Did you?
Did you? (As a disinterested observer, that’s pretty funny.)
Did you?
Really it isn’t about not liking certain things…it’s about not liking 90% of the stuff out there. I’ve got a coworker who’d like noting better than to exist, permanently, on Chick-fil-a. That’s it.
FWIW, the boy in question today is a real winner, it’s not limited to food…but it’s not just him…of the 5 or 6 boys my kids hang out with, half of 'em are like this.
That’s how my little brother is with my parents; they aren’t quite as adventurous as he. He corrected their pronunciation of arugula last week 
I certainly remember battles of wills over food with my parents when I was a child in the 1960s. I wasn’t allowed to get up from the table until I had finished whatever they had put in front of me; and if I didn’t like or want it, then we sat until I ate it. Bedtime could come and go; I’d still be sitting there with a plate of something in front of me until I cleaned my plate.
If I held out (which I usually did), I’d “win” by 11:00 p.m. The need for me to get to bed for school the next day meant I’d be sent to bed with a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk. But it was five hours out of my life I wasn’t going to get back.
At least I was better off than my cousins, who got to leave the table at their bedtime, but would be forced to eat last night’s dinner (cold and congealing) for breakfast the next day. They went hungry until they finally ate the last meal they refused to eat, no matter how long ago it was served.
At least in the 1960s, this attitude towards picky children was considered pretty normal by people in our neighbourhood.
Agreed. Stopping at McDonald’s later on is not in and of itself totally rude. Announcing to the host, “My kid doesn’t like your food, so we’re leaving to go to McDonald’s” is what’s rude.
And people wonder why there is an obesity epidemic in this country.
In fairness, I had no alternatives–there was no chance at McDonalds, or pizza, or anything except what was on my plate. If I held out long enough, there would only be a glass of milk and a peanut butter sandwich–no cookies or any sweets. The idea of giving picky children McDonalds or similar if they refuse their home-cooked meal somehow doesn’t seem right to me. As somebody said upthread, nobody ever died from skipping a meal.
Oh, Please, there is a so-called “obesity epidemic”, because of people like you and the political slant that comes with it, prohibitionists and sadists just like the above quoted … Modern atitudes about food have not changed, they have become even more anal, unfounded in science, and disciplinarian. Today’s atitudes and by extension, this board’s atitude about food are even more screwed up than 50 years ago.
I’ve got a crate of nano-violins on a priority shipment for you. Life must be rough.
Kids like bland food - nothing wrong with that, I used to blend up the stuff I thought they should eat into a soup - my kid didn’t like onions but she was eating them almost every day. What I cannot tolerate is the cries of “yucky, ew, disgusting” etc - it is rude to the cook and the other diners. If your parents won’t teach you basic manners that’s a much bigger issue for me.
My kids don’t get alternatives to dinner, either, but I don’t force them to sit there looking at food they hate until it is 11:00 pm and the food is cold and congealed. If they don’t want to eat it, fine, they can get up and go play. But there won’t be anything else for them to eat. My kids aren’t particularly picky, though, so this typically doesn’t come up too much. (And before someone comes and says, “Ah-ha! But your kids aren’t picky because you force them to eat whatever you have for dinner,” I have to point out that mealtime has never been a battle for us. I am just lucky. I don’t have delusions that it’s my awesome parenting that has given me kids that will try various things without a big fight.)
I just really despise the idea of forcing a child to sit there at the table until the food is all gone, no matter what. What if they aren’t hungry? What if they just don’t like it? I am a relatively adventurous eater and always have been, but I will never forget the time that my mom bought these weird hot dogs that had cheese filling in them and served them for dinner. I thought they were disgusting and ate a bite of mine and didn’t want anymore. I had to sit there staring at those godawful things for the next two hours because my mom wanted to make some kind of point about “cleaning my plate.” Guess what? I still didn’t eat them and I wouldn’t eat them if someone served them to me today, either. Because they were disgusting.
I don’t really understand why some people seem to feel that not liking a wide variety of foods is some kind of moral failing. I mean, look up-thread and there is someone who actually says that if someone doesn’t like the food he cooks, then that person is no longer welcome in his house. No longer welcome in his house! Because they don’t particularly care for the type of food that he prepared. That is messed up.
If I cook a dinner and have people over and one of the guests doesn’t eat much, you know what I think about that person? I think they’re going to be a little hungry until they go home and have something else to eat. And that’s all that I think.
My parents had the “three bites rule”: we had to eat three bites of whatever it was and then we could go fix ourselves something else (sandwich or Bagel Bites), but then we’d get the stink eye all night afterward, couldn’t have dessert, and it generally wasn’t worth it. Same for whining about the food. We were never forced to clean our plates, and there were a few foods that we were allowed to just refuse outright. For example, they gave up trying to get me to eat spaghetti by the time I was 5 or 6. On those nights, they just gave me pizza or frozen burritos instead.
As an adult, I’m both picky and not picky: left to my own devices, the list of foods I routinely eat is woefully short, but put me around other people and I’m much more “normal” and will try pretty much anything.
Perhaps there’s another reason. Kids tend to like the foods they got in the womb. If mom ate fish when she was pregnant, kid will eat fish. Makes sense, no?
Well that and a bunch of other factors.
That’s really interesting! I always suspected there might be some connection. I drank OJ and water as if they were going out of style when I was pregnant with my son, and he loves oranges and is also a big water drinker.
