It’s not the worst advice I’ve ever gotten, but the most recent, because having a child often means just an incredible amount of unsolicited BS coming your way. I had a family member tell me that the solution to my son’s pediatric feeding disorder was just to refuse to feed him his preferred food, and he’ll eat eventually.
It’s just the fucking balls on people who think they understand your own kid better than you and other professionals do. Gosh, I wish I had considered starving my child before spending a year and thousands of dollars with him in occupational therapy (getting nowhere) and watching him starve himself at daycare every day for the past six months. Clearly we never considered feeding him things we’d prefer him to eat instead of things he wants to eat! Pretty much every autism expert I’ve talked to says feeding is not the hill to die on. There are serious sensory issues there. I don’t even think my kid processes hunger the same way as most kids. He subsists on very little with no complaints.
And the next person who tells me “all kids are picky eaters” is gonna get it.
Yeah, just ignore them. It’s not worth your emotional energy. (Is there some kind of pat phrase you can use like, “Kids with autism will starve rather than eat something they can’t tolerate”?)
I don’t have kids so would never presume to think that I knew better than the folks who lived with the kid, but sometimes people get stuck without realizing it.
A friend has a daughter who used to eat seven things and that was it. Instead of suggesting that he just starve her, I suggested other foods that were very close in looks and texture and mouth feel. i.e. she loved sour cream, but hated yogurt. Unsweetened Greek yogurt is so close to sour cream that she accepted it and suddenly had eight foods she would eat consistently. (She has since learned that flavored Greek yogurt is pretty good, but it still has to be white.)
I’m just saying that to say that not all advice from childfree folks comes from expecting children to mindlessly submit to adults, some of us want to be helpful in a kinder fashion.
To be fair, “Hey, Greek yogurt is more like sour cream than other yogurts are” is a helpful suggestion on a completely different level than, “He’ll eat when he’s hungry enough.”
What you’re describing is in fact the evidence based methodology for helping kids with pediatric feeding disorder. It works for a lot of kids. In fact Wee Weasel had some improvement right around the beginning of therapy using that method, but then he stalled out. And now appears to be regressing.
I know many people are well intentioned, it’s just that guy is so punchable in general. He has a lot of unsolicited advice and since he has three children he believes he’s seen it all. I’m willing to bet he doesn’t lock up his guns. You know the type.
I’ll throat punch him for ya, he sounds like he really needs it.
My friend’s daughter is now going through some sort of therapy, friend doesn’t really talk about it much so I don’t know how successful it is.
I have cats. Cats are born with eating disorders and will in fact starve to death in a room full of things they don’t recognize as food, even if people are there telling them that fish is food and mice are food and everything else but the one sort of kibble they were raised on is food. The cat will die first.
I don’t like my cats to have such a limited diet (food shortages can happen), so I work with them to expand their idea of acceptable food and one of the biggies that works for me is food that is super close to a safe food. If they accept it, great. If they don’t, I feed it to the goddam birds and try again with something else, I don’t starve my cats in the hopes of changing what they are.
I’m sorry you have to deal with all of the not well meaning advice. I have a serious dislike of bullies and it sounds like he’s one.
Even at age 16 or so I surmised that my father was full of shit when he constantly used cheesy rhetoric as he tried to dissuade me from my chosen ( and present ) career in aviation. “Aim high! You need to aim high” was a constant refrain, as he constantly conspired to push me toward the path of a money grubbing, “big business” big shot. Be a captain of industry…or be nothing.
I saw it as "Yeah, I’ll do something I have zero interest in, am hostile to even, just to give you “my son is a…" bragging rights”.
Look, I don’t have kids so I’m not advising you, but that just strikes me as a stupid. Human beings ARE capable of starving themselves to death, so, yeah, stupid suggestion even if it usually wouldn’t get to that point. For a certain number of people every year it actually does.
As a student, my narcissistic, control freak mother once threw this at me during one of her many berating sessions: “When I’m not around anymore, you’ll be all alone!”
And then I Ieft home, moved abroad, and fairly quickly formed a big circle of friends. Now I have trouble juggling my social life, while she is the one who’s all alone. No friends, she has only my father, her flying monkey who caters to her whims and puts up with her abusive behavior, and a few relatives in the old country with whom she periodically speaks on the phone.
In my life I have met one other person who has manifested very blatant narcissism, a former neighbor who at one time I kept company with and tried to help with some personal problems. Like my mother, she was OCD’d and assumed that she was always right. Among her various antisocial behaviors was that she would take it upon herself to correct my use of vocabulary. I would disagree with her “corrections”, which were based on anal insistence on only one definition of a word, which can have more than one meaning or whose meaning could have expanded over time. When I disagreed with her, she said, “You don’t like being corrected, do you?” Uh, no. I just honestly disagree with your correction. BITCH! Over time (I associated with this person for six months), her behaviors started getting more and more obnoxious. She once said to me: “USE A DICTIONARY!” when she didn’t like a word I used to describe one of her behaviors. Finally, I decided to drop this person from my life and sent her an e-mail explaining that I could no longer help her because of her behaviors. This provoked a vitriolic response in which she spewed criticism over me. One thing she said was that “If you can’t be corrected for word abuse, you can never be an editor” (I had told her I was thinking of getting a job in publishing"). Fast forward to today. I have done freelance work as a copy editor and have published a book.
A man goes to New York to attend a concert, but gets lost. He sees another fellow who’s carrying a violin case. “Sir, can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?” The musician smiles and says, “Practice, practice, practice.”
Yes, I think point of view is everything when you are talking to someone who insists they are right about everything. As a technical writer who has been instructed to follow technical English (where each word really does have only one meaning) I can understand how someone being immersed in it for 30-40 years could eventually convince themselves that this is big truth and forget that English is very much a contextual language. And, given that tech writing attracts control freaks because the writing must be precise (sometimes), I can see how my interviewer went a bit nuts and I wonder if this person is similar in background.
I’ve been informed by coworkers that a child’s food issues can be solved with a sound whoopin’. This seems to come up every time I have to explain why I don’t want melted cheese on my food. (I nearly choked on a very cheesy pizza as a child; ever since then, melted cheese causes severe gagging. But apparently this could have been beaten out of me.)
Not advice, exactly, but I have a friend who is a nurse. I didn’t know her when she was applying to and attending nursing school, but she’s told me that when she was, more than one person asked, “Why not medical school?” on the grounds of:
“But you’re so smart!” And? It takes just as much brains and drive and so forth to be an RN as to be an MD.
“Didn’t think you could hack med school, eh?” If you think nursing is a Mickey Mouse discipline, you couldn’t be more wrong.
To be fair, some of the questioners chose their careers at a time when nursing was the default choice for a young woman who wanted to work in the medical field, and the question would have been “Why medical school?” But this is not necessarily an improvement in attitude. It’s good to see young women being encouraged to pursue medical school…but I’d be more heartened by an increase in respect for nursing, which is still seen as a Traditionally Female Role. And is it just my perception, or has being a doctor become less of a prestige profession in the last couple of generations, at approximately the same rate that the percentage of female MDs has increased?
This seems to come up every time I have to explain why I don’t want melted cheese on my food. (I nearly choked on a very cheesy pizza as a child; ever since then, melted cheese causes severe gagging. But apparently this could have been beaten out of me.)