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.

One of the other things that may have helped is not as much snacking. Though being really really starving may not help those with sensory issues to eat "anything", having a moderate sense of hunger may help them to be more inclined to try or tolerate newer foods even if it's just on their plate. Everything seems tastier when you aren't continually snacking.
Things like bread, potatoes, seasonal veg and cheap cuts of meat won't have been as constant in taste and texture as UPF are now, though, so eating "just bread and butter" may have been more varied than eating Warburton's and Flora now, and eating even small variations can help with accepting new foods too.

So while it's not parents' intentions to reduce their child's range of safe foods, the foods available now may be doing that anyway.

I think in large families where food was scarce yes some children would have died, it was called 'failure to thrive' or something.

Relevance?

Dan Aykroyd (Elwood) is autistic. There are other ‘tells’ to autism that he put into that character too.

Why not? You have carbs, protein and some vitamin C, and no sugar.

It could be worse?

“But too many parents don’t offer them other foods to try and therefore their diet is even more restrictive.”

But it’s really unhelpful implying it’s parents’ fault!

You might have worked with some children some of the time but you don’t live with them.

What they do at school (when often highly masking) is not going to be the same as when they’re at home in their safe space (unmasked).

The process of giving a selective eater a new food to ‘try’ (especially in a school setting) can be extremely difficult and if done incorrectly (for that child), can make them even more restrictive or could have other, non-food consequences like school refusal for example.

My son’s special school (even knowing about his life-long ARFID) thought that putting him in cookery lessons for an hour and a half, would help him eat more 😩.
Instead, it made his ARFID so much worse, we had to ask that the school no longer made him do cookery lessons. They were using words like ‘healthy/unhealthy foods’ and having two trays with ‘healthy and unhealthy’ foods on and the kids had to explain why the ‘unhealthy’ tray was ‘bad’.
From an autism /ARFID perspective, this was horrendously detrimental and once I explained to the school, they understood.

I also got him moved from eating at a joint table in the dinner hall/classroom to eating his lunch alone in a room….until another child walked in and spat near him. He then no longer ate or drank for the entire school day!

In reality, there are very few people in schools who truly understand autism and how it affects food /disordered eating/ARFID and that sadly, has a massively negative effect on families with these children.

In reality, it really is not as easy or beneficial to just say parents are parenting badly and they just need to give their children more food to try.

That makes sense.

Tell me you have zero understanding of ND children without telling me you have zero understanding of ND children.

It could be worse, as in you could pick two foods that'd mean you'd die sooner. But you still can't live on those for 60+ years.

I’m afraid he has. Not a well man. It’s a massive issue. He also now has a life limiting illness so of course it’s had a dangerous impact. As a SEN parent and working in SEN education, I’m afraid that I see some horrors and know that it will impact severely on health going forward. To add my own father has largely survived on nuts and raw veg. He’s extremely thin. My own daughter lived on plain pasta with grated cheese for years, having an ND related eating disorder. There has been some improvement there fortunately. I don’t think people realise how bloody difficult it is.

@Bbq1 There are very clear and well defined thresholds for diagnosing ARFID and ‘fussy eating’ is definitely not it.

ND people often don’t experience bodily cues in the same way, leading to delayed toilet training, not eating or drinking as not recognising / feeling hunger and thirst. When you don’t have the same interoceptive “skills” being extra hungry or thirsty doesn’t really matter. And hunger and thirst are more comfortable feelings than the feelings associated with non-safe foods.

ND has always existed, children either were in institutions or were quirky, weird or odd and to some level accepted as part of the community. “Don’t worry about Jack, he’s 22 but has a mental age of 7 so just plays with the other 7 year olds until his mum calls him in”. “Oh that’s Anne, she’a organised the whole school library in her lunch times and is very good at sewing but can’t work out how to interact in a socially acceptable way so we just let her crack on with the library and the sewing”.

I knew an adult man in the 90s who would only eat fried egg, chips and beans.His mum despaired as a child. Anything else made him gag. Now I look back and realise he was clearly autistic.
And another who only ever had beans on toast for his lunch.Every day.
And an autistic child in early 2000 would only eat a certain brand of white bread, with a certain brand of margarine with very mild grated cheese.
So ,actually chicken nuggets would have added a source of protein to their diets.

