To Think A Lot Of People Are Unrealistic About This

[TheShellBeach]

I am so sick of seeing threads about children whose diets are less than perfect.
I frequently see the response "Children won't starve themselves."

That is not true for a number of children. Some of them, those with ASD and ARFID, simply cannot cope with various tastes and textures, and would rather starve than be forced to eat something they find repugnant.

Then there are the virtue-signallers who love to tell us that their children eat any number of vegetables and other foods. That is not helpful when you have a child who already has an extremely limited diet.

AIBU to think that a lot of parents do not realise what a struggle food can be for some children, and by extension, their parents?

This is simple.
the children die.

just like people like me die in these countries today or died even 50 years ago or less in places like the uk because we didn’t have access to medication that keeps us alive today.

some of us are only alive because of modern science and society. The supply chain woes of the pandemic have been a startling reminder of just how fragile our existence actually remains.

I hear you OP, but I also want to say that a child doesn't need to have SEN or a condition to be fussy, they are just like that sometimes. And that fussiness is not necessarily created/exacerbated by the parents. When I weaned DD she would eat absolutely anything and everything. Her diet was amazing. Now she is 2,5 it's still okay but definitely more limited than it was. She eats fruit and veg but the main struggle is getting protein in her because she dislikes most meat and fish. She will eat eggs sometimes, so she has them fairly often, and I can occasionally get her to eat sausages. I buy the best kind I can (98% pork, watch salt content, etc) but the other day I still saw a parent on here slated for giving their toddler sausages as they're processed. Sometimes people are doing their best and others can be unhelpful 🤷🏻‍♀️

The thing about children who live(d) in countries/time periods with more restricted food choice is that often you'd get the same meals at predictable times every day. Those meals might not be very nutritionally sound e.g. in the early 20th Century, a lot of the working class would fill up with bread and butter etc as there wasn't much else available. Or in other countries, they'd eat a lot of plain white rice etc. For a lot of the sort of children we are talking about, they'd actually be very happy to have one consistent food available regularly, I think.

It's a relatively modern idea that we want a different meal every night of the week, so you'd have a pasta dish one day, fish the next, curry the day after, maybe a salad the day after that, pizza as a treat on friday. That's an awful lot of flavours/textures and it's constantly changing and unpredictable.

For some of these children, if, from early childhood, their meals had followed a predictable pattern of porridge in the morning, bread and butter at lunch time, some kind of stew/soup for the evening meal, with the possible exception of a roast dinner on Sunday, that might actually be more acceptable to them, because they know what to expect nearly every mealtime. Whereas in the modern world, they are expected to deal with a much wider set of flavours/textures and they're expected to eat different meals every day.

(To be clear, I totally accept there are also some children who would e.g. never eat stew because they simply can't cope with the texture, and they would have probably died young, maybe of a childhood illness as they'd have had a weaker immune system.)