To say to parents of fussy eaters…

[dogssaywoof]

That it’s not your fault?

I’ve seen lots of posts on here where parents of fussy eaters are told that it had just fed their child a better diet/didn’t give any other options/let them try different foods as a baby etc etc that they wouldn’t be such a fussy eater. it always sounds like there’s an underlying blame on the parents for not trying different or more adventurous foods because someone else said they fed their baby a better diet and now they eat quinoa and olives and honey smoked salmon etc.

i just wanted to post to say that this is NOT always the case.

as a baby, I was fed a multitude of different foods from weaning. As a 2 year old I ate mussels, asparagus, garlic mushrooms, and all sorts of other weird and wonderful foods. I ate every fruit and vegetable. Was as far from a fussy eater as possible. But as I got older as a child that changed completely. I like vegetables now but only a few types vs every type as a 4 year old. I used to love seafood and physically don’t think I could swallow it out of disgust now. I don’t like egg yolk, again, something I loved and had no problems with it. There’s a list of things I dislike now. If I get a burger I have to get absolutely everything off it. No cheese. No salad. No pasta. No pizza. No red meat. No dressings/dips/sauces. You get the drill

im not saying it’s good to be a fussy eater because obviously it can be restrictive but what I am saying is that it’s not always to do with the foods etc you feed them as an infant. Otherwise I would be the most adventurous eater in the world! My mum took me to the dr as a child who said it’s just the way some people’s tastebuds are and it’s normal. Sometimes tastebuds change over time and people can dislike things, some people will dislike more things than normal but if your child is fussy please don’t blame yourself because actually it’s probably nothing to do with what you fed them and it’s just the way they are!

I doubt anyone would want to go out for a meal with someone as unpleasant as you.

I have a ds with ARFID who eats only two foods and one of those is Dairy Milk and I have another who eats anything offered and always has. The others fit somewhere in the middle yet they were all fed and weaned the same, they all got the no pressure, plenty of variety approach. I don't think I could have done anything differently that would have changed the outcomes.

Spaghetti butter and a teeny bit of salt is a hit. As is plates that have seperate bits. Recently got some of Amazon you can microwave!

It's really hard once you're labelled as "fussy". I got no bloody credit growing up that I loved mushrooms, olives, anchovies and capers which are apparently "acceptable" things to dislike, but unfortunately I don't like mayonnaise or salad (lettuce/tomato/cucumber tastes bitter to me). This means:

No sandwich meal deal if there's no plain ham or cheese
Plain burger in McDonalds/Burger King (or I have to order the one with bacon and BBQ sauce, which I like)
I don't eat side salads on things like jacket potatoes
I don't eat potato salad or coleslaw

And oh my goodness, growing up it was a nightmare. Mum hissing at me that I had to eat the prawn cocktail at a relative's Christmas dinner, making me cry. Ordering a plain McD's and being told to scrape off the mayo when it wasn't plain. School dinners with tuna mayo in that I couldn't eat.

I won't do that to DS. His diet is limited but it contains chicken/pasta/tomatoes/cheese/beans/potato and loads of fruit. He won't starve.

As is anything fibrous like chicken or other cooked meat.

Ah, "stringy" food - my DD's nightmare!

I don't think they're is an increase in fussy eating now, rather an increase in variety, so in the past it would be far more normal to eat the same things repeatedly.

I have a DS who started rejecting foods at 14 months old, and by age 2 he was refusing all vegetables, most fruit, bread, pasta, cheese, eggs, and most cooked meals of all types. Now age 8 he’s still the same but will eat hot Asian meals ie curry and rice, satay chicken, sweet n sour stir fry, fish - but excluding all vegetables still. Will now eat rice and some noodles with these, pasta very occasionally as Mac n cheese at school.

He’s been under a dietitian for 18 months at age 4-5, been assessed by phone by an Occupational Therapist, and they both say he is choosing to eat selectively. As he’s a normal weight and healthy they say nothing can be done except keep offering a range of foods.

I won’t lie that I hate the food waste, find it frustrating, and live for the day when he can get his own meals when he’s older. So many people going hungry in this world and I just can’t abide good food being wasted (EXCLUDING those with genuine reasons obviously like Arfid, ASD etc).

I do wonder about food fussiness in homes where food is scarce both here and in poorer countries, and if there is still the same level of fussiness. Maybe some children are just offered too much choice, are too over-fed, and it’s all a power struggle for young children who have little control over anything else in their life. I know I’m grasping at straws but I am absolutely sick to death of seeing yet another meal scraped into the bin and a child shouting that he hates the food ☹️

I was a fussy eater (and WOULD choose to starve rather than eat the foods I disliked) and my sisters ate whatever was put in front of them. My mother used to wail that she hoped I would have a child like me so I'd understand how upset I was making her by refusing to eat her good home-cooked food. She got her wish in that just one of my children had what would now be labelled ARFID while the others all ate a wide range of foods. I'd decided that my own fussiness, which resolved in my teens, was due to coercive feeding behaviour, and promised myself I would handle fussy eating in a gentler way, but even so DD2 also ate only about a dozen different foods, all of them starches or boiled vegetables, until her teens. We have no reason to believe that either DD2 or I are neurodiverse or had significantly different upbringings from our siblings.

