Aibu to "starve" my 5 year old daughter

[Arrowfanatic]

Ok, hear me out.

As a baby my 5 year old ate a wide variety of food, she's my 3rd child and was the best eater. However as she has gotten older she has started to refuse more and more food. It has gotten to the stage now where all she will eat is chocolate cereal, shreddies, ham sandwiches and cheese and tomato pizza. She will eat crisps, chocolate, sweets and Apple's but "meal" wise that is it.

What do I do? I have never pandered to her, she gets exactly the same served up to her as the rest of the family and she just won't touch it. She is the most stubborn child ever. My health visitor said to refuse to cook anything she likes, that she won't let herself starve. Well that wasn't true, she went 3 days only eating cereal at brekkie and a sandwich for lunch. Would cry she was hungry but refused anything else until eventually on day 4 I relented and cooked pizza.

My aibu I guess is, would I be unreasonable to again refuse to cook what she does like even though I know she won't try to eat anything else. She's always coming down poorly, and gets sore lips and things which I'm sure is from a diet lacking in goodnss. I tried to get her to take vitamins, but she refused them totally.

Help me, I just don't know what to do??

it sounds like she is trying to assert some control so give her some - have her lay her own place with her owns special plate etc, let her help cook, give her partly what she likes and partly something new, and then if she refuses the variety bit just tell her the truth - that people who have narrow palates are usually slow witted people with small horizons, and she should aspire to be someone who tries exciting new foods and new things from around the world, not a sad little person that only eats potatoes and never leaves their home town - thats sad people. Be positive about linking interesting food to interesting people and places, culture and lives. So if she has a bit of pizza, serve her up a tricolore salad etc.

You need to reign back on getting into food battles. I would give her a small amount of something she will eat except chocolate etc.

My dd is incredibly fussy with food and stubborn. Her issue is that she has a very very sensitive sense of smell and taste plus has reflux (she talks about burning feelings in her throat but the doctors are useless).

Have you ruled out possible allergies or gluten intolerance etc?

I would place small portions of food on her plate and separated. I would also ask her to taste stuff but don’t react either way. Ie if she tries it, don’t praise and if she doesn’t, don’t tell her off.

Give her snacks. So breadsticks and hummus, small cut up apples and fruit, cubes of cheese, (does she eat yoghurt), crackers etc. Just have them out on a table and let her help herself but don’t say anything. Just put them out and announce the snacks then leave it at that.
Give her ovaltine if she’ll have it (it’s got added vitamins) with milk.

My dd massively stopped eating recently because she was recovering from tonsillitis and her food tasted funny to her. (She’s just turned 6). It took a few weeks for her (fussy) appetite to return. If your dd has been ill it could be that.

What vitamins do you give? Mine like the chewy sweet ones.

theory and practice dont always meet in the middle.Not only have i got the "i was that soldier"tshirt..i was cursed with 2 kids that are even more pernikity. 1 is now 22.he eats like his legs are hollow(wouldnt know was same boy).Other one is 7.orders a "green plain"tray at school lunch.this is specifically the bread/sandwhich option.no butter.no filling.king of the fresh air wrap and cheese-less panini. i cant afford to feed the bin so..provide something he likes(not chocolate or crisps)relentlessly serve a small plate of whatever i'm having for him to eeew-yuk at.exclusively breastfed(took a while for me to realise that meant i didnt have lactating friends on hand..lol),never seen food outta tin..will munch bloody supernoodles..or mcyuks..etc.... i ply him with hot chocolate.pander so i hold the fruit he refuses to touch(if not sort can stick fork into)and supply vitamins as back up...Try not to let em see it gets to you./make like youre cool with it. i starved myself(intentionally i suppose but..not on purpose if you can make sense of that)cereals better than nothing.

Make the pizza yourself. That way its healthier. You can make the base with wholemeal flour, top with tomatoes and cheese.

Mixture of foods on a plate. She must touch her tongue with the foods she doesn't like before she gets the ones she does. It introduces and normalises the taste. It will work over time. If she plays up, that's fine, but she loses screen time or toys or another treat she values. If she does it, she gets a star or something else non-food related. This is about control. She is the youngest, she is 5 she wants some say over her environment. She has chosen food, other children do other irritating things. In a week or two, she must actually eat a bit - building up the contact with the food. Boring for you but you must win. Also, a children's vitamin wouldn't be a bad idea. Good luck. X

We had a period of cooked veg refusal, but raw veg was still fine....

people who have narrow palates are usually slow witted people with small horizons

Sorry but that’s terrible advice. Research was recently produced saying that fussy eaters might have very strong sense of taste/smell and that’s why they’re picky....