I can remember (divorced parents who both remarried) being forced to sit at the table for hours with cold chicken stew and not being allowed to leave untill I had eaten it
I remember scraping my plate in the bin and my step dad getting the food back out , putting it on my plate and trying to force me to eat it
I remember cold disgusting sausages fished out the bin and given to me for my next meal
I remember crying and being to scared to leave the table for hours , trying to force down food I couldn't bare to eat ,and trying not to vomit at the same time
I am diagnosed autistic
My children are diagnosed autistic
My children have never been forced to eat anything they don't want to ,and consequently eat quite a range of foods now they are adults
Thank god parents now a days don't behave as my parents did

@Bbq1 i started school in 1963 and as the mom of a severely autistic young man now in his 30’s and with other levels of ND in extended family I can go through my school years and recognise the children around me who were on the spectrum.

My father who was almost certainly autistic went through a stage as a teen when he would only eat egg and chips. His long suffering mother made them every evening in addition to whatever the others were having.

I don't think this is true for all people/children. I do think in the current world there is some degree of pandering but it's not my parenting decision to make.

That said, my partner had extreme food issues when we met. He was extremely underweight and had nearly died from this. He literally only ate 3 foods. All of which beige. His mother did do various things (like trying to sneak cheese into buttered bread) which gave him further psychological mistrust and issues. He didn't even like food when we met and had deep mistrust for all of it, how it was prepared etc. He did not enjoy the process of eating. He would have absolutely starved to death if he wasn't given his safe foods, he nearly starved to death being given them. So there are some cases yes where they probably would eventually become unwell and die.

He's much better now and eats a lot of different things now, but he had to want to and it's somehow helpful that I was severely anorexic as a teen so understood a lot of recovery looked like and expanding safe foods as well as intruding the idea he can see the process of how things are made which gives an element of control back to the person. It allows ownership over process and to built trust in relation to certain foods.

There's still many things he will never eat but he's no longer unwell and that's enough.

Children would have failure to thrive and did often die.

ARFID isn’t a new thing, I remember children 40 odd years ago who only ate ketchup sandwiches or toast.

My dad remembers someone his age (born late 1930s) who only ate bread or potatoes and was very ill by his teens and died.

One of mine has ARFID. He went nearly two weeks eating very little when he was in between safe foods, and nearly ended up being hospitalised. He’d rather starve then eat something he doesn’t like or doesn’t know.

My dad (ASD) grew up in poverty and it was eat what meal is made or go hungry …. And said meal would be served up again for the next meal if it wasn’t eaten.

This gave him awful food issues which has affected his whole adult life.

Not going back that far but have worked in this area in the 90s in eating clinics.

Children can actually get away with eating a tiny variety of foods and mostly being okay.

If you supplement that tiny variety with vitamins/minerals that you know are missing through tablets/liquids then that's fine.

That is largely what we did - parents were encouraged to stick with the foods their children ate, allow them access to other foods without pressure and to supplement missing nutrients. They were also encouraged to play with food/cook with it and handle ingredients to increase familiarity.

Some children genuinely existed (and grew within normal parameters) on milk only diets, or two/three foods (one of which was chocolate buttons I remember).

I still remember my home economics teacher saying that the only 2 nutrients that milk lacks are iron and fibre.

Well said.

I remember a school friend who was only able to tolerate eggs, bread, potatoes.
So, eggs on toast for breakfast, egg sandwiches for lunch. Egg & chips for tea.
Nothing else at all. (except Kia-Ora orange squash) This was in an era / area where you ate what you were given, fed by parents who remembered rationing.
(I'm late 50's so may parents were born 1940's).

Do wild animals have this - animals of all sorts can have failure to thrive and can’t eat. Mostly they die in infancy and the cause isn’t known.

My son was breastfed for far longer than normal because it was the only food he’d reliably take.

Sneaking food in to safe foods makes me rage. Breaks trust and makes safe foods unsafe.

Serving a plate of safe foods and then having new foods on the table for children to explore has long been the advice I believe. One of my kids is fussy and this has helped him expand his range. No pressure, smell or look or touch or taste, just there if you want to try it.

I ate much the same as my ND son does as a child, I just ate Marmite, fish paste, cucumber and plain potatoes, he eats a lot more than I do and if it means nugs too then so be it

We ruined a few safe foods by doing this on the advice of our gp!

Ds can taste a slight change in ingredients of a specific cereal, he can certainly taste snuck in carrots or broccoli!