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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t really understand this issue which is so common among parents. When I was a kid we ate what was put in front of us or we didn’t eat. ‘You get what you get and you don’t get upset.’ Of course we were neuro typical so I certainly understand in some cases kids can’t cope, but neurotypical kids will not starve themselves, they will eat eventually. When I see mothers (it’s almost always mothers) bending over backward and preparing multiple meals to accommodate all preferences I am just mind blown. I don’t know any kids I grew up with who had that kind of . . . coddling. Is it part of what they teach in the parenting classes and books of recent decades? If not, how does this even start? Are young moms really so afraid their child will fail to thrive absent constant efforts to provide them with the food they want? What I’ve seen in practical terms is a lot of American kids growing up eating chicken nuggets most nights or Mac and cheese or whatever their favorite and not actually getting a good balanced diet nor an exposure to various foods that will encourage an inquisitive palate in later life. It’s sad.[/quote]

You are confused. First of all, you are not in people's homes so you don't actually know what people are serving.

Second, the people on this thread are not giving their kids chicken nuggets and Mac and cheese every night. Then opposite, they are trying to serve their kids balanced, nutritious meals, and their kids are complaining incessantly about how they don't like and they don't like that and they want this instead. It's exhausting. People are complaining about the exhausting of continuing to serve healthy balanced meals to children who have no concept of how hard that is to get on the table while also taking some preferences into account. The people serving chicken nuggets and Mac and cheese nightly are not on this thread and do not consider their kids picky because their kids eat what is served, it's just that what is served isn't that nutritious. My own child would reject chicken nuggets and Mac and cheese! She would also reject all vegetable.

Third, the people most likely to complain about this are the people whose kids likely have some kind of issue with food. Whether its ARFID or sensory issues or ADHD or OCD or whatever. Maybe severe, maybe not. The people whose kids don't have these issues and just eat what is served don't complain. It's the people who are serving healthy food and having it constantly nit-picked or rejected who wind up on these threads because that's so hard! It might be a minority of parents but their struggle is real.

So your criticism is entirely off base. The people supposedly making no effort to serve their kids healthy food are not on a thread complaining about how hard it is to serve healthy food. The ones on the thread obviously are running into resistance from kids who, for whatever reason, are difficult to feed -- people with the kind of kids who will just eat what is served becasue they are hungry don't need to complain about this.

If it seems like people complain about this more now than they used to, that might be because you are on message board for parents in a thread about challenges with picky eaters. Self-selection bias.

No one needs your "back in my day" scolding. Unhelpful and pointless. Also, I've been told that my husband, born in the 1970s and parented by two peopel who definitely never cooked him special meals or resorted to nightly Mac and cheese, was an unbelievably picky eater who would barely touch his dinner night after night, for years. They are pretty sure he lived off of bread and butter for half of elementary school because he was barely touching proteins or vegetables. And yet he's a fully functional adult with a normal palette now. So maybe you are misremembering.[/quote]

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