I think people who say that fussy eating is caused by parenting have never partented a fussy eater. It’s absolutely all about luck not judgement. Same with sleeping.

I didn't realise what a poor cook my mum was until I met dh. She was better at cakes.
I would have loved more variety, but it was cheap and basic. Apart from curry with sultanas. Boringly nutritious though. I can't eat cabbage, liver or butter beans to this day.

Absolute amen to you.

People use ready made baby food pouches to wean, give children bland rubbish and I even heard a parent say to a toddler the other day "no you can't try it, you won't like it, it's spicy"

A very tiny minority of people have genuine sensory sensitivity to food. Even then, if they had never been fed a chicken nugget, smiley face chip, instant noodles or a tin of spaghetti then they wouldn't be able to restrict their diet to that. Even with genuine restrictive eaters I gave no time for parents complaining their child eats turkey dinosaurs, Coco pops and micro noodles because they shouldn't have been fed if in the first place a a meal option.

I have a friend who complains her daughter (3) won't eat meals. Multiple times I've seen her turn up for a day out with a snack, have another pan au chocolat at 11:30 or something equally huge for a toddler then at 12:15 they are saying " see she just won't touch her lunch. It defies belief.

We are a very foody family, cook everything from scratch, every cuisine and every type of fruit and veg. 1 meal round the table. You don’t like it, you go without.

Still got a son weaned from the same pot as his twin who has always struggled
and now at 18 eats very little other than beige dry. Many many nights he went to bed hungry.

Looking back, do you wish you'd done anything differently? Even just serving him some toast or porridge at bedtime?

Not sure because now I’d be blaming myself but looking bank meals must have been hard for him.

DH wasn’t fed these kind of things but he is really fussy. I have seen him just go hungry for 48 hours as there was nothing he’d eat. Eventually his mum gave up as she’d tried punishing, pleading, bribing, letting him starve and he ended up getting plain pork or chicken every night as at least he was eating something. I have managed to widen his horizons a bit but he is still a stubborn eater.

i was labelled fussy but my mum is a shit cook and meals were very rarely nice but as my brother would eat anything I was the fussy I’ve. I always wondered why it was ok for my parents not to eat things and be allowed preferences but as children we weren’t allowed the same.

I've a 2 year old who we though was fussy. Turns out he has sensory issues, he was exposed to a wide variety of foods , textures and flavours but right from weaning he was very selective about what he would eat. Its definitely not our fault and we can only work with him now to widen his safe foods at his pace.

But if your child starts refusing anything then you offer foods you never thought you would.

when you child has gone days without eating your standards on what they should eat strangely drop dramatically. In Ds case his safe foods are actually mainly salad and fruit but that in itself creates issues as the calories are nowhere near enough to sustain him. I would be over the moon if he asked for chicken nuggets!

until you have been in that desperate position of your child refusing everything then you really can’t judge.

If your child has been fed since birth by Ng tube, you get to the stage where any food eaten is good. Feeding turkey dinosaurs is far better than holding your child down to insert an Ng tube.
Obviously this is an extreme example but it is easy to be critical if you haven't experienced any real difficulties.

I even heard a parent say to a toddler the other day "no you can't try it, you won't like it, it's spicy"

If I heard that I'd assume the little one has recently tried spicy food and didnt like it, so the parent was just confirming that they wouldn't like this too.

Well exactly. I know DS found a BBQ Pop Chip spicy so if he asked to try one of my wasabi peas I'd say no. I don't want to expose him to new things he won't like because then he just stops trying new foods.

Fussy eating = attention seeking.

Fussy eating = attention seeking.

Totally disagree. If I didn't want to eat then I would have far rather had no attention and been ignored. The worse thing about not liking the food was the attention about it.
I still struggle to eat if I feel attention is on what/how much I'm eating or there's an expectation to eat it all.

YABU. While SEN / ND /sensory issues can absolutely cause fussiness, and nobody should feel bad about that. However that doesn't apply to most kids - instead so much food misery and bad health in the UK is driven by the food industry profiting off pushing ultra-processed snacks and prepared foods to families, and we can't let them off the hook.

I come from a culture where most children eat food that would be considered wildly adventurous here - the biggest difference I see is that families here are under time pressure, and they and the schools are under cost pressure, so there's a lot of ready meals and freezer food from a young age, and less time for children to relax and enjoy different foods. That's compounded by the insane snack culture, where kids fill up enough on processed foods and drinks between meals that they can comfortably refuse anything they don't love, knowing that more food will be along soon (or an alternative meal).

The time pressure and cost pressure is hard to fix, but the snacking can be - however it's such a norm here, I imagine it's hard to turn it around.

Fuck you, I almost starved as a child.