To starve my toddler

[TiredMama90]

My son is 3. He’s been a fussy eater since the beginning. I’m a single mum (not by choice). Admittedly some days, for an easy life, I’ve given him what he chooses.

It’s his 3rd day of not eating a decent meal and only wanting crap.

Shall I just refuse him the foods he wants (crisps, chocolate & the like) until he gives in and eats proper food.

How long until he will give in??

DD (just 3) has been a nightmare with food for the last 6 months. She likes porridge (at any meal), grapes, yoghurt, scrambled egg, toast cucumber and very little else. I have learned to stop making a fuss and let her get on with it.

Since the lockdown started and we have been at home all day I have been trying to broaden her diet. I grate cheese into her scrambled eggs, or add chopped up grilled bacon, put smooth peanut butter on her toast, and top it with cucumber, add honey and chopped apricots to her porridge. Her meals are the same as ours except I add something I know she will eat. We don't make any fuss- good or bad.
DH does the 'Oh this is nice? Do you want to try a bit of this?' to DS1 (who always says yes even though he has the same thing on his plate) and she often then says 'Me too Daddy'.
We have baked things like scones and mini-buns and shortbread and she likes to try what we have made.
We have done things like fajitas where she gets a tortilla and can choose what she puts on it- started with cucumber and progressed to a bit of grated cheese, now she adds a bit of chicken and a slice of avocado and sour cream. She ate a tuna fish sandwich at lunchtime with some soup. It's taken since the week before lockdown (she was off with a cough) but she really enjoys things now and it's such a relief.
Meanwhile Ds2 9m scoffs anything he can get his hands on.

You’ve already had lots of advice on here but here’s my two pennies worth. I have a 3.5 year old with developmental delays, (about the same as your child) and I have a 22 month old picky eater.

It’s really hard to get a picky eater to eat a balanced diet at the best of times - my 22
Month old needs cajoling and bribing to eat veg and protein that isn’t milk. My daughter with delays, I can’t get her to eat a thing she doesn’t want to. I don’t think I’ve ever got her to eat something she doesn’t want to. She has sensory processing disorder amongst other things. Luckily, she will eat a varied diet but not certain textures, but if I combined her with my picky eater, which is essentially what you have it would be really hard.

I just think you have a lot on. You’re a single parent and a parent of a child with delays, two huge things. I have found my daughters delayed have taken up so much emotional energy that’s not been room for other worries. My advice would be to try and cut out chocolate and crisps and swap for peanut butter, crackers and honey or jam, give vitamins and then just let it go. Accept the status quo changes with SEN and don’t let it get you down.

Probably terrible advice, but SEN is exhausting and there are so many battles, you need to pick the ones you can face. If your son looks healthy then he probably is fine.

Good luck with it all.

@TiredMama90 my gp has an online thing where you can get in touch and they either ring or email. Lots are working from home and so they have time for such queries. Does your gp run such a thing?

It won’t hurt to only have ‘healthy’ snacks available. Things like red pepper, carrot and cucumber chopped into toddler size fingers with hummus, cheese, Banana, cold chicken. If he doesn’t have access to chocolate and crisps, he will not eat chocolate and crisps.

These are the formative years when he learns good eating habits. Remember, he will learn by example, so you must be seen to be eating the foods you want him to enjoy.
Get him to help you prepare healthy meals, let him chop up grapes and cheese and add crackers to a plate then congratulate him on preparing ‘dinner’. Then you eat it with gusto.

I hope you both eat together at the table, that’s another important factor in encouraging children to eat.

Finally, could you plant some simple salad leaves, even cress that he grows all by himself, add it to an egg sandwich and enjoy his home grown food.

When he’s 14/15 and eating you out of house and home you will look back at these as the lovely years, I promise.

There are lots of things you can do if it's a sensory thing with food. Sounds a bit nuts but getting children to play with food can sometimes help as some children may even refuse to touch food. You can build sculptures with mash, run toy cars through beans, squeeze bananas, line up peas. All pretty gross! You dont need to talk about eating but gradually try to encourage touching and then finger licking.

Other things to make new food fun is to get it away from the stressful and familiar dinner time situation. Try a meal with lots of choice like making wraps together or pizzas. Have a picnic in a different room or make his room into a kitchen and eat there. Make healthy meals for his teddies or get him to serve you different foods or make you a sandwich. Dont worry if he doesnt eat, getting him to touch things and watch you eat them is a start.