I agree with what Reet outlined above.

Most DC do grow out of it after the toddler years.

You don't have to make her pizza for every meal.

Try to provide a variety of food in which there is something she likes for every meal. Make sure there isn't move of anything than you are happy for her to eat.

Don't put food on her plate. Put food in serving dishes and let everyone put what they want on their own plates.

Don't comment on what she does or doesn't eat in a negative or positive way. It just shouldn't be a topic of conversation.

Keep getting her to help prepare meals. Handling and smelling the different foods will support her ability to taste them when she eventually feels ready.

The one most important thing you need to do is to remove all of your emotion about her eating from the situation. You do your job as described above and then it is non of your business what she chooses to put in her mouth.

Please don't make judgemental comments about people who have restricted diets. Don't use any sort of incentive to encourage her to eat. It is her business and hers alone so nobody else has a right to an opinion.

that people who have narrow palates are usually slow witted people with small horizons...

Do this if you want to make an even bigger deal out of it and make her feel like shit. Also try if you want to make her anxious about being a ‘slow witted’ person etc. Also do it if you want to teach her to talk to others in such a degrading way

Just an afterthought, have you looked at the times you’re serving up a meal? If it’s late she may be tired, if it’s early maybe she’s not hungry yet. Kids will often say they don’t like it because they don’t know how to express it’s actually another problem

My five year old son eats only white foods. Bread, pasta, cheese, sweetcorn, chips, garlic bread etc. Some of these foods come off the list from time to time as well. My other children eat nutritional meals without fuss just my son. We've been to docs, nutritionists and nothing has helped. This has been going on for some time and now I've just give up. I've tried everything even bribery. So for now I have a happy child if I give him what he wants because if I don't he will just starve and I can't have that. I give him a multi vitamin every day, he is a model pupil in school and a popular member of his class and he is involved in various after school activities. He is very energetic and loves the outdoors. Just has a very unhealthy relationship with food. For tea he has had two mini pizzas with xtra cheese and garlic bread. A chocolate bar and a pack of cheese and onion crisps while the rest of us have had a nice delicious chicken stir fry. He will sit at the table with the family and eat but shows no interest in what everyone else is eating. God knows what he will eat for Christmas dinner. As long as he's happy I'm happy, hoping it's a phase and he will grow out of it

Mine is 8... he eats pizza.yorkshire puds .one type of patsta.thats it for meals...chocolate vegan yogurt for lunch...he leaves everything else in his lunch box .or hides the food round the school...they are aware..weetabix for breakfast...strawberries...that is precisely it..won't touch salad or veg...lord only knows how I've got to this point....the dogs not far behinned with the same fussyness.so perhaps it's a family thing

what if you got rid of the sandwich and cereal? put the food down in front of her and give her the option to eat it or go hungry? if you think her diet is making her ill it doesn't seem to me that you can carry on like this. but most of mumsnet are more keen on pandering to fussyness than I am.

Fresh herbs...I made the mistake of telling mine white bread had bleach in it from where they bleached the brown to get white..he never touched it since..didn't realise he would take me so seriously

Have you thought of the Haliborange vitamins? They taste so sweet she might like them.

Other than that will she drink milk? Eat grapes? Crackers? I would have a total ban of sweets until she eats more.

I only had one fussy eater out of three kids.
I secretly was very worried and fretted over the lack of variety and veg he was eating, but outwardly refused to say anything to him or to even acknowledge he was being picky.
I just cooked one meal for everyone, and tried to make sure there was something on there he would eat. Some days it was a piece of bread. If he ever said yuck to anything we reminded him that it took three spoons of anything to decide you like/dislike it. no idea where that came from I think my friend made it up with her son one day
Lots of nights he pushed food about, licked a few things and ate a few. I made sure he had a packed lunch for school he could eat so figured he wasn't going to starve to death.
He's grown up now, still fussy but he cooks for himself and knows what he likes. Manages to eat out with friends and stay alive. He's always been slim, but not undernourished looking.

I have no experience of a picky eater child (except my brother who was incredibly picky as a child unless we were on holiday!).

But I have a friend who as an adult has a restricted diet, mostly if not entirely, because of food battles at home. It is not the food with him but the pressure, he has started to try the odd thing I have cooked after knowing him for about 15 years so I'd say select your battles and chill at meal times.

Not sure if this would work but could you play about with things she will eat eg 'bread pizza' ie cheese and tomato sauce on toast, or on a pitta bread?

It’s not pandering, it’s diffusing the situation to allow choice. You don’t have to make pizza everyday. But if she’ll eat bread and she’ll eat apples, maybe put those on the table with pasta. Maybe if you’re making pasta for everyone, save her a bit of plain and let her put cheese/ham/pesto on if she wants.

