Did some ND children starve before chicken nuggets were invented?

[BusWankers]

I'm not being horrible, genuinely curious.

You read on here how a child who has autism or some other issue, will only eat safe foods. Usually a lot of things like chicken nuggets, a particular brand of cheese and onion crisps, Nutella, supermarket pizzas (UPF mostly)

Do we think children in the 1920s just went hungry? Or perhaps they were forced to eat foods they didn't like. After all you do hear stories,of adults even now being made to sit at the table and choke down food etc.

No I don't agree. My DD is mid 30s. Lots of involvement from GP and hospital and she would starve rather than eat. It was a constant struggle and worry and came close to hospital admissions when on doctors orders we'd have to give in and feed her what she would eat. Eventually it was obvious the only sensible thing was to let her eat what she'd eat.

Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist, it's not a protected title.

I’m glad to see so many educated and rational responses.

Rather than the ones that have massive undertones of ‘Well this would never happen to me because I am such a great superior parent and can tell you exactly where all these lazy SEN parents go wrong and can confidently say exactly what I would do if I was in their shoes!!’

My grandma came for dinner the other night and we were talking about the range of food available now compared to when she was little. My 2 and 4 year old had eaten Italian, Thai, Mexican, and British inspired meals that week. She said she hadn't tried many of the flavours associated with those cuisines until she was an adult.

Her diet was primarily bread, meat, potatoes, and a basic variety of seasonal vegetables. It's far easier to fall under the radar if you have a milder version of AFRID and your world is set up in a way that you're repeatedly eating the same blandish foods anyway.

More severe cases would have depended on your family, finances, and how severe your other needs were. If you appeared too disabled along with your food issues, you'd have been put in an institution and probably force fed if you refused to eat. If you were not institutionalised, some families would have accommodated your limited diet (with varying degrees of forcing you to eat, some of which would meet the threshold for child abuse under today's standards). In others, you would have 'failed to thrive' and eventually died.

You might be shocked then at how many people have liked that comment of mine.
I guess we are all worthless if we don’t have the same opinion as you…

This.
ND DP apparently ate bread and butter and boiled potatoes throughout his childhood years, with some seasonal foraging in hedgerows for fruits and berries. Wouldn't eat anything else. DMiL accommodated, no big deal. In his teens, DP joined a commune / cult (specialist interest) and learnt to cook and appreciate vegetarian cuisine -OK as part of specialist interest. This has stood him in good stead, as he now eats a broad and varied vegetarian diet.
DC1, autistic, will eat most things if hot and spicy. I can eat hot food, but couldn't stomach (literally) the things they eat. DC1's friend was periodically skeletal with ARFID in primary school but this has abated now in mid-teens.

My autistic ds was a normal, low risk, uneventful pregnancy, born on his due date and weighing bang on average at birth (the midwives laughed about that and called him a textbook baby)

But maybe there’s some other reason the eugenicists could come up with to deny his right to exist?

I sympathise having been there. For us it got a lot better by mid to late teens. I hope things improve for you

In the early 80s I was on prescription milk due to dairy allergies. Apparently it wasn’t that highly unusual and i think you could even purchase a goat milk or soya sub? Also knew of children in 80s and 90s with allergies. However, I had asthma that was undiagnosed until I was a teen. So healthcare was so much more hit or miss depending who you saw.

My husband has a tragic diet thanks to been force fed food as a child by his very traditional grandparents. His diet is very dull and would gag if he tried eating certain foods even now.
He was just seen as the bad child, couldn't concentrate and so they didn't bother.
Im 99% sure he would be diagnosed if he bothered to go to the doctors/assessments.

Our child who also shows traits of ND is also pretty beige with main meals but loves fruit. Will try things but has to be led by them and if the initial reaction is not good, I struggle to get a 2nd try (not always impossible).

Interesting, if you ever watch the film the blues brothers one of Elwoods 'traits' is that he always orders or makes 'dry white toast' to the point other people could recognize it was him by the order of 'dry white toast'. I always just assumed it was to make the character quirky.

My mother used to in her 70s now, and almost starved as a child, with long lasting consequences of malnutrition.
She only ate bread, pancakes and apples as a child. so yes, it did happen

It’s really gross that her parents have put all her personal health and medical information online like this. We should be side eyeing these weirdos that benefit off their childrens problems and share them with the masses.

I wasn't ND but didn't like many foods at all as a child. I lived on fish fingers, chips, beans, jam sandwiches, a few breakfast cereals and crackers (a child of the 70's).

Oh @Mini1977 you have just taken me back to a holiday with autistic DC age 5 where she ate only bananas, ice cream and tomatoes! So stressful. A week would have been OK but it was three. We did have to resort to chicken nuggets because she kept having meltdowns, she was so hangry.

DC does get on well with buffets now although her choices are interesting.

Nutella and cucumber, anyone?

I really don't like burnt toast. Slightly burnt sausages and bacon, yes

I like my toast just toasted. I have been asked whether it's actually been toasted because it still looks rather white

Your poor husband!

DD is good with fruit. Maybe fruit tastes similar from one occasion to the next?

Although she refused orange melon the other day "because it smells like nappies" (as in plasticky!)

I know some people are "super tasters" and DD appears to be a "super smeller".

