Reply to When does picky eating become abnormal or a eating disorder? 13yo

Forum Index » Tweens and Teens

Reply to "When does picky eating become abnormal or a eating disorder? 13yo"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]And, her follow up post is here.

https://www.kartiniclinic.com/blog/post/selective-eating-revisited/

You will see more parent descriptions of children's eating that will sound a lot like your step son.

There aren't a lot of treatments that have evidence behind them (i.s. studies have been carried out with controlled variables, etc., and published in medical journals) to treat this disorder.   There are people trying to treat it using trial and error -- Duke University seems to have a good program in my experience.   But if your step son is actually gaining weight and is healthy and has energy, I don't think you'd want to invest that kind of time and money.   The people who do that usually have kids who don't eat anything AND are failing to thrive.

There's a good book out there but more geared to younger children:

http://www.amazon.com/Helping-Child-Extreme-Picky-Eating/dp/162625110X[/quote]

I love these blog posts, thanks for linking to them.

I have a selective eater who is almost 13. He's been this way since we introduced solids, basically. No matter how many times we presented a food, it was usually rejected. As the blogger notes, he would happily starve himself rather than eat something that wasn't in his repertoire. Every once in a great while, he will consent to try the smallest of nibbles, and even more rarely, that small nibble leads to a new food being added to his list. Yet he is of normal height and weight and appears to be glowing with health.

One way he differs from the kids described in the blog post is that his repertoire isn't composed mostly of junky foods. He will eat most meats, chicken, and salmon, but never sauced or mixed with other foods, and often not if it was cooked by someone other than me or DH, and not if it somehow looks or smells unfamiliar. He eats clementines (but not oranges), applesauce (but not apples), pears, pineapple, grapes, strawberries, bananas under duress (but likes them in smoothies). He eats green peas fresh or frozen, green beans and sugar snap peas from our garden only (not frozen, not canned), and steamed broccoli and cauliflower (fresh not frozen). He drinks soy milk, won't touch cow's milk. Loves a yogurt smoothie, but won't eat yogurt. Will eat a cheese quesadilla with a minimal amount of cheddar cheese, but no other cheese passes his lips. He will eat black beans and pinto beans. He eats plain white bread, wheat bread if it is toasted. No butter on anything, ever. He loves all manner of desserts and munchies, especially (go figure) hot salsa (?) and tortilla chips. Will not eat any type of pasta or rice. He may be the only child in America who has never had mac & cheese in any form.

So all in all, it's a pretty good diet. But in order to feed him, I generally have to make sure our meals are a plain form of protein and plain broccoli, cauliflower, or peas (or that they can be deconstructed into this form) (and unless it's summer and I have garden beans), and a starch on the side (for the rest of us; he gets a slice of bread). It drives my older child, who is something of a foodie, stark raving mad, LOL. BUt we usually do okay at home and we have some restaurants we know are "safe." The hardest thing is eating at other people's houses. He gags and vomits if forced to eat something he doesn't want, but feels bad/guilty if he doesn't eat what the host prepares.

All this is to say: OP, your SS is fine. Really. Let it go.[/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