help! how can i encourage a 2yr old eat meals

[pandagirl]

hello please help me!

we have my dp 2 year old son every other weekend for the whole weekend and he wont eat meals i've tried everything with him and i'm at my wits end.
All he seems to eat is biscuits and wotsits when he wants to eat we have stopped him eating then between meals so he would eat his meals but it doesn't work.Has anyone else had a similar problem if so how do i overcome it.

I had the same problem with my dh 2 year old daughter!!!! We got round it by ONLY offering her yoghurts or cheese or friut all day. She ate when she was hungry and i didnt mind her eating yoghurts and fruit as they were healthy. I also started offering her a bit of pitta bread and crackers and other little snack things as well as a small(very small) portion of what we were eating for dinner. No nice traets were offered! Give milk or water to drink or fresh fruit juice! He will get most of what he needs and it may take a few weekends but it will get better. Talk to his mum( not a nice prospect) but ask her to help encourafe him and avoid giving bad treats. My step daughter did eventually start eating meals but then went thorugh a phase of making herself sick, we ignored the sick and she had to go to bed (sick means poorly) a year on and she eats every meal we give her and still loves us! It was hard especially cos we only saw her at weekends and seemed to be disciplining her all the time but now we have a little girl who knows the rules and eats brilliantly and she doesnt hate us!

pandagirl - I agree 100% with childmindersam. I used to say "There's only fruit or yogurt available until the next meal time if you don't eat this" and they soon learnt. I introduced new foods gradually and let them leave one thing as long as they'd tried to eat that one thing. For example, if they had potatoes, carrots, peas and swede, I'd let them leave the swede as long as they tried it. After a while, I'd give them 2 foods that they weren't too keen on and they'd decide which one they liked the least and they'd leave that. Now they eat almost everything that's on their plates. It helps that I rarely buy crisps and biscuits. Pudding is more often than not a yogurt, fruit, rice pudding or crumble or home made cake. Hth. Good luck! P.S. Their sweets and fizzy drink tolerance level is very low, so they're climbing the walls after they've been to another child's party! Whoops!

hello thanks very much for your advice we took your advice and tried using it on sunday gave him breakfast he didn't want it, just screamed i dont want a hour later he wanted something to eat so gave him a small bannana then came dinner time again he wouldn't eat. any way to cut a long story short it came to 5.30 he still hadn't eaten apart from the bannana. we took him home and spoke to his mum about it her answer was he has days like that,we said he shouldn't be having junk food but 2 mins later she gave him 3 jaffa cakes. what a waste of time makes me so bloody angry. dont know what to do now.