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??

I took my child for counselling to deal with this kind of issue. There is a name for this - selective eating disorder. Your Health Visitor has given you very bad advice. The worst thing you can do is try and force them to eat things or battle with them, it is really hard but you have to take the pressure off completely. Then, get them to make a food scrap book, print out photos of food they like and together stick them into a breakfast lunch and dinner section. Each time they add a new food to their repertoire youcan add it in and keep looking through it together having fun with lots of praise. Now start food chaining. This means trying very small relatable steps towards trying new foods. So my daughter would eat ham and what we did was try some processed sliced turkey and some processed sliced chicken. They all look very similar and she was comfortable with this step. Once they have developed the taste for chicken you can slowly branch out to other forms of chicken, cooked fresh chicken breast sliced, them maybe with a marinade on in the end but don't rush anything. We went from breaded chicken to breaded pork recently (after a long time of her only eating chicken) and this led to sausages in the end. You need to find close links with food items and slowly open them up to the idea of the next one. The other things that have helped is getting them to help with cooking. If they will eat pizza, have a pizza making night once a week where you join them but get them to help put the toppings on your pizza - chopped mushrooms, sweet corn, anything really. By touching them and being involved with them that will help and they might get curious and want to try them too. I enrolled my daughter in an actual after school cooking class and apparently she would make the dish each week and would not eat it, but one day she snuck back when no one was looking and tried it secretly because her curiosity got the better of her. Also the first time she tried mushrooms was at a pizza express pizza making birthday party. When they are at school they don't want to feel left out so they will do things in their own time but it helps. You need to make the school aware though so that they are not pushy and are understanding at meal times. It is hard not to get frustrated and upset but that is honestly key to solving this. Best of luck.

I haven't RTFT so sorry if this has been mentioned, but have you tried a food wheel?
Sometimes making a game out of it helps and planning out the week meals in advance with DD. So on a Sunday go through all the ingredients for the week and for every meal where a new ingredient is added she gets points or stars or something, enough points and she gets a pizza at the end of the week.

My mum had to do this with My sister and this was the only way she would eat

I wish some of this sensible advice had been around when I had a fussy dd still living at home. She was ebf and then developed reflux around weaning and then food issues. I tried all sorts of nonsense and meals became a battle. (I'm a feeder, and pour all my love into my cooking, so her rejection of the food I made felt like a rejection of my love.) I think that family style dishes and everyone serving themselves, and ensuring some 'safe' foods on the table sounds so much better.

My advice would be to start with a reward chart for all ur kids. Things like clean ur room, tidy toys away, homework, and last but not least, eat all ur dinner. Work out a reward on a day basis (piece of cake, choc) and weekly basis like cinema/getting a new toy.

When it's dinner time, start with serving everyone the same food. Family style dining. To start with always have a little something that u know she will eat. A plate with a small slice of pizza, some veg, some potatoes, a small bit of pasta, etc.

If u have dinner with ur kids, eat the same and chit chat. Otherwise leave the kids at it and go get yourself a glass of wine. Don't watch her eat. Don't make a fuss if she doesn't eat. Everyone gets a star at the end.

Hopefully seeing her siblings have a reward would be a great incentive to at least try.

Good luck!

Is she poorly atm anyway? you mentioned sore lips so if they are poorly nows not the time to worry about it because they won't want to eat as it is even though they are hungry, Going through same atm with a picky child. Method I'm using when he's well is simply give him the stuff "he doesn't like" big fibber lol :') and have the things he does like visible as bribery and tell him he can have it after he eats his veg. Maybe sometimes break it up in stages, he eats so much and then gets a bit he likes then some more and gets another bit he likes. It means dinner takes alot longer and is more laborious trying to cox him but it works. hope it helps you too :)

Rewards are pressure. Adults don't get to express an opinion on what a child eats.

Make the food available and your role ends there. Leave the child to decide which of the available foods to eat and make no comment on it, positive or negative.

No reward chart! Don't make good an emotive subject. You can't reward for tidying bedroom or doing HW or sitting nicely at the table. But not actually eating.
Serve food.
Ignore what is and isn't eaten.
Chat etc.
Remove plate.
Continue with life!
It's hard but it's the right thing to do.

^ this.

Our ‘encouragement’ is limiting to offering it, eating it ourselves. Pronouncing it yummy and saying ‘try it, you never know, might be delicious.’

After that, if it’s refuses it’s ‘ ok.’ Then back to chatting about whatever we were doing before.

No pressure, no rewards, no cajoling, no EMOTION around food. As soon as you emotionally charge an everyday task, you’re getting conflict and a potentially unhealthy relationship with it.

We do sometimes make the offered item deliberately delicious 😋

Food.
Not good.
I wouldn't even say try it! Zero pressure.

No,no rewards.

Food is just food. You don't reward her for breathing, don't reward her for eating.

Just give her what you want her to eat. No comments on it, no salacious watching for tiny bites, no hovering. Plop it down and eat your own. After 20 minutes, if she's not eating, ask her if she's done and if so, take it. DON'T get drawn in to "But I wanted x! I hate this! WHY can't I have X!? I'm so hungry but I HATE THIS!!!!!!!" - seriously, disengage from that, leave the room, tell her the subject of food is closed.

DO it every meal. You have to take the emotion out of it, it's just food.

Does she go to school/ nursery?

