To not want to live off spaghetti bolognese?!

[Bancha]

I am trying to do the weekly meal plan and I don’t want to eat the same meals yet again! Toddler is 2.5 years and is quite fussy with food. On nursery days we get a pass because she has tea there and something small when we get home depending on how hungry she is. But that leaves four days a week to find something she will eat for tea with us.

I think I’ve followed all the advice on here - we eat the same as her, sometimes adding bits to ours that she won’t touch. When she doesn’t eat we don’t comment on it. Try not to put any pressure on her or seem like we want her to eat. If she doesn’t eat she can have toast or cereal so she’s not hungry but not another meal or snacks. But she will only reliably eat spaghetti bolognese, sometimes pasta with tomato sauce (extra veg blended in), pasta with pesto, and pizza. God forbid I try to add peas.

Of course, madam eats nearly everything at nursery.

Am I alone in this? Is this my life now? I’m so sick of bolognese!

If she won’t eat, NOTHING else. She won’t die of starvation. If she can eat at nursery, she’s just being manipulative.

Oh sure - but in the evenings we ate at grown up time.

However, even if you do eat at the same time, I wouldn’t force myself to eat like a toddler - even good toddler eaters can’t eat spice etc.

even good toddler eaters can’t eat spice etc.

Whyever not? Surely the only things that toddlers can’t eat compared to adults is large amounts of salt. I was happily chomping biriyani as a toddler. I can’t imagine babies and toddlers in India are eating nuggets, chips and peas.

Make a big batch of bolognese that you can defrost for her and have whatever you like to eat. If you're all eating together, maybe she'll get curious and want to try what you have.

It's a guideline not a law that you should eat together and the same thing!

@fluffythecactus interesting to hear it from the other side.

We reckoned on DS eating about 1.5 meals a day for a while. I figured he would eat if hungry (I always put stuff he'd eat on his plate, often a bit of bread and butter on a separate part of a divided plate) so I let him down from many evening meals without eating anything and didn't give alternatives. It really wasn't a punishment, it was just going with his choice, made 100% easier by the fact that his weight percentile was never lower than his height percentile.

As it turned out I might have got it wrong - we now know he's autistic and he doesn't seem to get hungry or full much. However he survived just fine and he now eats a really good variety of food (for an autistic child) with very little anxiety or stress. I don't think you need to torture yourself about a child going to bed hungry having refused food you know they like. Toddlers haven't read the textbooks about 3 square meals a day.

Some good advice here, which we also need!

OP: my two cents is that we bought some extra large ice cube trays from Amazon. Perfect size for freezing toddler portions and fast defrost if I ever get around to refilling them

Laughing at toddlers can't eat spice. Someone tell my DN that. She's one and eats spicier food than me. I'll be sweating with tears running down my face and she's serenely dipping her poppadoms and munching. Did she want a drink? Did she fuck.

Definitely stop with the cereal and toast. As a pp said, it's a control thing. She will eat the food at nursery as she knows the toast isn't coming out.

Start giving her different meals and make it clear to her that she will not be getting toast or cereal. I wouldn't give her the banana or any 'pudding' either unless she has had an attempt at the dinner.

Ds1 was a dreadfully fussy eater for ages. He would only eat plain pasta,veg & cheese. I took the viewpoint that that was a balanced meal so he had variations on that plus some of what we were having. He's now 17, bigger than me and eats huge amounts of everything. I wouldn't worry too much.

do not have time to fuckarse about with fussy eating. This is dinner. Eat it or don't.
This.
All the alternatives and pandering encourages fussiness ( SEN different)
Its food not toxic waste and no there isnt an alternative.
Eat or dont.
This what we are having.
Mine got to choose breakfast and lunch.
I chose dinner.

I would absolutely send her to bed hungry. She eats what you eat or she doesn't eat. Otherwise, it's spag bol for you ad infinitum.....🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I'll go against the grain here and say, for the sake of your own eating pleasure, it's fine to let's say 4 nights out of 7 the adults eat something different to the kids. Making a pre prepared spag bol, or sausage and peas or baked potato or pasta for kids while parents have curry or something they don't like isnt much work and is fine esp when they are v small. As they get older it is easier to start doing same food for everyone.

My DS ate spag Bol every night for 2 years. I’d batch cook the bolognese and freeze 3-4 tablespoons each in those little sealable IKEA bags - defrost in the microwave in about 5 minutes, and boil pasta or spaghetti fresh. The spag Bol was made from mince as a base but was packed full of lentils, tomatoes, garlic, carrots and mushrooms. No drama, no food refusal, and he ate it all up every night. Eventually he did start stretching his food wings and now he’ll eat pretty much anything. He had a teriyaki bao bun after school today and will likely have a chicken curry tonight. His favourite is still bolognese though - 10 years on! My point is, just give her bolognese but make it as healthy as possible. Eventually they become interested in what others are eating.

