Stepdaughter eating too much fruit

OP, your feeling so resentful over a little girl eating all the fruit is not a good sign for the success of your marriage.

Really who gives a shit if someone eats the strawberries? If it wasn't this, I suspect you'd be fretting and complaining about something else?

This is the most easily solved problem in the world. Buy a fridge lockable box from Amazon and lock all the expensive berry fruit in it. And buy a load of supermarket wonky apples, pears and satsumas for general consumption. I suspect the fruit addiction will stop when the fruit on offer is less succulent. This is not a SC problem you know. I hide food all the time from my teenagers otherwise they'll go through the fridge like a plague of locusts.

But you described yourself as a "high earner" anyway. High earners don't fret about the cost of fruit. So what is the real problem here?

It's obvious that now you've got your own baby, you resent having to pay for and look after someone else's particularly as the Dad is not properly contributing and you probably didn't bank on her being around much when you first got together. That's fair enough if that's how you feel but the problem will only get worse as your SD gets older.

Either you have to square this in your own mind and stop resenting your poor SD or call it quits now. At the very least, your DH needs to get a full time job. Unless of course he's got genuine caring responsibility for both DCs whilst you work which is also fair enough. But IME being a house husband does not work for the majority of families as the men tend to do fuck all other than what they term as "babysitting"and everything will be left to you when you get in from work.

I hope you find a solution that you are happy with. And don't resent or complain about a little girl over fruit. It's just fruit.

This poor girl doesn’t seem to have been parented very much. And the words you use make it sound like you resent her. Poor thing.

First thing to do is to take her to the GP and the dentist.

i would then start working hard on her diet, introducing her to lots of healthy foods, including full fat yoghurt when she comes home from school.

Funny how you ignored all the posts about emotional support and just kept reinforcing the idea you don’t like your SD.

Far too much. Think of the amount of sugar! I wasnt allowed to help myself to food when I was 7! Change the rules so she has to ask you for food and you control her portion sizes.

I know on MN we're supposed to be onboard with step parents not liking their step children very much ("but it's NOT her child"/"the kid's got her own mum" etc etc) But from the point of view of someone who was the step child who wasn't liked very much, these posts break my heart every time.

Of course it's totally reasonable to gradually adjust her diet if it's making her unwell. You don't even need to mention it out loud. But this poor kid has been through a massive upheaval, and letting her have her favourite foods is a very small way to make her feel welcome.

Oof a lot of judgment here. You may have produced accidental klickbait OP by writing 'stepchild eats too much of a good thing'. Easy to misinterpret...

I think for cost control purposes the only thing you can do with immediate success is to stop buying the more expensive fruit/buy less of it.

I join the praise for the tupperware snackbox suggestion up thread. And at 7 (if memory serves) I think it's fine to explain in simple terms that you're buying less berries, say, because you have less money ATM.

I've met some nasty stepmums - my mum never quite got over hers - but you don't sound like one.

Read this post well.

Your language about this poor girl, who's been through massive, massive changes, is unpleasant - bingeing, gorging, greedy. That way of thinking about her needs to stop, right now.

You're not unreasonable to say to her that you all (!) only have a limited amount of fruit each week and need to share (though I'm another who doesn't understand why you're buying so much out-of-season stuff), although I think children - yes, even stepchildren (!) - generally come first for this sort of thing. But this is about more. I can't help reading a sense of you wanting to 'put her in her place' behind all this. For whatever reason, this child's mother can't or won't care for her currently. She needs unconditional love and care, including from you.

Why was it OK for your dh to work so little (and maybe he can't find a FT job in his field, but there are shortages across lots of sectors) before she arrived, but now you are literally resenting the food that goes into her mouth?

I would make sure dh knows there are going to be huge dental bills if she continues to eat like that. If your dh won’t support you then I would just stop buying so much. If she eats it all she goes hungry for the rest of the week. Also just buy the cheapest stuff you can get.

It sounds like your problem is that your DH doesn’t earn as much as you would like him to, not that your SD eats too much fruit.

She's only 7. She should be given set meals and snacks, not be allowed to constantly graze.

do you say that to mums who work part time and rely on their husbands as main earners?

your dh needs to claim CM of mum, o/p.

Some of these replies ‘take her to the gp’ Jeez no wonder it’s impossible to get an appointment 😂😂 Counting the calories 🤔 and only on mumsnet do people scream SUGAR in relation to fruit.

