AIBU to feed my fussy 6 year old the same meals every week

[Agadooo]

My 6 year old is v fussy n doesn't like most things so have now got in a rut making him the same things I know he'll eat every week-margarita pizza, breaded chicken with sweet corn n a few oven chips, breaded fish with sweetcorn and a few oven chips, pieces of chicken stir fried with baby corn cobs in a wrap, beans on toast, macaroni cheese and spaghetti bolognaise. Won't eat shepherds pie, fish pie, noodles, rice, chilli-I'm a bad mother aren't I ??? I serve it up n he tries a tiny spoon n says he doesn't like it and if I say he has to eat it, he'll want to please me n force down couple mouthfuls ??

Sniffs, my DD would have starved herself if I did that, seriously. So would I as a child. Even now there are foods j just can't bring myself to eat - peas, sprouts and green beans mainly. I hate the bitter taste. I also dislike tomatoes (though am fine with them cooked) and beetroot.

People forget that a child's palate is different to an adults. There are dozens of foods that I enjoy now that I hated as a child. I used to find melon really sharp tasting and now I love it and find it fresh and sweet. I also hated French bread because I didn't like chewing it so much and it got 'stuck' in my throat. Hated mushrooms which I think is another common one for children - I disliked the texture. Again, I love them now. I hated cheese (it's still not my favourite thing but I am partial to a cheese and pickle sandwich.) I disliked a lot of fruit as well - anything citrus, nectarines and peaches (again I love them now) and salady stuff like peppers and cucumber and onion. I now love peppers and onions but still not a cucumber fan.

Obviously we all really want our children to have a healthy and balanced diet but the worst way of doing this is to essentially starve them - it doesn't work and it makes them likely to store up on carby and sugary foods because they are peckish. Much better to provide a balanced meal they will eat. My daughter, for instance, likes sweet potato and she has this mashed with carrot and some swede and a bit of cheese - that with a couple of veggie sausages and baked beans is a nice tea for her as its warm, filling, has veg and so on.

It's worth remembering for fussy eaters bland and sweet is the way to go. So the perfect green veg is spinach hidden in mash. The best veg are sweet ones - carrot and sweet potato. Cheesy sauces hide things.

Custard, yoghurt and rice pudding (calcium) are also good if you've a milk refuser. Some children might enjoy yogurt and a bit of honey with berries as a relatively healthy but sweet snack. Fruit and custard is lovely.

Some children are intimidated by big portions - I always was - cutting up small amounts of food and topping it up later can help.

Swede chips are nice and healthy, too. At times it is just about running with a phase. But the worst thing you can do is to have the inflexible attitude 'eat it or be hungry.' It turns food into a battle of wills, into something to be dreaded rather than enjoyed and ultimately can lead to both unhealthy eating and unhealthy attitudes.

I see both sides really, cos I was a very very fussy child who ate very slowly (bothered by textures - when I liked something, it was generally because I tolerated the texture with the added benefit that I could eat it at normal speed like everyone else without 'testing' every mouthful). My dad and mum had no patience for me being fussy though so I was just expected to force things I didn't like down. Going hungry wasn't an option: a) not healthy for me b) waste c) not training myself to be self disciplined. There were quite a few times where I was at the table alone and crying, choking etc. If I brought something home in my lunchbox I'd have to eat it - that was the worst, warm damp sandwiches. Once I flicked rice all round the room in the hope it would sort of blend in with the furniture and I'd have an empty plate. My dad's face when he came in oh I was a horror

I eat a very normal (veggie) diet now and have a great relationship with my parents. I don't think their approach was wrong.

My parents are not British so this probably makes a difference!
Would also have gone against their principles to disguise food - they'd see it as missing a learning opportunity & making things too comfortable.
My mum loved telling me the story of her grandmother who as a kid mentioned she didn't like carrots and then was given them for every meal until she started to like them.

I think you should still try. That list is very limited.
Taste buds change, but they change quite late - much older children than you might think.

But don't they say that you need to try something x times before the taste buds become acclimatised? Or is that bollocks?

My kids eat everything except salad. All veg, hot curry, everything. Was nothing I did. Was just luck of the draw.

Well my 7 year old will only eat mashed potato (or at a push a potato croquette) with broccoli and carrots for a hot meal!
He tells me he is vegetarian....which would be fine, if he ate eggs, or fish or rice!
He has had lots of health issues which have affected his appetite and eating and I do wonder if it's just become a habit/if he is scared.
We are off to see a dietician in November.

My son is extremely fussy. It's all about textures. I've been quite inventive. Well done French toast is my way of getting eggs down him. He only ate cornflakes for six months and specialists could not get around him. He's have rather starved. I just had him help me cook, and didn't make a fuss.
They get there.