Get an ice cube tray and fill it with little cubes of anything you can think of. I still do buffet style lunch and dinners if he asks but he is 14 now.
I used to put cheese, pasta, beetroot, apple, ham, anything that I thought it may be attractive. Dry fruit. And he can choose from the choices you give him and then the same at night but with a divided plate. Do mini versions of meals like sausage and mash o shepherds pie. But very little portions and he can have what he wants. If he doesn't want any just take it away and same again every day until he eats.

As previous poster said, eating with others is important as their behaviours are learnt by copying.

Don't worry about him not eating. He really won't let himself starve! But don't show doubt, stress or fear. Small kids play on that! Honestly, hold your line, don't worry, you're in charge, you know best.

I would not be able to let him go hungry but I would use bribery or whatever to get him onto a healthier diet. My DD was a fussy eater but would have had things like spaghetti bolognaise, , shepherds pie, fish fingers, cucumber, grapes, petit filou, cheese, marmite sandwiches. I would ditch the crisps first. Then gradually cut back on the chocolate over a few days.

If you have to give something like crisps...oven chips would be better. Instead of a chocolate bar..try a cereal bar with little chocolate chips in or a chocolate rice cake...and gradually move to healthier options.

I only gave my children water or milk to drink when they were little and they still mainly drink water as teenagers. My DD who was the fussy toddler now eats most things...still won't have mushrooms or courgettes but has a balanced diet!

I;m gonna go against the majority @TiredMama90 and say if its sensory he may not just give in and dig into his broccoli.

My 4 yo has sensory and food issues , he would just starve if the foods i put in front of him looked wrong, were the wrong colour, the wrong texture. We've made steps, but it's SLOW and sometimes it goes backwards.

Can you rwite a list of everything he will eat? Sometimes it can help you see a pattern in what is or isnt acceptable. For example, no ice cream, no yoghurt, no mash potato - we dont do wet white food.

Also agree with Boshmama

It can sometimes feel like the battle is lost over these things, the reality is there needn't be a battle over food. You are a team of two, he is the player and you are the manager. These formative years are your responsibility, life will be much easier for you both later on if you can take on little issues in the early years.

When he is hungry, he will eventually eat if it is there and available. Offer him choices, less of the one he likes, more of the one he doesn't. You will have a few meals that are a write-off going forward.

Eating grot, his little system will go into overdrive and you will soon (or now) have behavioural consequences too.

A lovely list from @YappityYapYap, and some great healthy and very popular other foods from other contributors, @LuluJakey1, @IHaveAMagicBean. Try to wean him off the bad things, and fundamentally (and I also concur) try not to have them in the house. You are still in with a good chance on day three, but this could be a really nasty habit to break come day 30.

Diarrhoea can be common consequence for toddlers who overdo certain fruits and veg, but mix these with carbohydrates and his system may tolerate them better.

Don't forget about drinks too. Plenty of water is a great habit to get into early, and go for a receptacle that he likes, 'sippy cup', beaker etc and just keep offering it to him with some insistence. Drop back on any drinks that might be keeping him going, such as reducing any morning milk in order to get his breakfast appetite back to where it should be.

From what you say I would be concerned about two possibilities. One is that there is a physical reason why he doesn’t eat, something that causes him pain so that now food is associated with pain. I would be very suspicious about that given what you say about him having an upset stomach, diarrhea, etc. The other is that he may have sensory issues which complicate his eating. Despite what other posters have said, DCs with sensory issues may eat in some environments but not others, it’s part of the complexity of their difficulties.

I would take him to the GP and start the long process for a referral. A specialist pediatrician would look to exclude any physical cause and them consider emotional and sensory issues.

Meanwhile, the more you battle with him, the worse he will get. If he does have a problem with food, and there is no clear line between regular fussiness and fussiness as a medical problem (ARFID), he will starve himself and children do end up in hospital, sometimes needing to be tube fed. I strongly advise you to look up Division of Responsibility and to always offer 2-3 of his safe foods along with everything else at every meal. You may think that him eating a limited number of ‘unhealthy’ foods is bad now, but things get much worse for DCs that further limit their list of acceptable foods to only a couple of specific foods.

You may need to restart weaning. Treat him like a baby and keep offering a bit of what you eat whether he eats it or not.

1. Don't have those things in the house, then they're not an option.
2. Keep healthy snack foods within easy reach on the table ALL THE TIME so he can reach for them - falafel, carrots, celery sticks, apple pieces.
3. This incredible book, Getting The Little Blighters To Eat, was recommended to me on here years ago and following its tips totally sorted out my fussy eating toddler: www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1408190745/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?psc=1&tag=mumsnetforu03-21&ie=UTF8

If he isn’t eating healthy can you get some vitamins in him

I also puree a lot of veg/lentils and add them to pasta sauce.