Both of my kids would have done exactly this at 7 if I let them. They still have full sets of teeth and grew out of it. Dd2 would also eat raw veg too (carrots, peas, broccoli stalks, cauliflower).

The simple fact is that you need a balanced diet and eating too much of anything will leave you deficient in something and isn’t a good thing. Kids need a balance of carbs, fat and protein in their diet.

YANBU OP. It’s just common sense surely,

Not unreasonable at all and this amount of fruit is actually not very healthy. There is probably almost as much sugar in all this as there would be in the sweets she was previously eating.

If you genuinely can't afford it then why are you buying so much fruit? Raspberries and peaches are out of season so very expensive... and not even very nice at this time of year. As others say, just buy cheaper fruit and not so much at a time, if your DH is working part time presumably he had time to go shopping several times a week?

This would annoy me too. I might be in the minority here but my kids have to ask for food before getting it. They wouldn't be helping themselves to food out of the fridge. That is a lot if fruit for one child to be eating in a day. Dad needs to step in with you to tackle this though. I have a 7 year old who would fully understand the reasoning behind budgeting etc.

My 8 year old will eat fruit like that if allowed. Drives me crazy. We have to have a cut off time for fruit eating otherwise he won't eat dinner. I had to look him in the eye and say that is the last piece until dinner time every single day.

My sil ate lots of fruit and dd had to hide some for herself.
Sil had 9 fillings recently and has been told by dentist to eat less fruit.
Also eating acidic food before bed and then scrubbing teeth is likely to affect the tooth enamel.

Cut fruit and was in white vinegar then put the fruit into portions for your dsd and into glass jam jars or Tupperwares then place in the fridge. Apart from bananas

explain those are her portions as the fruit needs to be shared with everyone, so the other portion is for yourself and her dad

That’s how I’ve read it as well

I also think comfort eating and that is a lot of sugar in the fruit.

One thing I notice is that the fruit she is eating is fairly small and soft, there is no effort in eating raspberries out of a punnet, just sit watching TV and idly putting raspberry after raspberry in your mouth. I'm 56 and I can eat a punnet of grapes that way.

How about introducing some fruit that is harder to eat? Apples, pineapple, oranges and also swap some for veg, carrot sticks, celery (even though I hate it) spring onions.

Make her after school snack carrot sticks and hummus or cheese. Maybe a hard boiled egg or some crackers.

Make fruit part of the evening dinner, as a pudding, but you stay at the table and fruit is 'prepped' so apples are sliced, melon is cubed.

If you peel and freeze bananas then put them in a blender you get something similar to ice cream.

I got time by my dentist that I was eating too much fruit. Something to do with the acid?

Really? Where does that end? My husband and I have entirely joint finances. He earns more than me and works longer hours as we have children with some health issues so not possible to sustain 2 full time jobs.

Are you suggesting someone in my position wouldn't be able to be fully joint finances if they had a child from a previous relationship? So the step parent in that scenario shouldn't be paying more housing, heating and food costs?

Your reasoning is ludicrous to me. If my husband had a child from a previous relationship or I did I'd expect that child to be fully a part of our household when here.

Yes the BM in the op should be paying maintenance but if op wants a part time partner for childcare reasons for their shared child she needs to accept she's paying more household cost.

Yes, i would expect the mother (I hope in conjunction with the father) to provide 100% financially for the child that is not that of the current partner.

Fruit in moderation is great.

The sample day OP gave in her first post included about 900 calories from fruit alone, and 50 grams of fibre. That's on top of normal meals.

So this little girl is getting well over half her daily calorie needs (about 1550) from these fruit snacks alone. She is overdosing on fibre (needs maybe 20 grams) and having toileting accidents. She is getting nearly 200 grams of natural sugars - better than added but will still be bad for teeth.

This isn't healthy and OP is right to be concerned. Her husband isn't stupid - lots of people on this thread have the same idea that fruit is fine in any quantity. It's not. He's wrong.

How to deal with the issue is another question. I think GP - if bowel issues aren't diet related, you'd want to know. If GP thinks it's likely they are, you'd have an easy way to explain problem.to husband and daughter.

It wouldn't be kind to let this situation drag on.

(Assumed 20 raspberries, 10 grapes, everything else medium)

So if ops husband were a mum and not a dad, remarried and had a second child and decided to work part time would you say the same?

In ops setup she is the full time working parent of their family and her husband the part time worker who takes on more childcare. Many mums will be in that position, are you suggesting those mums are not providing for their children?