Reply to 5 year old only eats 3 things

Forum Index » Elementary School-Aged Kids

Reply to "5 year old only eats 3 things - help!"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous](1) Give her a multivitamin and make sure it has iron in it.

(2) Feed her the food she likes to eat, but incorporate one or two servings of vegetable and/or meat (or other protein like eggs) into every meal. Make sure every meal has a protein she will eat  in it (we relied a lot on rice and beans, yogurt, pancakes, cheese for this) and serve her the broadest possible variety of fruit you can get away with (she eats apples but what about berries, grapes, citrus, etc. -- the more variety of fruit the better this comes to mimicking decent vegetable intake). Really focus on each meal having several components and keeping serving sizes small, as this will encourage variety in an otherwise limited diet. She can ask for seconds but only after she's tried everything on her plate.

(3) Regarding trying the small servings of "unacceptable" foods on her plate -- be really understanding about this. Explain that you aren't trying to force feed her and she only has to taste it, so she gets the flavor and texture. She can tell you she hates it -- that's fine.

(4) If tasting is very hard to do, try incentivizing her with a small sweet treat after dinner. We liked to use a small piece of chocolate because it's very decadent but not loaded with sugar or all the crap that is in candy. We aren't weird about sugar but kids who eat like this get a lot more natural sugars that kids with broader palettes (because they eat more fruit and baked goods) so we are trying for balance.

(5) Try incorporating smoothies and muffins into her diet and sneak some veggies into them. Start small -- throw a couple leaves of spinach or kale with a fruit smoothie. Make cinnamon muffins but include some shredded carrot or zucchini. Don't just make zucchini muffins -- she'll sniff it out and won't eat them. Just sneak in a little. Then start increasing the amounts in the smoothies and muffins as she acclimates to the flavor and texture of them. My kid had/has a superpose for vegetable texture and flavor. So start very small. With time she'll acclimate and this will help her develop a taste for these things, and eventually she'll even be able to eat like raw carrots or salad. But it could be years. Lots of kids won't eat salad until their taste buds develop a bit more to embrace flavors other than "sweet". And the texture thing can take a long time to acclimate to as well. This is a long game.

(6) Let her know that the main reason you are doing this is not because you enjoy torturing her, but because having a really limited diet will make it hard for her in the future to do things like sleepovers, drop off birthday parties, travel, and other things where she won't always be able to ensure that her limited list of foods is available. Explain that learning to eat foods that aren't your favorite, or even that taste "gross" to you, at least in small amounts, will ensure she doesn't go hungry. It will also make her easier to be friends with. Give her examples like "what if when you are older, all your friends want to go out for pizza, but you don't eat pizza and WON'T eat pizza -- they might be less likely to invite you." It sounds mean but honestly, its' practical, and these conversations were part of what helped incentivize my kid to be a little more adventurous with food.

(7) Finally, keep it in perspective. Very picky eaters can be really stressful, but a lot of that stress comes from the expectation that a "good" parent would be able to convince the picky eater to not be picky. Since you have other kids, you know: this is not the case. Some kids are just more sensitive to tastes and textures, have a much more sensitive "disgust" trigger, and have more fears around unknown and unfamiliar foods. I was this way as a kid (and I eat very normally now), and my kid was/is this way. But just stay the course. It gets better with time. Don't be afraid to feed her the food she actually enjoys -- rice, pasta, waffles, apples, cheese are all totally fine foods and if she's eating mostly that and you are just introducing other foods on the margins, she's okay. Adding in smoothies, incorporating some veggies to her baked goods, doing the multivitamin, and just continuing to encourage trying new things will help balance it out.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics