever she wanted and she turned out just fine. It is true, she has scrambled eggs with cheese and sauerkraut or kimchi on a tortilla every morning, but I don’t judge.

An infinitesimal number of picky children suffer from any kind of malnutrition then or later. So what would you rather have? A child whom you have forced to eat what you think they ought to, with the resulting damage to your relationship with them and their relationship to food, mealtimes, choices, but the satisfaction of knowing you have Helped Them Become An Adult, or a child who progresses through their own food choices naturally and turns out fine?

I can tell that almost every one of the previous posters, as a child, was bullied by the adults in their life over food, and has normalized that bullying as “what parents do and what I as a parent should also do”.

83

Although I was never called “a picky eater” , I know exactly what you mean. I am over 50 years old, and to this day my mother will tell me I don’t like tomato sauce. Usually as I 'm eating something with tomato sauce - because it’s her tomato sauce I don’t like.

84

I don’t understand the claim that the "don’t argue, just tell them that’s their only option until tomorrow morning " prevents arguing about food. My son is not adventurous, but not picky, so this never really came up, but if at 5 or 6 years of age, he’d rejected a dinner and I had calmly and told him, that’s fine, we’d have been in for a LONG night of power struggle. Which we could have done and we could have “won”, but it sure as hell wouldn’t have had the effect of preventing conflict over eating.

85

This thread started off about a specific kid, and neither you nor any of the rest of us know what issues that specific kid may have.

But while we may not know if the kid has specific issues, but we can certainly play the odds here. As I said in my post +99% of childhood “picky eating” is about power and control, not about legitimate physical or mental issues with eating certain foods.

Your point is well taken - yes, there is a very slim but real possibility that, like you, the kid may have some legitimate mental or physical issues with food, but the chance of that is pretty slim. While you offer a very robust and eloquent defence of why you’re selective in your consumption, this isn’t about you and whatever issues or baggage you personally have.

You made your point, but you don’t need to project your own personal situation on this one and then get triggered when everybody else is not jumping in and agreeing. The test of us are playing the odds that this is is not like your situation.

I think if you take a moment and read my post, at no point do I ever say you force a kid to eat. I say you never force a kid to eat, but you don’t just pander to their whims motivated by their attempts to exert control over you.

Parenting is not about taking the path of least resistance. It’s always easiest to “just cut the crust off the bread” or whatever. In my experience once you start to pander it’s a slippery slope and the demands start to increase until eventually the monkeys are running the circus.

That said, if you want to cook separate meals for your kids, if they crawl into your bed every night, if they go apeshit in Walmart because they want candy, that’s fine. There are effective parenting techniques to deal with those situations, if you choose not to use those techniques, that’s your decision, but just please don’t complain about your kids.

86

How old is the child?

Same here (although not to extent of the child in the OP).

87

Or, my kid could reach the age of 25 and not actually realize that the reason that she has suddenly become extremely angry at everyone and everything is that she hasn’t had enough to eat! (True fact, I legit did not realize this is why I became so very angry sometimes until my then-boyfriend, now husband, was like, “…you realize you get this way when you’re hungry, right?? Here, have a granola bar!”)

Anyway, you’ve convinced me, not that I should make my second child eat what’s in front of him, but he’s probably old enough (5) that if I put a step-stool in the kitchen he can get his own rice and beans if he doesn’t like what I cook :slight_smile: So this discussion has been useful for me!

88

Cite, please?

Have you been reading the thread? There are quite a few people disagreeing with you.

Are you even reading my posts? I specifically advised against doing that.

89

Huh??? :thinking:

90

Apologies - I not referring you. I was referring to some parents in general. I don’t judge other parents, do whatever you want, raise your kids however you like. Just don’t bitch about their behaviours, especially when they’re toddlers.

This is IMOH - No cites provided. But if you’re keen, please produce one that says a significant portion of TODDLERS who refuse to eat “anything that’s not white”, or “bread with no crusts” or “only mac & cheese” or “never mac & cheese” or “everything with ketchup” or “nothing green” or “only French fries” or “only white bread PB&J” or every other example parents have given here etc etc etc. have the same issues you have.

As I said, and will say again, you point is well taken, I acknowledge we should make sure the kids do not have underlying issues but most toddlers do not. This thread is NOT about you, it’s about toddlers.

91

Take off the pressure off yourself & off the kid. Offer a variety of dishes to please everyone’s palate. Make small talk not about food, praise gently good manners, then shut up about eating not eating tasting not tasting. All of it. Shut up about it, instead start a conversation with spouse ask each other about their day etc etc. kids will chime in between bites.

Ask kids to excuse themselves if turning belligerent.works for grownups too.

92

OK. But I’m free to assume that your 99+ figure is based on nothing whatsoever.

Insisting that a child have something forced into their body that they don’t want there most certainly is a control issue; but not, I think, in the way that you mean it.

