Do I HAVE to continue to cook separately?

[Luisaa]

Wits end.

5yo DS has always been an incredibly fussy eater but we are now at the point where he will only really eat pasta for dinner. He has pesto pasta, mascarpone, macaroni cheese. He will not eat tomato sauce, so no bolognese or hidden veggies sauces. He hates to see ‘bits’ ie onion, veg, herbs or chicken/mince.

Breakfast is ok as he likes eggs of different forms. Lunch is either a tuna sandwich or egg bagel. Not ideal but at least it’s something. He likes olives and hummus of all things so has that with a wrap once a week. Gone off chicken mayo which is a shame.

It’s dinners I’m mainly struggling with… tonight I have made a shepherds pie and I have refused to cook bloody pasta AGAIN. He is having a meltdown and refusing to eat. Do I just make the bloody pasta? Do I persevere but if so, how?

Any other dinner/lunch ideas for an incredibly fussy eater?

I completely agree with this post. ARFID and sensory issues are very real of course, and there are children who can become severely malnourished because of it, but there are also many, many more who are just ordinarily fussy /throw tantrums over food and will grow out of it over time without suffering any lasting ill effects or food trauma - sounds much more like this child is in the latter than the former purely based on what is said. And TBH even if he never ever eats anything in the evening he's unlikely to 'starve' if he eats a good breakfast and lunch every day (even if repetitive). That sort of language is just so unnecessarily dramatic and we wouldn't use terms like that or accuse one another of 'abuse' so lightly over anything else - e.g. We all know sleep is important but no-one cries abuse over an unsettled child who isn't a good sleeper - more constructive advice and support would be given and no-one would chime in with horror stories of kids whose parents got their choice of bedtime routine wrong and are dysfunctional adults as a result. I feel like because we know so much more about nutrition than previous generations it's a tool to blame and beat parents with or rather to beat ourselves up with, but the reality is children can thrive and grow and develop very well on what MN would deem either nowhere near enough food overall and also 'crap' i.e. limited fruit and veg, lots of bland carbs.

I'd definitely try some of the things this poster lists OP, above all try not to stress yourself out about it, if he eats pasta for dinner 6 nights a week that's ok, if he sometimes eats nothing at all that's ok. If mine didn't eat their dinner I didn't mind giving them some toast or fruit or yoghurt for afters although I'd usually give a bit of a gap to see if they changed their mind first. The only thing I'd say is that it's best to try and feed them if possible before tiredness and hanger sets in, mine were always so much more amenable to trying different things or generally not screaming and melting down over everything not being quite perfect/ exactly as they were expecting when relaxed and not wiped out from school or starving from lots of activities - tricky because evenings were when I had time to cook new things for them as opposed to mornings when it was stuff something in as quick as possible and lunches which were packed lunches - but sometimes just choose your battles and if that means pasta for tea Monday - Friday and new things at the weekend then so be it - or even a safe snack beforehand then a perhaps more challenging dinner?

I disagree.

He’s been offered normal food that he’s chosen not
to eat. He’s 5, not 2.

Im only in my 40s but I don’t remember ever as a child children getting separate meals based on preference.
You ate the offered dinner. That was it.

Jesus wept, your child only eats pasta, at 5 years old they are dictating what they eat and pasta at every meal is not a balanced diet. Presumably they are also getting lots of attention as your try to encourage the little darling to eat.

Time to parent your child, actually make them a proper balanced meal with vegetables, protein and complex carbohydrates and serve it up.

If they don’t eat it, pop it into some Tupperware and serve it up again at the next mealtime. Rinse and repeat.

This is DS6 (older DD is fine)! I make sure DS’s meal is balanced as per the nutrition wheel but he eats some weird dinners! For example a meal may consist of: brown rice (carbs), pot of natural yoghurt (calcium), good few unsalted cashews/peanuts (protein), loads of raw veg sticks and fruit. He too would eat pasta every meal if we let him. We can’t get him to touch any meat or fish (or veggie alternatives - we have them all in as I’m vegetarian) so this is how he lives!

He too would refuse to eat when I had the like-it-or-lump-it attitude and we were all utterly miserable. I’m past caring what others think now. He’s healthy and happy and he’s not eating junk. He’ll get there in his own time.

Will he eat mashed potato. Could you just seperate that from the shepherds pie. I won't cook seperate meals but I will deconstruct meals if that makes sense

I think the vast majority of kids get past this naturally as they get older. It is bloody frustrating and worrying as a parent though.

My fussy eater spent several months as as small child eating nothing but pb sandwiches and yoghurts. He’s an absolute bin now at 16 and will eat absolutely anything going his way.

