My DD is 3 in a few months. She’s never been the greatest eater but over the last year or so I’d say she’s slowly gotten more and more fussy over meal times. Breakfast and lunch are largely ok but dinner is a real nightmare. She will eat sausages, fish fingers, sometimes pasta, plain cous cous, pizza, sometimes chicken nuggets, roast beef, chips/roast potatoes.
She won’t entertain anything with sauce on it so we can’t serve her curry, chilli, bolognese, pie etc. anything new or unfamiliar she won’t even try it, just says she doesn’t like it. We’ve tried serving new things up with familiar things, serving ‘’dessert’ eg. A yoghurt or satsuma up with the main meal so she isn’t holding out for them and not eating her main but still she will just leave it.
No amount of cajoling her works, and we’ve tried ignoring her eating entirely at meal times, which definitely makes it less stressful but still she will only eat a small amount of familiar things. She loves fruit, sandwiches, snack bits and bobs of course, porridge or cereal for breakfast, toast. She barely eats vegetables except for sometimes sweetcorn that I put in muffins, or carrot sticks with cream cheese (which she got into eating at preschool) and grated carrot within a tuna mayo sandwich filling.
Today we went to a cafe for lunch and got her a honey sandwich (her choice from the kids menu) then when it came she took one bite and said she didn’t like it. She keeps saying she's hungry so we keep offering her the sandwich but she is just refusing it. It's a battle of wills.
At the weekend we saw friends and their 2 year old was running around eating pizza and loads of other food and I just feel like such a failure that my child won’t eat. It’s embarrassing when family come around and she just won’t eat what we're having.
I guess I’m posting to ask if this is normal or whether I should worry more about how she eats. It’s so stressful trying to decide what to make for meals each day and I am starting to crave more variety of meals than the things I know she will eat. It’s making me miserable to be honest. Thank you for any help.