Reply to Picky eating child

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "Picky eating child "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Adding to my post above, for my medical kid, I'd do pretty much the same thing, except that I would have calculated what he needed to eat, and anything that didn't get eaten, I would have blended up and fed him through his feeding tube.

I say that, in part, because I get the fear that your kid won't eat enough and will be hungry.  Not, "it's time for dinner" hungry but malnourished.  I want to say that first of all, that's pretty rare.  If you aren't seeing signs of trouble, like failure to grow, then I would try really hard to let go of the idea that the kid being hungry is either a bad thing, or your problem to solve.  Your job is to provide healthy food within a structure, and their job is to problem solve their own hunger within that structure.  It's really OK for a kid to go a few hours without food because they are pushing against the structure.  Over time, the more consistent you are with the structure, the more they'll learn to anticipate their own hunger and eat accordingly, and the less often they'll be significantly hungry.  [/quote]

I am the PP and I just want to thank you for this and your last post -- really helpful. Admittedly we struggle with consistency at times especially on sort of the auxiliary issues of snacks and dessert (so much effort goes into being con

sistent and adopting the right attitude with regards to meals). But this is a good guide -- I really appreciate you taking the time to write it out.[/quote]

Thank you!  I'm really glad it was helpful.

I came back because after I wrote my posts I saw what someone else had posted about dessert and other kids, and I realized I hadn't addressed it.

I don't give or withhold food as a punishment or reward ever.  In my house, kids would get those cookies one of three ways.

One is that they would get one, or maybe two, as a dessert with a meal. We don't have dessert every meal, but we have it pretty often.   If that was what we were doing, then every member of the household would get offered one or two cookies, and it would have nothing to do with whether or not they ate anything at dinner.  Satter suggest simply putting the servings of dessert at their place at the beginning of the meal, for them to eat at any time during the meal.  Or I'd put one or two in their lunch box.

The second is that sometimes we have cookies for snack, usually with milk or something else, and in that case they can have as much as they like.  I don't usually do that for an evening/bedtime snack, more likely an afterschool snack or a mid afternoon snack on the weekend, but if the cookies arrived today and they seemed like they might go stale, then I might offer them in the evening, but usually our evening snacks when they were younger were bland easy things like a bowl of cereal with milk, or a banana and a glass of milk.  Again, it wouldn't be related to whether they had eaten dinner.  I think of balancing nutrition as something that happens over the course of a week, not a few hours.

The third would have been if the neighbor brought them over and we decided to try one then and there, maybe inviting the neighbor to sit with us.  Whatever we did, we'd all do it, unless it was some kind of cookie one of us didn't like.  [/quote]

PP again and this is again very helpful. Not least because I see a lot of recommendations to just eliminate dessert/treats from the household in order to address picky eating and I hate these recommendations because I have a very healthy and nutritious diet and also love a small treat after dinner or as an afternoon snack. Also our picky eater loooooves sweets and I hate the idea of essentially eliminating one of the few foods she eats with genuine pleasure. We also use baking with her as a way to share and talk about food in a fun, enjoyable way (since she won't eat most other foods we enjoy). We try to be balanced about it but you've given me some things to think about so I can deal with my own guilt/shame around my kid eating sweets when she hasn't eaten much else with nutritional value at a meal. Really helpful.

I know you recommended Satter before and we already use the Satter method but do you have any other resources you'd recommend. I also follow kidseatincolor and sometimes it's helpful but I feel like she's focused on the average kid with picky tendencies rather than extreme picky eating/ARFID (even though I'm pretty sure at least one of her kids is an extreme picky eater -- I think she tempers her advice to reach a broader audience and have found that the ideas that work for moderate/normal pickiness in kids are generally just not very useful for extreme pickiness). Any other recommendations for sever pickiness or ARFID?[/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