I think batch cooking is great advice and as others have said keep offering him a small portion of what everyone else is eating but don’t make any fuss over whether he eats it or not.
Offering small changes to safe foods is a good start for adding more variety too but it often takes them a while to open up to even this so patience and perseverance is key.

Also as an aside there are hidden veg mac and cheese recipes if you’ve not tried them before

Make a pan of whatever pasta meal he likes and portion it out to freeze (portions of about a third of what you'd normally serve him)

Make whatever family meal you're making each night eg shepherds pie and serve the mini pasta portion (reheat it in the microwave) with a smallish portion of shepherds pie. He'll eat what he'll eat.

Eat together at the table, talk about anything and everything, be upbeat and happy BUT Don't talk about the food and don't encourage him to eat anything.

Remove the emotion and the battle of wills

Neurodiverse children will not eat unsafe foods even when hungry. Any other signs of neurodiversity?

Personally, OP, I wouldn't make meals a battleground. Kids go through phases. It doesn't actually sound like your DS is that fussy; he just has different tastes to you. I'd make the pasta.

Try seeing the positives - your kid will eat a variety of pasta, which is great. He'll eat eggs in various forms - another win. He likes wraps. Will he eat any vegetables (excluding olives), like steamed broccoli or peas etc? What about fruit?

Don't be hung up on what are "breakfast" or dinner foods. If If he likes egg dishes, what about quiche, omlettes, scrambled eggs, poached eggs etc? All of those can be breakfast, lunch or dinner options. How about savoury as well as sweet pancakes?

What if he helped you plan the week's menu and/or helped you chop/cook? Some children are more willing to try new things if they've played a role in choosing/growing/preparing them.

Also, I agree that it's not as simple as, 'if he's hungry enough, he'll eat'. Some children are like that; many aren't.

I think fussy eating is about control. My friend ds so was down to a very short list of foods at a similar age. When he eventually started eating more food he got to eat whatever he wanted. He then switched to a different habit which meant everyone had to police themselves around him and follow his whims. Said child is not doing so well as a young adult. It's a shame because my friend is lovely buy they've always let him do what he wants and it's not set him up so well for successful adult life.

Get off your high horse.

This doesn't work for some kids.

It's a known thing for neurodiversity and this is what school picked up with first.

DS never did nugget and chips. In fact he refused to eat beige food. He got a good diet but wouldn't touch vegetables. He'd rather not eat if that's what he was given. Anything he deemed 'suspicious food' he wouldn't eat.

The goal for us was getting him to eat full stop some days.

Believe me if you saw what DS eats now you wouldn't be as smug.

This ISN'T always simply a parenting issue.

Jeezus, talk about a power trip. 😵‍💫

I would just give him the pasta with something else on his plate as well,chicken ,sausage etc .
My son would only eat marmite sandwiches,bananas, chicken nuggets when he was about 4-5. He now eats a huge selection of food ( stuff I personally wouldn’t like,think oysters etc) as a pan extremely healthy,rugby playing 25 year old.

I am in my 70's and do remember being given what I would eat and not forced or made to go hungry. I wouldn't say that I have arfid but there were things I couldn't eat then and cannot eat now. I went to a school that did "sit until you eat it" for school lunches and it was stopped when I projectile vomited actoss the table. You may have had to eat the offered dinner but that is not to say that everybody was forced as you were.

You can think that, but you are wrong. Your friend's son is likely neurodiverse and undiagnosed; or diagnosed and your friend doesn't feel the need to inform you.

People know when others judge them, their parenting and their children. It isn't pleasant.

My fussy eaters are autistic, so the fussiness is next level, and they genuinely would rather starve. Not in any way suggesting yours have any type of ND, but the method we were recommended could still work.

The only way I've ever been able to add new safe foods to their rotation is to consistently serve it alongside food they already eat (but not touching or mixed in any way). So a small portion of one thing from the meal your having, on the plate next to the pasta. I encourage them to have some but if they refuse it, I just shrug and say "ok just eat your pasta". Make it as low pressure and non threatening as possible, and eventually they feel safe to eat it.

It's been a slow process and I've thrown away a lot of food over the years, but we've added about 10 new foods a year. My eldest is 9, his diet is still very repetitive, but has enough verity to be healthy.

I agree, having dealt with the same sort of issues. If you make a stand your child will probably just not eat, and you will have to give in fairly quickly, so I would just give him what he’s happy to eat and hopefully he will improve over time. He’s not doing this on purpose to just be difficult, in my opinion.

Cook the bloody pasta again. You aren't being asked to produce multiple gourmet meals. A bowl of pasta with a bit of pesto is not a big added task.