I don’t actually believe this. I think people keep eating the food they normally eat while pregnant, and then they keep on eating it afterward, because that’s what they eat, so that becomes what the kid eats, too. If it’s good healthy food, the kid likes that and gets used to it; if it’s junk, the kid likes that. Well, everybody likes junk.
^ That should easily be testable. If TV is accurate, pregnant women often have cravings for weird foods that they wouldn’t eat otherwise. So if the kid likes that food they wouldn’t normally eat, then it should be easy to figure out.
But if it is not, then you still could alter your diet while pregnant for a little test, although I’m sure it would be harder to get a significant number of people to do that.
Yeah, my wife craved caesar salads when pregnant with the first two (including Mr. Picky), then craved McDonald’s for the third. Wanna guess which one likes caesar salad? 
Absolutely agreed. Which is why I taught my kids, at a young age, to try something, and then politely say “Thank you, but I don’t really care for that”. Period. Full stop. To go on about why they don’t like it is also rude, especially if there are other diners around.
FWIW, I would never reward my kid by taking them to McD’s after they turned up their nose at something that was being served to them. As they were growing up, we had one dinner rule: you eat what I’ve prepared, or you eat peanut butter. Of course there were the standard arguments over the years: “But why can’t I have ham and cheese? It’s no harder to fix than peanut butter!” No, it’s not about what’s ‘hard’, it’s about the idea that your choices are: eat what I’ve prepared, or eat peanut butter. It’s about this is not going to turn into a battle of what we own that you’d rather eat. It’s about this is not a restaurant and I am not a short-order cook.
Of course, as they got older, they were always free to prepare something for themselves, as long as it wasn’t something I had earmarked for a dinner or something.
No, there’s an obesity epidemic because of the attitude that kids can’t be expected to like everything, or even try it, so the kids are allowed to dig in until they get McDonald’s, and that vegetables and other healthy foods have to be sneaked into high-calorie dishes like zucchini bread and sugar-and-salt-laden spaghetti sauce.
It’s also caused by the notion that children must be forced to eat what they don’t like, with no room for compromise. (Note that I said “compromise”.) For example, the sprog does not like salad. It’s not worth the argument, so he gets a plate of tomatoes, celery and cucumber slices, all of which he likes sans dip, and which is about the same as eating salad. He gets his vegetables, I get peace and quiet, and we both win. Similarly, he does not drink milk and is not crazy about cheese, but I make sure he gets yogurt, broccoli and other calcium-rich food. The alternative is a kid who learns to fight and argue, and that’s not acceptable.
Finally, the children’s processed food market is just horrible. “Fruit snacks” may have fruit flavors and vitamin C, but that’s about all they have. They’re loaded with sugar, as are fruit drinks, cereal, and other “healthy” foods that are aimed squarely at the juvenile palate. To go along with that, there are a lot of parents who think that their kids won’t like sugar-free and fat-free alternatives. Not to sound “anal” or “disciplinarian”, but the sprog gets sugar-free/fat-free yogurt in his lunch more than he gets the regular stuff, and he loves it.
My son is a very picky eater. It extends to candies and cakes as well as regular food. As some have said here, it seems to be a texture thing. I think he has a very sensitive mouth. I learned not to push food on him the second time he gagged and threw up all over the table… We learned not to do the “You will not eat anything till you eat this” thing when a relative tried it and he went 26 hours without food passing his lips. He is at the point where new food on the table worries him. He will back away from it.
Right now, I serve what we want to eat with a plate for him with broccoli, rice, carrot, egg or meat on it. No sauces, nothing touching or mixed (a throw back to people trying to hide foods by mincing or blending stuff). I make no attempt at all to serve him anything new. Occasionally he says he wants to try a bite of something with the promise that he can spit it out if he doesn’t like it. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, it gets spat out. It is heartbreaking. He’s very thin and doesn’t have good colour in his cheeks. This summer he has learned to like cucumber and strawberries. He adds about one new food every six months or so.
HOWEVER, he is never, ever allowed to make unpleasant rude comments, nor fuss. At home, if he does he is removed from the table and deposited in his room till the end of the meal, and there are no more chances at food till the next time. He has learned to sit and join in with the conversation and enjoy the company if not the food. We did have a couple of deeply embarrassing play dates/parties that involved food where he took huge helpings of the few foods he did like, depriving the other kids of their share. We solved that with me talking to him about it and a couple of friends having him over to their houses and warning him that it was not allowed there either. Now he takes a reasonable helping of what he will eat, eats it, and refrains from commenting about the rest. He’s not perfect but this is a matter of good manners and he needs to learn it.
I’m sure there are parents who are doing the wrong things to curtail pickiness, however it does remind me of my kids issue - sleeping, or not. She would be going full guns until around 11pm, no nap, then wake around 7 the next day. I tried all kinds of things, the fact is, that’s just her. I had a miserable time when my mother visited and tried to correct the issue trying all the things I’d also tried. She said I wasn’t getting any time for myself. Tell me about it! I used to get up early just to have that time.
Eventually my kid went to stay with my mother for a few weeks when she then humbly commented that she was getting up early to have some time for herself! It’s easy to criticize, but eventually you’ll be glad the kid is eating **something. ** it must be quite a worry **Hokkaido Brit **.
As This article in the Wall Street Journal points out, “picky eating” is a lot more complex an issue that cannot be reduced to improper parenting, decadent societies, and the general simplistic pronouncements so frequently offered up.
We also discussed this last month: http://boardstest.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=569941