To tell my toddler DD fish is chicken?

[SalemSaberhagen]

DD is 21 months old and horribly picky. She will only eat bananas, chicken, pasta, ham chips and bread. Yesterday I made myself some fish and asked if she wanted any. She proclaimed it to be 'yuck, disgusting' and refused to try it. I broke off a few bits and put it on her plate and asked her if she wanted some 'chicken'. She ate it with gusto! I was so pleased.

I posted a light hearted thread about it on a Facebook group (yeah, I know) to say how pleased I was.

In amongst people sharing their own stories, I've been told that I don't respect my DD and I'm undermining her trust. I was asked how she will feel when she finds out.

Was I doing something bad by letting her think it was chicken?! I was just happy she was eating something else to be honest!

My DD (2.5) enjoys eating 'chicken' at literally every meal from spag bol to gammon and chips

The people on the Fb group sound like pretentious "show parents" of the most annoying order Tell them to get to fuck!
Your Dd ate something that is good for her, without knowing what it really was, but enjoyed it anyway. I personally can't see the harm in that!

Those people who said that, by the way, are utter dicks. Breaking her trust? Ffs.

I told my dd tuna pasta was chicken , she believed me until she about 12. When she found out she just laughed.

Lol we have chicken fish,and chicken sausages,all the time in our house.

My ds2 thoroughly enjoys his pig chicken, cow chicken and sheep chicken!

Next time just put it on her plate and don't say it's anything

I work in a high school canteen with different serveries offering various options, one of them is a hot snack (different item each day, so things like sub sandwich, pasta pot with choice of sauce, panini with 3 or 4 variants, etc) Your chicken/fish tale reminds me of the day the pasta pots had a choice of Italian Chicken or Bolognese. For some reason the kids didn't like the idea of bolognese with pasta twirls rather than spaghetti but wolfed down the spicy mince we offered them instead....

Go for it! 😉
I undermine trust by calling raisins sweeties and plain crackers biscuits, by the time the little ones catch on they are enjoying their raisins and crackers so carry on.

I told my DD all meat/fish/tofu was just the cover-all "meat" for about a year (maybe a bit longer) for exactly the same reason... I say do what works! And it's not actually lying if you Google the definition!

Every type of meat in this house is chicken

I used to do it the other way round - everything was fish...

Fish is a type of meat here. Everyone loves meat. They don't dislike fish but it seems easier to categorise it like this.

YANBU. DS hates cauliflower but loves white broccoli

Mine is like PP - likes beef chicken, pork chicken and chicken chicken. And 'chips without potato in'. And roasties (not potato).

We have white broccoli too. And hot salad (cabbage!)

Salmon was pink chicken. Lamb was red chicken. Lentils were little pieces of chicken... You get my drift.

Undermining her trust?

My mum knew I hated coconut but managed to get me to eat a coconut yoghurt on a flight by telling me it was the milky bar dessert yoghurt thing!

I'm not traumatised or damaged well not because of a deceitful yoghurt

Mushroom Stroganoff! DS (who didnt still doesn't like mushrooms) used to wolf down my (blended) mushroom stroganoff because it didn't have mushrooms in it. It took him 2 or 3 years to decide realize that actually it did.

They need to get a life!
In our house we had chicken, chewy chicken (pork) brown chicken (beef/lamb).
Bizarrely she didn't like the sound of chicken nuggets, but did like fish fingers. So chicken nuggets became fishin nuggets?!
She ate happily without any dramas or battles this way, that's the important thing to me.
I think the trust comment is totally ott!

When my dd was little she didn't like sausages. I had a recipe for tomato, lentil and sausage soup that I wanted to try so told her that it was ok, these weren't normal sausages, they were special soup sausages. She loved the soup and for a long time was happy to eat "soup sausages" although she would turn her nose up at the same sausages if they weren't in a soup.
She's a teenager now and thinks it's very funny.

We were talking about it with my mum the other day and she did pretty much the same thing when I was little. Once, when my sister and I were both going through a fussy stage, I refused my dinner because I had the same veg as my sister (mum couldn't remember what, but it was something I was wouldn't eat at the time). She made up a nonsense name, said that was what I was having and that it was completely different from whatever my sister had. Of course I happily ate the food that I insisted I hated.
I can't say that I feel scarred by the deceit.

Oh my DS didn't like chicken stew but would eat chunky chicken soup..

My DS would eat peppers at nursery but not at home ..He didn't like them !!!

So no you are just playing the same game...

But to be fair at this age it is about getting them to try different tastes and textures.. so if it works go with it.

I had a friend who told her DD carrots were sweets !!

My mum fed us rabbit once and told us it was chicken. I cried for about 2 hours. Boy did she regret it lol.

No, you haven't done anything wrong. You fibbed and she ate it which is good. I would carry on. Forget the FB brigade it's more important to Ge giving your child a varied diet.

We also had white broccoli (cauliflower) and hot salad (lettuce). A lot of meat was "sausages without the packet" - thinking of it, there were lots of things that looked very different without "the packet" on. And many different sorts of peas, because peas were OK. Yellow peas (sweetcorn), brown peas (raisins), big peas (grapes), red peas (cherries). Apples were also ok so we had squashed apples (pears).

Thanks everyone! I didn't think I was but you never know!

All fish in our house is cod even salmon, don't worry about it