For years I would boil up a selection of vegetables, purée them in the juices/water they were cooked in and add it to casseroles, sauces and, more often than not, bolognese. I was glad mine ate those 'wet' foods but know plenty of children who didn't/don't which makes it harder to disguise/hide foods.

I also have one who would go hungry rather than eat what was put in front of them if they didn't like it. And, horror of horrors, I would still spoon feed them at times when they were 6 years old-ish because otherwise they couldn't be bothered to eat

I would only be concerned if it was an ever decreasing variety of foods they will eat. There are some foods I just can't abide and nobody forces me to eat them. I don't see why children can't be treated the same

It's worth remembering for fussy eaters bland and sweet is the way to go.

My fussy eating DS (who also eats the same 7 meals on rotation, and not nearly as much veg as the OP) will eat spicy stuff. Chicken fajitas are one of the only things he will eat with veg in! He also likes curry, but only one particular type.

People usually say that if a fussy eater doesn't eat their dinner then they shouldn't get pudding, but my DS is just as fussy about pudding as other food. He also doesn't like sweets and isn't bothered about chocolate.

I'm a supertaster, I suspect he is too. I have memories of miserable mealtimes when I was young being forced to eat stuff I didn't like, so I don't particularly want that for him.

I've got 3DCs and I they all annoy the s**t out of me with their likes/ dislikes. What gets to me the most is they won't eat stuff they ate happily as babies (lovely home made fish pie / cottage pie / cous-cous!) It seems all three went through a phase at about 18mo /2yrs where they started to really restrict what they would eat. I have no idea why but it seemed to follow a bout of illness with all of them.

The most irritating thing is that they all like and dislike different things. I have started to be a bit more insistent with the 3yo though because I can't cook three different meals every night, and I know he doesn't really eat his lunch at nursery so I need to know he has had a decent meal.

Still - there is hope! My fussy 3yo ate breaded cod last night which he usually rejects and my 11yo ate a piece of unadulterated baked salmon for the first time ever, and the 8yo has suddenly decided she loves red peppers! Keep your chin up! The only thing I would try and do is introduce some different veggies as someone upthread said - even if you hide them in something else. Fortunately mine will eat the basics veg-wise (notwithstanding the battles over broccoli stalks) which just about keeps me sane!

I would stick with the sameish meals for an easy life, but try changing them slightly...so try oven wedges instead of chips, tell him you have no sweetcorn but does he wants broccoli, peas, beans or carrots instead. But leave the plate in front of him and don't make a huge deal over whether he eats the new thing or not.

If he'll eat stir-fryed chicked, will he eat stir fryed pork? I find the two very similar. If he'll eat spag bol, what about meatballs? The sauce I make for meatballs is exactly the same as a spag bol - just that the meat is in balls rather than mince. And so on.

I would be wary of falling into the 'He doesn't like that' trap because kids tastes do change. My 7 year old has always hated mushrooms and I've not given him any for about two years. We had a meal with garlic mushrooms a couple of weeks back and he suddenly was very indignant that he was the only one without some on his plate - so I shared mine and he scoffed them and is now an avid mushroom fan!

It's fine to just stick to a few dinbers, OP.
My son was an extremely fussy eater, from the 'was happy to starve' group.
We did eventually develop a list of 6 or 7 dinners and 2 or 3 lunches, but that didn't happen until he was 8 or so. He's still very fussy, but he's 18 now so I just let him get on with it.

You really must stop worrying about him going hungry (unless he has SEN, MH issues or is off the bottom if the percentile chart). So many mothers worry about perfectly healthy stocky kids going hungry, it seems irrational.

Releaseasongbird

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LadyMcmuffin Instead of making separate meals for 3 fussy dcs why not serve the food in bowls on the table and let them help themselves to what they like (they might even try something new). Eat with them too.

We all have different likes and dislikes why should children be MADE to eat everything fgs?

I've been on quite a few 'slimming' threads and a recurring theme among some of the posters is that there were\are issues with being forced to eat by their parents as dcs.

Haha! i roasted some cauliflower for DS2, once - just a few pieces in with some potatoes.

Put him off the roast potatoes, it did

People who trot out the "they are only fussy if you let them be" and "they'll eat if they are hungry" are smug ass-hats who have children who eat well. Which is pretty much pure luck, and NOT down to you so cleverly feeding little pfb with organic mung beans since the day he was 6 months old

I had one of those first. I was a smug fucker too. The second child who starved himself into hospital showed me the error of my ways, and they were treated exactly the same.

OP, feed them what they will eat, offer new stuff as well, don't make a big deal out of it. As long as they are healthy and growing its all fine. They usually get better. And if they don't, well, they survive and much more. Don't beat yourself up.