And yes, I have experience of this. My middle child was such a restricted eater that the day he ate a chicken fillet I notified the entire family as if he had just climbed Everest. We had worked with a child psychologist when we realised that he would basically eat only cucumber, satsumas, smooth yoghurt, bread, mild cheddar cheese, raisins and pasta. Her advice was a million miles away from the idiotic "just make him eat what you want him to eat or go hungry" claptrap trotted out upthread. She said to calm down. Give him food he will eat and continue to encourage him to explore other foods. Take the stress out of it. Don't make food a battle ground. Don't lose your temper. Don't make it all about you and your emotions and how upset you might be that your food is rejected etc.

My middle son is 16 now and eats a hugely varied and very healthy diet. Food is not an emotional issue in our house.

So yes. Cook the bloody pasta and stop seeing it as a terrible demand on you. It really isn't. You really will cope with adding "boiling a small pot of pasta and serving it with some pesto" to preparation of any other meal. He isn't being difficult or controlling or any of the other labels people are so keen to apply. He simply doesn't like the food you want him to like and he doesn't want to eat it. That's not an objectively unreasonable position!

Why anyone ever imagines that some sort of hard arsed "eat what I say or starve" approach will encourage kids to have a positive approach to food I will never understand. It's absolutely ridiculous to expect bullying and harshness to have good results.

I love how some people like to treat their children as some sort of inferior humans. Reheating food they don’t want to eat and serving it repeatedly to them until they either force it down or, quite likely, feel faint and unwell and incredibly stressed and upset.

Would you accept that behaviour from someone? Would you force down food that you didn’t want to eat or accept someone serving you reheated food you don’t want at every meal? Why have so little respect for your own children? Blows my mind.

Blend up some broccoli and peas to stir into the pesto pasta. You could freeze it in small portions ready to add into his usual meals. And batch cook loads of sauces that he likes so at least cooking won’t be such a ballache.

This sounds exactly like my mother. She comes out with all sorts of nonsense like this. My two older siblings have had a full life of mental health problems (one of them dead because of it). She still 100% thinks her parenting was amazing thougj of course.

Yes I got fed up with they’ll eat when they’re hungry line. It only comes from people who have no experience of this. My son was like this but unfortunately when he was 4/5 he collapsed at school and it became apparent he was eating absolutely nothing at school and very little at home. When he was 7 the only meal he ate was sausage, sweetcorn and pasta for year. I was just relived I was getting food into him that actually constituted ‘a meal’. He did eat cream cheese bagels and yoghurts too but really not much else. After about a year he asked spontaneously if he could try some chicken (I think he was bored with the same meal everyday!) and we added chicken to his diet.

He’s 26 now and was probably one of the healthiest children and never had a day off school all the time he was there (other than the day he collapsed through lack of food). My main thing was to not make a fuss about food and not make it in to a big issue. When we ate out as a family there would always be something he could eat even if it didn’t constitute a ‘proper meal’ (plain rice at a Chinese, garlic bread or plain pasta at an Italian, garlic naan or plain rice at an Indian). Consequently he seems to have widened his food repertoire as he’s got older and has pork fried rice at the Chinese, pizza or spaghetti boldness at an Italian chicken tikka at the Indian. As long as he gets calories in to him to function I don’t stress and whilst he’s still on tge thin side he’s healthy. He’s recently undergone screening which may indicate autism which may explain food issues. As a child he was there only child who would eat one and half biscuits because he’d had enough and couldn’t see the problem with leaving half a biscuit. Ditto a packet of crisps.He’d leave 2 crisps in the packet and wouldn’t eat tge last two because ‘he’d had enough’.He actually says that it’s the texture of food that can be a problem rather than the taste but I did see him get visibly distressed if some started drawing attention to him not eating or making a fuss in some other way.

I would just say ‘don’t turn it all in to a big drama’ ( imagine how you would feel if sometried to make you eat something you didn’t like by standing over you fussing trying to make you eat it. It doesn’t make you anymore inclined to eat it does it?) Try and present them with as balanced a diet as you can with what they will eat even if it’s repetitive.

Team pasta.

I agree with everyone saying don’t mix the foods. Have you tried bribery? Mine would try anything for a quarter of a mini meringue. Then next time, I upped the quantity that needed to be eaten to get the quarter of mini meringue. So quarter of a green bean to half a green bean next time. And kept going until they just ate it. Teens now. Eat most things. (Son still prefers pasta, sauce and cheese to be separate on the plate and swallows peas whole like tablets with a mouthful of squash, but he doesn’t leave them!)

My son was like this for years ( still is as an adult) and would have months on end where he would only eat plain pasta, on occasion with grated cheese but usually just plain. He would, quite literally starve rather than eat anything else. We saw a consultant psychiatrist as part of his autism diagnosis ( not to say your child is autistic, but mine is!) who told me just to feed him what he could eat and not battle, it wasn’t one I could win!