I wouldn’t choose to do the ‘you must taste it’ or ‘foods must touch’. They just up the stakes and the anxiety. Or, encourage a fussy eater to dig in their heels :) it’s worth reading a bit more about the thinking behind the principles in the site I linked to - it’s all about de-escalation. If you frame food as a battle of wills, you potentially set up a really unhealthy dynamic around it. Plus, some kids will have genuine anxiety and making mealtimes stressful won’t help them eat.

Enough food is the basic rule. Supplement with a multivitamin if you’re worried. She may well grow out of this.... in a number of years... but the impact of power struggles is much more lasting than accommodating her eating preferences. You are still in charge of what gets served, when you eat and where you eat. You may pragmatically decide that you will serve things that she will eat alongside things she may not eat. That’s ok. Pandering would be everyone eating what she eats, or her not eating dinner with the other kids/family.

I was a super non fussy eater. I ate evvvvverything, apart from one lunchtime when a dinner supervisor decided I should eat some particular item. I refused, and sat there until the end of lunch refusing to eat it. I never did eat it, which just reinforced my certainty about the rankness of said item and the foolhardiness of the dinner lady in choosing to enter into a battle of wills with me. I can be very, very stubborn ;) never enter into a battle of wills about food with a stubborn child, is my motto. They won’t eat and everyone will be sad!

If you are going to starve her then there is no point in giving her a breakfast and lunch that cater to her fussiness. I wouldn't though, some children will just not eat. My eldest is like that. We have slowly but steadily increased the types of foods that he will eat by making modifications to 'safe' foods (e.g. We went from chicken nuggets to southern style bartered fried drumsticks, to ordinarily roasted drumsticks to cooked chicken breast.) and making 'fun' foods (e.g. He learned to eat broccoli by pretending to be a dinosaur that was eating trees).

www.huffingtonpost.com/the-mid/6-words-that-will-end-picky-eating_b_7139710.html

sorry if its been linked - i dont agree with all the article but it certainly opens up the old fashioned rather narrow dont eat at all then.

I handled that situation by only giving water as a drink. No milk, no fruit juice. Food offered (in small amounts with lots of choice) was take it or leave it. No pressure. Nothing with empty calories whatever, no biscuits or snacks. Distraction at mealtimes (watching films or fun conversations such as where will we go at the weekend) and having non fussy friends over worked a treat.
Helping to make meals (messy meatballs, mashing vegetables), pictures on plates ( Faces, islands etc.). Different presentations (skewers, cocktail sticks, tiny towers). Growing stuff to cook and eat. Use your imagination but keep the pressure off.

My 7 year old is a fussy eater. He loves meat (to my horror as a vegetarian) so will eat all meat, his favourites being roast chicken, ribs and meatballs, loves prawns and salmon, will eat rice, cous cous bread and olives (refuses pasta) but the only veggies he will eat are peas, sweetcorn and broccoli and the only fruit raspberries and tangerines. So, all his meals are based around these foods. Maybe we pander too much but if there is nothing he likes then he won't eat.

My dd was a very fussy eater. It was a horrible, stressful time but she grew out of it and is now both an adventurous eater and an excellent cook. She had issues with both texture and taste (we now know she has an excellent palate). Some of the ideas suggested here would have made things much much worse. Forcing her to lick food that she didn't like for example would have led to a total meltdown. Making favourites unfamiliar would have led to the favourites joining the 'scary food' list. dd refused to eat sauces or mixed food so no sneaking in of stuff possible.

What worked for us was to remove all offering of hated food or food types and instead to have communal dishes of things she liked. Which for her was very plain food. For example plain boiled potatoes (but never mash, even though she liked butter, milk and potato separately), cut up vegetables on separate plates etc. Pizza with only cheese.

At meal times we tried not to focus on food but have conversations about other things so that the stress levels went down. Nicer food for other family members would be on the table too and we would say it was good, but without putting any pressure on dd (not even 'would you like some'). It's horribly easy to get really anxious and upset with a food refuser (especially if you yourself enjoy food and cooking).

I'd also look at trying different types of vitamins with her, perhaps the gummy ones that look and taste like sweets?

My DS had a fussy phase with only wanting familiar limited foods. Variety in very small portions seemed to work. He eventually tried more and more. We never commented and didn't use junk as a treat. He was a better eater when eating out of the house and with other people - maybe it was a control thing seeing the angst it could cause at home? I don't know. Anyway, he's a 23 year old pescatarian now and when fish was on the menu as a child i was accused of trying to poison him .