YANBU or a bad mother - we'll if you are then so am I. My son just turned 8 and eats exactly the same foods as yours except instead of sweetcorn he eats baked beans. He eats loads of yoghurts and bananas as they are the only "healthy" foods he likes. I feel your pain but what can you do?

As said before - he's eating hot cooked meals. You're doing great! :) keep going x

DS2 is quite fussy - never been interested in food, will happily skip a meal if he doesn't fancy it. We selectively accommodate his fussiness. We still only cook one meal for all of us every day, and we generally avoid recipes where he dislikes the whole meal (as we would for any family member). He doesn't really like cooked vegetables, so he's allowed to have tomatoes / raw carrot / raw pepper instead of whatever we're having. But we do put a little of the cooked veg on his plate, and ask him to try that.

If we've cooked something that he doesn't love, and he's eaten the bits that he does like, and tried a bit of the rest, then he can fill up on fruit or have pudding if one is on offer.

The most important thing and the hardest is to stay relaxed about what they will or won't eat. Because if food becomes a stress-fest it may have long-lasting negative implications. My Sprog is in his mid-twenties now and he had health issues as a baby, undiagnosed lactose intolerance and he was born with a cleft palate which meant he had a lot of colic and difficulty. So feeding became associated with pain for him and I had a lot of trouble making sure he ate. He had a small number of foods he ate without much fuss and I used to make casseroles for the family and mash his up so he'd eat veg in disguise.
I would be envious of other mums who had kids who would eat everything without a fuss. As time went on he became more confident about food. But then when he was in his late teens we met up with one of those families and their teenagers were all refusing to eat anything except chips and picking at stuff and my son was by then adventurous and eating a wide range of food. So from my point of view I preferred him to be tricky to feed when he was young and then better at eating when he got older than the other way around. As long as you have a good relationship with your child and food does not become a battle ground it should all work out. Try not to make food a method of control because that way leads to heartbreak for all concerned. x

Ha ha ha ha ha ..... If hungry a child will eat can only come out of the mouth of a parent who has never had a fussy eater!

Aged 18 months we were told this by the HV .... On day 4 I ignored her and fed him what he liked to eat ....

My son won't eat potato, rice, pasta any grains.
Trying a balanced meal is impossible !!!!

As time has gone on he has become much better and will now eat pizza, toasted sandwiches and meat !!!! It wasn't until he was 7 he started to eat meat of any sort !!!!!

I'd perhaps try and be a bit more adventurous within the parameters of things you know he will eat. He eats wraps and pizza, so perhaps try quesadillas. He likes baked beans and sweetcorn, so perhaps he'd eat a jacket sweet potato with cheese and beans. He likes pasta, chicken and sweetcorn so maybe try a chicken and sweetcorn pasta dish.

Oh god, yeah :)
We grow veg, we grow herbs, we bake.
He still won't fucking eat it.

They're only fussy if you let them be fussy

Ahahahahahahahhahaaha. No.

It is funny how we view this from an adult perspective.

Dh will eat literally anything except coconut/marzipan/almonds and a few other bits.

I am a supertaster (see this BBC link to see if you are and therefore as much as I would love to eat certain foods like jacket potato and beans. I do not like the taste. I am not fussy, I eat lots of different foods but I don't like broccoli, or cauliflower.

Ds1 will eat anything, Ds2 is more selective. Dh gets really frustrated with Ds2 but I asked him how he would feel if I gave him a meal that was coconut tasting. Would he eat it? No he wouldn't.

From your point of view you want to feed your child foods you like. My childhood was miserable over food. It was a case of if you don't eat it you go hungry. I didn't eat for 4 days. I was nearly hospitalised.

If he will eat pizza, Annabel Karmel does a hidden 7 veg tomato sauce, and I would write a list of all the foods he does eat so you can see how much variety there is in his diet. Ds2 only started eating pizza aged 7. His diet was fairly bland but now he eats Thai, Indian and Mexican. He is 9.

In the past I gave Ds2 a teaspoon of what we were having, so a spoon of chilli and a spoon of rice in a bowl. Once he had eaten that he could have the dinner he wanted. That way I introduced new flavours but he was still fed and no arguments.

So not true that kids will eat what they are given if they are hungry. In my experience giving them things you know they dislike just leads to a) shouting and stress or b) throwing away loads of food and them whining later they want snacks because they are hungry.

I always swore my kids wouldn't be fussy but they are fussier than I would like. But, they all eat certain fruits, vegetables, protein and carbohydrates therefore I don't worry about it and mostly give them what they like to eat. We do try new things from time to time but I hate waste, so I would be more likely to get them to taste something new off my plate than give them a plateful that they will likely not eat.

Lots of people I know do the "put it on their plate anyway" thing. Personally, I can't afford to be throwing away food all the time, so if I know they don't like it I won't put it on their plate.