Yes, sometimes parents have to be in control. And sometimes parents really do have to insist that a child have something put inside their body that the child vehemently doesn’t want there. Parents have to say, yes, you’re going to get that vaccination; yes, you have to take this medication that the doctor says is essential for your health; yes, you’re going to have the dentist poke around inside your mouth; yes, you have to go to the hospital and have invasive surgery, along with all this collateral stuff being stuck in your body and being unpleasantly handled by strangers, because otherwise you’re going to die of appendicitis, or lose your eyesight, or whatever.

I’m just disagreeing that ‘you must eat this specific food that I chose to put in front of you tonight’ is reasonably one of those issues.

Different kids have different issues; there’s no reason any specific kid should have had my specific problems in order to have a problem. I was perfectly happy with a chopped liver sandwich. There are plenty of people, some of them adults, who are nauseated by liver. My point is not that everybody is me, but the exact reverse: that people are different, and assuming that the child in the OP can’t possibly be genuinely nauseated by what’s being forced on him is a really bad idea.

93

As a child it would have never occurred to me to not eat what was put in front of me at home. Both of my children were pretty good about that too. Strangely enough, my older daughter became more and more picky once she moved out on her own. She rarely complained while living at home, and now she refuses to eat some of the dishes she used to ask for when she lived at home. She eats here most Sundays, and I always check with her on Saturday to find out if she is coming for dinner before deciding what to cook.

I could never get either of my daughters interested in cooking. The older daughter is really fond of a goulash style dish I make and I taught her how to make that when she moved out, but her go to dish at her place is boxed mac and cheese with hot dogs cut up in it.

94

Same way my parents did:

  1. You never serve anything except home-cooked meals served to the whole family family at the dinner table.

2 If anybody doesn’t like something on his plate, he sits there until he learns to like it.

95

What you teach a child when you force them, by whatever means, to eat what you have offered or go hungry, is simply that you are much more powerful than they are, that their choices don’t matter, that their body is yours to do anything you want with. Moreover, you are modeling that this is what being parented feels like, and other people who stand in the place of you, in future – teachers, coaches, bosses, mentors – if they want to impose anything on your future child that they don’t like or didn’t choose, will have an already-trodden path into abuse that you made.

There is a place for coercion in child-rearing. It is when a child’s life is at risk. That’s when you don’t reason with, you just act, to pull a kid out of oncoming traffic, you make them wear their seatbelt, and don’t let them play with matches or whatever. This is not one of those places.

96

and by giving in to their demands, you teach them they can always have their way. and they grow up into adults who throw temper tantrums in public.

(I’m surprised it took this long for someone to equate it to child abuse)

97

I completely disagree. That’s an antiquated way of thinking about child-rearing that does not even correspond to current knowledge of human psychology. There is a gigantic difference between pandering to and respecting.

My own experience is that the main reason people want to use force with children is because they were forced, as children, and the underlying rage and frustration boils up in unreflecting reaction to the same situation in reverse. “I want you to hurt like I do,” as the Randy Newman song goes.

But you know, “picky eating” is not the real subject here, child rearing theory and practice is. Or even, violence versus non-violence in relationships. And I have not just strong opinions about it, but absolutely inveterate, intractable opinions, backed with enough emotion to blow the top off the universe, had it a top. So I will let you guys discuss the right way to force-feed a child, and I’ll bow out.

98

Well, I mean, you pointed out it’s not particularly reasonable to have to cook two meals. I agree it’s not reasonable! But I feel that kid making his own meals is a reasonable compromise.

On a separate subject, I’m also surprised people haven’t brought up the ubiquity of junk food, etc., which I absolutely think is part of what’s going on with my second child. My first child never knew about the existence of junk food until she started going to school (at which point it became unavoidable). My second child was born around the time first child started going to school, so it’s been around his whole life. Also now that I am a lot busier the kids got more mac and cheese, hamburgers, etc. whereas when I just had the one kid, who wasn’t yet old enough for after-school extracurriculars, I usually had time to make more interesting and nutritious meals and snacks. I don’t think it’s all due to personality that first kid enjoys more kinds of food. (It is partially due to personality, as second child is pretty cautious in general and doesn’t like trying new things in general as much as his sister.)

I’m trying to fix that now but it’s definitely an uphill battle, and the kids will often elect not to have snacks at all if I say the snacks available are fruits and vegetables. Which isn’t the end of the world, but it does mean I often have to plan to push dinner earlier so the kids don’t start melting down (as noted above, when my kids (and I) get hungry it’s GAME OVER for emotional levelheadedness), which has its own problems.

99

As the OP is 16 years old, and the “child” in question is now in his 20s, hopefully the family has since figured something out.

My parents made a wide variety of foods and insisted we clean our plates. Now two of their kids enjoy broad and varied foods, they’re adventurous eaters. And I’m still very, very picky - which has been true since I was a toddler. I didn’t fight much as a child (I’m not a power struggle type of person v. my brother who is and did). But as an adult, I have a lot of foods that I just don’t eat. I’ll try pretty much anything, but I don’t see the reason to keep going when it tastes awful and a lot of things taste awful.

100

And then you end up like my dad and my aunt did, with weight problems as teenagers.