I went to school in the 80s with a boy who I think pretty much only ate weetabix or chocolate spread sandwiches.

Exactly this. Most cultures have a bland carby staple served with most meals.

Before the 20th century a large proportion of the diet of working class people in the UK was bread, maybe with some dripping or margarine: you'd have bread for every meal and maybe something else at dinner time. If you lived in the countryside and had a garden, you might have had some fruit and veg daily. Households used small amounts of meat and adults would have eaten the actual meat, with children having the broth from the stew - probably with bread, maybe with a potato. Food was repetitive and bland. I imagine a lot of autistic kids would have been just fine and the fact that they didn't eat a variety of foods would have not been remarked upon, because no one ate a variety of foods. Even my DF who grew up in the 1960s said that his family literally ate meat, potatoes and veg every night (sometimes without the meat if there wasn't much work that month) - it was an event when as a teenager his mum cooked Coq au vin from the Woman's Weekly.

With autistic children, some won't eat many foods because of sensory differences; for some, it's also anxiety over trying something unknown or just the security of knowing what dinner will be helping them through the day. It was probably easier in the past when you knew every meal was going to be pretty much the same.

Oh come off it, that's a stretch and a half! Nobody has said your son shouldn't exist or even implied it.

@UpDo Sure, but I do charge for this service (and yes, I am qualified and nowadays do this professionally as part of my ‘retirement job’😁). Would you like a quote PM’d?

Hint for you - search relevant medical journals. There are sites that even collate them for you that make searches (fairly) easy!

You will find in the last 5 odd years, in the UK alone, referrals for restricted eating in paeds have increased around 30%. That’s referrals, not diagnoses, granted, but it’s a good indicator of parents believing their child is not a picky eater but has a medical problem. While there is not comparable data from say 1940, even an increase of 30 odd % from 5 years ago shows you a trend.

Even in clinical practice we saw this a lot more frequently from a certain point, than in the decades before, but that’s personal experience and one could claim confounders, area bias etc.

Hint for you - when doing the work yourself that you are trying to push onto others, use all relevant terms. ARFID only came in around 2013, the previous relevant clinical term was Feeding Disorder of Infancy and Early Childhood, and Eating Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood before that. Going back some time before again you may also want to throw in Anorexia in infancy/childhood as while we know now that’s not a thing in infants/small children they tended to use catch all terms like this to try and describe patients (quite like how ‘consumption’ historically meant not only TB but was also a catch all phrase for anything that caused illness with severe weight loss, so a whole range of cancers in there as well😁). I’d be hesitant to use FTT as that’s such an umbrella and while we still use it today you would distinguish FTT due to ARFID, while historically it was not distinguished based on underlying pathology so too hard to pluck out restrictive eating vs medical causes with that one.

I am ND and only ate 3 foods and only drank ribena from the time I started solids and only in small quantities for many many years. I was extremely underweight and was under a paediatrician because of it. My primary school was heavily involved because of worries about malnutrition and i shamefully had to have my plate inspected each day by a dinner lady after school dinner (which the paediatrician insisted I have) to check I'd eaten enough. If they decided I hadn't I'd have to go back and sit there until I had, sometimes well beyond the end of lunchtime and into the afternoon. There was nothing on earth that could have persuaded me to eat other foods, I would start gagging if I tried to force things down. I still have issues now with swallowing foods due to various textures, even the thought of the texture makes me gag, although I have expanded the number of foods I can eat. I also have all kinds of weird issues about eating at all, which I didn't have before they started trying to force me to eat. It would have been better if they had let me eat my three foods little and often. The shame and upset was awful - I'm sure it has played a part in my mental health issues as an adult. This was in the late 70s and early 80s. Children today who are ND aren't being faddy and the parents are not being too lenient, it is literally like a form of torture trying to swallow foods that you are being pressured into eating when they repulse you. Like the bush tucker trials on I'm a celebrity but with no say in the matter as you are a child and can't speak against what is happening.

This is the answer to the very suspicious opening post.

Thanks- that’s interesting to know.

my parents must have had rubbish doctors 😂 I dropped from the 50th to the 1st centile and it took me a few years to recover.

They probably wern't pandered to like we do today.

You either ate, or you starved. Probably labled back then as failure to thrive.

Personally even as an AU/ADHD adult i think we pander too much. I admit i have "safe Foods, but thats becuase of a stomach condition i developed after covid - wich bacsically killed my ability to eat green veg, (theres an enzyme apparenly) and most beans or pulses (wirdly excluding chickpeas?)

I still think taht we should be less accomodating, for heavens sake - food is food. Just make them eat it

My child with ARFID wouldn't touch a chicken nugget and preferred to eat only raw vegetables so in many ways it was easier for us not to be judged and the number of "oh you are so lucky, I wish mine ate veg" we got, but her diet certainly wasn't healthy and she was ill A LOT. We struggled to get protein and dairy into her.
She is 19 now and eats pretty well but textures are still difficult for her sometimes and she still won't eat meat.
She actually managed not to eat for 6 days on a school trip when she was 13 despite me being VERY clear with school and them assuring me she would be catered for - she didn't need special meals or anything just them not putting mayo on a cheese sandwich for example or even giving her plain bread and fruit. I got a call about her "anorexia" and when she got home she was really ill and thin.