My DS is very fussy at home (and with his childminder) and would starve rather than eat something he didn't want, however both his nursery and now school comment on what an amazing eater he is! The power of peer pressure I think. He'll literally eat pretty much anything he is given at school, as long as his friends are eating it too.

We need to move away from this idea that eating your dinner is good behaviour.

Eating your dinner is meeting a biological need. We need to teach children to listen to the messages from their own bodies about when to eat, how much to eat and what to eat.

As adults we should make the right sort of food available at mealtimes and in between if we feel that is right and then we need to back away and let the child listen to and respond to their own hunger cues. That is how we set them up for a healthy relationship with food for the future.

Why would we reward children for eating food their body doesn't need at that particular time? That is actively teaching them to overeat.

I wouldn't even say try it! Zero pressure

We keep it pretty light. If there’s any mild curiosity we’d use that. If there’s the usual ‘neeeejjjjjjj!!’ Then it’s a shrug and leaving it.

Agree that they behave differently at nursery. Toddler pack mentality

I wouldn’t say ‘try it’ that’s still pressure/persuading even if you think the pressure is off, it is still there slightly. The same with saying your own food is tasty.

Once you can be genuinely not bothered and accept your role is simply to make the food available, it really helps. Kids pick up on you being bothered/not bothered even if you think you are hiding it.

With my third, I genuinely couldn’t tell you what bits of his meal/how much he ate. I put the food there and we all ate out dinner. Not having the stress of watching what he was eating/worrying if he would be hungry later, etc was great for me. I just didn’t have to think about it.

I have never found a solution to this issue in my house, OP. My very very fussy 8 year old eater goes in fits and starts with what she will or will not eat. It drives me absolutely to the edge sometimes.

She sees proper food as some sort of punishment, and like your child, she ate a wonderfully colourful and varied diet as an infant.

She has her range of foods that she allows, and anything outside that remit is met with utter disdain and rejection. If I serve beef stew for example and ask her to try a bit of the onion this time, she reverts to a toddler like stance, gagging, hysterical, tantrumming etc because 'you know I don't like it Mummy! Why are you forcing me to eat it? I hate it!" Etc when all I've done is gently suggest she give it a go. It's so utterly out of proportion.

Her big sister has such a relaxed attitude to food, if she doesn't want something, she just leaves it! But doesn't freak out about it, and is willing to give it another go if it gets served again. Simple as that. My 8 year old however would go on and on and on and on for days and even weeks about it. Drama queen doesn't even come close. Even telling visitors and friends that I tried to make her eat x,y,z...

So, whilst I don't have any tried and tested methods to share, it's possible that some children absolutely will starve themselves to the point where they are lacking energy, even more difficult behaviour etc and they end up in such a tiz that it can't be beneficial for them. I do relent and give my DD the foods she will eat because I don't have the time and energy most nights to enter into the big debate!

It's exhausting and I'm taking the stance that I'll just talk about it more when she's mature enough. For now she is too immature to understand how food nourishes, builds bones and muscles etc etc, to her it's some sort of battle of wills.

My nephew and neice were both very fussy eaters and would only eat certain foods. my Dsil went with it and it wasnt an issue, they both got bored with their choices and started to eat a bigger variety of food. its just a phase, try not to worry xx

Sorry I took so long to reply. I think initially it would have been awkward to refuse the food a friends mum had cooked for me? So Say the food was fish fingers, mash and peas... I only liked fish fingers, I would make a ‘deal’ in my head that I would eat all the fish fingers half the mash but not touch a single pea. I’d say I would do that from 7... this was what I decided not what an adult had decided, if that makes sense? Then maybe a friend had something in their lunch box I thought looked nice? It started as rubbish food I would try more of then slowest over years I eat almost everything. X

If I serve beef stew for example and ask her to try a bit of the onion this time, she reverts to a toddler like stance, gagging, hysterical, tantrumming etc

By asking her to try it you are probably preventing her from trying it. YOu need to back right off and appear to not give two hoots whether she tries it or not. If she does, you must not notice.

Goldmandra
I have tried this too- I bugger off and busy myself and don't get involved at all. Whatever the food is, if there's bit she doesn't like, she'll leave them, and shout and tell me I've given her food she doesn't like etc etc

TinselCrack

Maybe put everyone’s food in the middle of the table to help themselves. Make sure there is always something your DD likes, maybe start off with most things she likes and then very gradually just always one or two things she likes.
That way, you are not ‘giving her’ food she doesn’t like. She may feel very stressed and pressured that the food is even on her plate.

It can often take years and years but by being completely matter of fact about it, you are building a positive relationship with food so when she does start eating more variety, she has no associations that food is good/bad/pleases her Mum if she tries some/is a reward/something bad,etc. Food is food.

Thanks Littledinaco

i would give her what you know she will eat, maybe a spoonful of other food so she can try, and try to relax.Also let her help with some easy cooking. anything for a peaceful life. and don't tell the HV.

Mumma I completely agree, I have no hard experience in the eating field but it makes sense to me not today force children into a corner.

It's the sure fire way to start eating disorders because you the parents are drumming it into the child.

Same with teeth brushing and forcing a tooth brush in when you could simply back off and reintroduce in a non forcible way a few days later.

I'd you make something into a big issue yourself child will take it on as well and big issue! Be discreet, be subtle, back off, come at a different angle!!,

She will eat when hungry enough.

She will eat when hungry enough

From experience, not true. Even with a neurotypical child