Help me turn around my terrible eating toddler

[DeepaBeesKit]

DD is 2. Prem baby, never had a big appetite and is underweight. NHS are largely useless in offering any help/understanding how stressful it is when you have a child won't eat and is not putting on enough weight.

Used to eat a better variety of food but rapidly become awful- refusing to eat much of anything except breadsticks/crackers, chips, cereal etc....rejecting most meat, vegetables, fruit.

Attempts to simply not make available the preferred snackier foods means she just eats basically nothing and is not gaining weight.

Any advice please? No other developmental concerns at all, no sensory issues etc. Loads of speech, good motor skills etc.

Morechoc I might pm you

To clarify, she has gone up a tiny bit on height centiles but is also worryingly short (tall family, she's only 5th % height). So overall growth is a worry.

if you have a very bad day before bed out the TV on for 20 mins and spoon feed yoghurt while she is zoned out.

Ha yeah this doesnt work. She never zones out enough to let us spoon feed her. We've tried this a lot.

@Morechocmorechoc sorry to jump on but may I PM you about food issues? As previously posted my toddler is a horrendous eater and I’m keen for any advice x

It sounds as though she doesn't have a sweet tooth, as she's refusing the sweet things in favour of savoury items.

I was similar as a kid, but also, to quote my mother, 'turned my nose up at almost everything' because I didn't want milk, didn't want bread, didn't want biscuits or cakes or chocolate, didn't want cereal, didn't want pasta, didn't want pies, didn't want fish fingers, didn't want anything battered or breaded but would come back from parties with reports that I really liked peanut butter or prawns or other things that never formed part of my daily diet. She was also baffled by how many vegetables I would eat.

I then went on to find as an adult that there's actually tons of things that I love to eat.

Turned out that I had celiac disease and have to avoid cows' milk entirely and have low lactose dairy products made from Ewes' or Goats' milk. I also found out that I needed to have more salt than normal (POTS) and that she was told when I was a child that she needed to cut dairy and wheat out of my diet when they were investigating my almost daily stomach pains, severe constipation lasting weeks at a time, random puking incidents where I'd recover instantly after throwing up and headaches/migraines, but she refused because she didn't believe in faddy eating also an element of racism as the food I clearly liked was 'all foreign'

I now think that as a tiny child, I had already begun to associate foods containing wheat and dairy with feeling ill and was also instinctively wanting salty things.

I now eat rice or potatoes with almost every meal and enjoy a diet consisting largely of those, meat/fish/shellfish, vegetables and lots of flavourings, herbs and spices.

Perhaps your DD is doing similar?

@Buffyfan26

Of course.

Couple of things :

1. Have you tried letting her eat in the car? And in the pram?

1. You know those squeezy pouches? Will she eat those? I know you probably don't want to go back down the puree route but you can get some reusable pouches and make your own stuff to go in them. Carrot and Lentil soup blended up for example.

Also, fwiw, DS would only eat cheese, crackers, peanut butter and Scrambled eggs at that age. And he didn't eat much of that at all! He eats most stuff now.

My dd15 went though a stage like this. I made a sandwich and cut it into fingers, put it into an empty crisp packet and she scoffed the lot every lunchtime

Obviously not when she was 15, she was around 2

working hard

op, my toddler wasn't even preterm but is 2nd percentile for height and weight. We tried so much. We went private as NHS didn't help even when he had to 10 weeks of white diarrhoea. In the end, we have largely relaxed and accept him for who he is. He will occasionally eat well. Mostly if it's plain pasta and as long as he eats other foods every now and then in the week, no matter how little, we consider it a win. He is now 3.5 and can still fit in 18-24 months clothes. It's hard sometimes but he is happy and healthy and that's all that matters.

ps: Pvt paed found he had lactose intolerance which he has since outgrown. He has refused milk most of his life