(no subject)

[lollardfish]

My son's eating hygiene has collapsed. He now only willingly eats edamame, green beans, plain noodles, yoghurt, fruit, cottage cheese. He used to eat many more things. Like, over the last weekend. It's very frustrating.

Edit - Sweet potatoes back on the menu. Fish sticks and chicken nuggets, spaghetti-os (indistinguishable from the food he ate from jars) still off, fruit-and-nut bread still on.

Comments

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

At least there's fruit, vegetables, and protein . . .

Count Your Blessings

[davidschroth.livejournal.com]

He could adopt the eating characteristics of pegkerr's daughters...

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i have no children and you can laugh at me in three years when i am doing the same thing but: what i have heard and what i am going to try is that as long as they're getting enough calories and a wide enough selection of nutrients (not going to die of scurvy or anything), let them eat what they want to eat, and eventually they'll come back to eating a wider variety of things.

i also have a horror of giving godot food issues, so that's why i'm excited about this theory.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

There are two amazingly counter-intuitive facts of child rearing that should be printed in giant red letters on the first page of every book on baby and child care. This is one of them.

Babies start out eating just one kind of food and not very much of that. As they get bigger they eat more and more, at the same time increasing the variety of what they eat. A pattern has been established, and it seems perfectly natural. You think you know how this works.

Then at about 18 months the appetite stops increasing and that seems a little weird. Then they start eating LESS. Then they start getting picky about what they eat, and dropping foods from their diet. As the months roll by, both trends pick up speed until, by the age of 4, your child won't eat anything except bananas and Cheerios. This just feels SO WRONG. It's even stranger if you happen to have a baby in the house at the same time, and you realize that your great big 4-year-old is eating approximately half as much as your 9-month-old.

The growth spurt has slowed down and you will be absolutely astounded how little he will be eating over the next couple of years, and how your baby who used to live for putting strange things into his mouth would now rather die than swallow a vegetable. They all do this. It's okay.

My two cents....

[mizzlaurajean.livejournal.com]

Feed him one thing with each meal that he will typically eat and then try feeding him whatever you want or better yet what you are having. And start eating with him. He needs to see how you do it. What manners etc are expected. If it's not really your dinner make it a snack for you. This is what I do. I just have a very little bit of each thing I am serving kids when trying to work on such issues, and take very small bites. Get everything together first before starting him on anything so he doesn't have the chance to toss it all. At least this was my prevention method.

Use positive re-directive language whenever possible. You want to minimize his opportunity's for ditching his undesired foods. And you want to give as little attention as possible to any behaviors you do not wish to see repeated. Encourage him to try a bit but then if he is still uninterested let it go. If he tosses it say something like "If you don't want that lets just set it over here instead of throwing it." Ask him to hand it to you and then praise and thank him when he does. Try to remember you want meal time to be fun, relaxing and nurturing not just the food part of it but the entire mealtime.

If he rejects everything then maybe he just isn't really very hungry. Assuming his thyroxine levels are adequate which presumably if they weren't the dr. would up it so you don't need to worry about how much he's eating.

His tastes will change and I do believe he will be more inclined towards foods that have something in them his body needs. Taste buds change around 2yrs and when their hormones change which starts when they are little.

I know I kept wanting to feed him something with more fat or protein.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

At least Nico has a somewhat varied acceptable diet -- I had a nephew who for seeming YEARS subsisted entirely on mac-and-cheese. :-)