You've never heard of a family eating together?!

Personally I'm so glad we eat once, all together. If we made one meal for the children and then another, entirely separate meal for us later I'd feel like we did nothing in an evening except get home, cook and then go to bed.

Thank you all so much for these replies. I have read every one of them and will go through them again.

It seems like the consensus is we’re being too soft, which is probably fair. The thing about it being her favourite foods rather than the only things she likes is a really helpful way to frame it, thanks for that, @ManateeFair . It’s also really interesting to hear from people who had food issues as a child and the different things that helped them. I agree that punishing anyone for not liking something isn’t the way to go @fluffythecactus . I think that’s why I started allowing the cereal/toast instead when she was littler as I wasn’t sure why she wouldn’t eat some things as she couldn’t tell me, but obviously it’s become unhelpful as she can refuse foods I know she likes now.

@Luredbyapomegranate i love all these names by the way. We do eat with her on non nursery days as we like to eat as a family. We try to make meals that accommodate what we want and like with what she will eat but recently she’s become so much fussier hence the post. But I can’t believe you’ve never heard of people eating with their children?!

I will definitely be going through the replies and following the advice on here though. I know some people post on AIBU with no intention of taking advice but I am taking all this on board 🙂

Does she like other pasta dishes?

I am by no means an expert but I'm a huge fan of all eating together and eating the same thing with no other options available - but I think it's best to then give them some autonomy within that. We have one meal and that's that but I try (not always successfully - we also have 'no vegetables then no yoghurt' conversations at times) to not get involved in what they eat from it. It's a rare meal where they both eat absolutely everything, and I tell myself they eat balanced diets even if not balanced meals. For instance tonight was a salmon tray bake with new potatoes, broccoli and roasted cherry tomatoes all in, and then peas on the side. I could have told you beforehand that they'd both eat the potatoes, the tomatoes and the peas but the four year old would eat the broccoli but not the salmon and the 18 month old would eat the salmon but not the broccoli - and so it was. But they both ate a reasonable amount of food, and had other vegetables/sources of protein during the day. They both get served a little of everything, though, even if I could bet my house it'll end up untouched.

I am also deliberately relaxed about picking things out (from the four year old) - it can be a bit infuriating as he painstakingly removes every piece of onion from his meal but I don't want to stop cooking with onion and he doesn't want to eat them and so I grit my teeth and ignore it. I think otherwise you end up going down that route of presenting every meal as deconstructed, which I try to avoid.

@OompaLoompaa she eats pasta with tomato (hidden veg) sauce, cheese sauce, pesto, bolognese. She is suspicious of any and all vegetables I try to get into her so I would make all the above with veg but it really puts her off even trying it. I think it’s the textures she doesn’t like. She would eat her body weight in smoked salmon, which is a very easy texture to eat.

@Hardbackwriter that sounds delicious. I would throw a parade if DD would eat like that!

It was quite a good night! There are occasions where DS1 just eats plain rice for his dinner, studiously ignoring the actual meal, with the nutrition in it, that it is supposed to be accompanying. Again, I figure that he eats variety in most of his meals so the occasional meal of just rice won't hurt!

It is sort of easier with two in a weird way because they have quite different likes and dislikes and I'm not making three meals so I feel like catering to it is more firmly off the table and I'm more accepting from the off that it's a rare meal that will please everyone in its entirety (spag bol, incidentally, is on that very short list of universally acceptable meals!). I think I used to fret more about it when it was just DS1 (he is also the fussier of the two - for now, DS2 is only 18 months and probably has it all to come!).

Check out feeding littles on Instagram.

We went through this exact phase and I think we're coming out the other side now 2y 10m. Tonight she had Homemade salmon fingers, paprika wedges and veg, last night a lentil dhal...unthinkable a few months ago!

@Bancha oh I am all for eating with kids, but no - weekday dinners we ate later when they were in bed (else might now be divorced…) But no most of my friendship circle wouldn’t eat w toddlers in the weekend in the evening, although they would sit with them.

@Bancha

Going to bed a bit hungry will not do her any harm.

And it will help her develop her cause and effect thinking.

No harm ever came to anyone from missing one meal.

My toddlers eat plenty of spicy food! Their all time favourite meal is Dad's chilli. He makes it shockingly spicy, so we add a bit of yoghurt to mellow it. As the kids develop a taste for it, we gradually remove the yoghurt.

Obviously it's up to you what you feed your kids, and if you aren't bothered about spicy stuff then I wouldn't bother getting your kids into it for the sake of it, but we have always eaten lots of spicy food and I wasn't about to stop just because we had kids!

If it's their first time trying it, I would have a cup of milk on hand to calm their mouth.

My DD has got a bit better as she has got older. But I'm with you in that none of the tips work! Especially 'if they cook it with you then they'll eat it'...I put up with all the mess etc etc and she still won't even taste it!!! And she's been brought up the same as my eldest who will eat almost anything.