He has his daily dose of vitamins. He’s been having it since he was a newborn.

I’ve always made sure he’s had vitamins as I take mine daily (my diet isn’t great as I’m a binge eater).

My son doesn’t do “wet” foods. He will not eat anything with added sauces (weirdly enough used to have tomato sauce).

Now he has all dry foods (bar cereals). Used to eat chilli con carne with me but suddenly said it was disgusting and won’t touch it now.

He’s just not consistent. Won’t even touch chicken nuggets and chips!

If you're waiting for an assessment anyway see if there is an Early Years SEND Inclusion team near you. They were brilliant with us. Food wasn't so much of an issue for us, but the group we were in had a couple of children with very serious sensory issues round food (one with ARFID) and the group was fantastic.

Yeah me suggesting leaving him to eat and spy through the door is just something to try once or twice. I put cucumber in front of my DS loads of times while we were eating and he never touched it, would keep looking at me. Then I tried that once and he ate the cucumber, knew it tasted fine so then ate it infront of us. I did the same with different fruits. He just needed to be sat alone without attention on him a few times to try the food and see that he liked it. I think he got into a frame of mind that we were watching and as long as we were, he had options. No one there, no other options!

Don't worry about him not eating. He really won't let himself starve! How do you know? Some kids will. I was really lucky as I had a GP who had personal experience, funnily enough he had a teenage daughter with the same name and same phobia of food as my 4 year old. People telling me she wouldn't starve herself were the most irritating people in the world. She was so underweight she was in danger of being taken into hospital, if it hadn't been for the GP telling me to let her eat any rubbish she wanted as long as it had calories she would have been admitted. We got her to a normal weight and gradually as she got older she tried the occasional thing. Some kids will really starve themselves, they get to a stage where they don't even feel hungry.

OP please get medical advice. Some things that helped with mine
We let her eat what she wanted
We never tried to persuade her to eat anything
We had other children round and sometimes she might try something because they were
We tried blander and blander and it didn't work
She tried something a relative was eating that was spicy and loved it, that was our breakthrough.

Good luck.

Meanwhile, the more you battle with him, the worse he will get. If he does have a problem with food, and there is no clear line between regular fussiness and fussiness as a medical problem (ARFID), he will starve himself and children do end up in hospital, sometimes needing to be tube fed. I strongly advise you to look up Division of Responsibility and to always offer 2-3 of his safe foods along with everything else at every meal. You may think that him eating a limited number of ‘unhealthy’ foods is bad now, but things get much worse for DCs that further limit their list of acceptable foods to only a couple of specific foods. Fantastic advice.

It isn't always about rubbish food either, mine would eat green salad but wouldn't tolerate anything else with it so if you tried a bit of tomato or carrot that was the end of it, a particular yogurt that wasn't easy to get hold of (no local supermarkets stocked it) and home made fruit cake. Doctor wasn't worried as she was getting some protein, calcium, vitamin c, carbs. Just wanted me to give her as much as she would eat.

I’m in the process of getting my 13.5 year old diagnosed with ARFID - she had had an issue with food since she was born. One of the diagnostic markers for ARFID is. Traumatic birth experience - hers was stunningly traumatic. At 2 weeks old if she wanted no more milk then the choice had been made and absolutely no more was going in.

Her diet is pretty appalling. She has a dietitian who agreed that if you cut her, her blood would flow clear as she has no iron at all in her choices. ( we have since got her iron gummies and multi vit gummies that she will take - she also refuses all medicine).

DD2 is amazing but she didn’t conform to “if she is hungry enough she will eat it”. She very rarely feels hungry and has often fainted because she hasn’t eaten anything and will not have anything offered.

You need to find out if he is one of the “if he is hungry he will eat it” and “just 3 bits and you can go” type of fussy or the “absolutely under no circumstances will I eat this and I will fAint, need to go to a&e and be put on a drip and I still won’t eat it” type as the tips for moving forward are very different

OP, it's so bloody hard!

My son was exactly like yours this time last year; barely ate a thing - anything he asked for he left etc.

My advise? They WILL last longer than you will. DS got to three days without a square meal before I caved... if you have instagram check out kids.eat.in.color she's a nutritionist and I've gotten so much advice from her.

We've learnt this past year a lot of DS' aversion comes from sensory issues but even with improvements can be made.

My best advice is try little and often - always have a safe food on the plate and don't make mealtimes a battle.