My son’s suddenly gotten a lot pickier with food. Holding out for pudding.

[kayrayhunter]

My son’s suddenly gotten a lot pickier with food. At the moment he’s eating about 80% sweet stuff and refusing most of the savoury “healthy” options we offer.
I’ve been reading paediatric dietitian advice on picky eating (like this one on Raisly: https://raisly.com/uk/family-life/family-life-food-and-nutrition/top-tips-for-picky-eating/) and it says you should still offer dessert, but I swear it’s made him just hold out for something sweet.
Has anyone else had this? If you kept offering dessert, did it eventually balance out or did you change how/when you served it?

How old is he?

dessert is a common offering in babies and toddlers but I’m not sure why if I’m honest. My teen / tweens get pudding once a week.

if you still want to do pudding, then make sure it’s something like a apple and raisin homemade muffin or Greek yoghurt and fruit rather than a petit filous or rice pudding with jam mixed in.

We often give a small dessert alongside the main. Means no rushing the main, they often go between main and the yoghurt and fruit salad or whatever it is, and they end up eating more overall.

What is dessert though? If it’s fruit / plain yoghurt then just serve alongside. Anything more than thst should only be served occasionally.

It says 'if you're planning to offer dessert', so you don't have to do it at all. I think that advice is about not making dessert a 'reward' for eating your dinner, because that might reinforce the idea that the savoury meal is horrible and something you have to just get through. So if you're having it, you don't withhold it. But if you're not having it, your child can't hold out for it.

I'm mean, so I have mine when my children have gone to bed and they don't even know it's a thing.

I just wouldn’t do dessert. I don’t really know why it’s a thing after a full meal. And it’s causing issues so just remove it as an option.

What puddings are you giving him?
Mine could always have pudding regardless of what they’d eaten from their main course but they had to gamble whether it was chopped up fruit with a blob of yogurt or something ‘better’.

How old is he? Why are you allowing 80% of his food intake to be sweet? I’m confused by this.

Stop the dessert, don't even have one in the house and then you can't cave in to pressure. Have you been a bit of a push over?

I’ve never known why people think small children need something sweet after something savoury - as an adult I rarely have pudding, what does it add to a child’s diet (assuming it isn’t plain fruit/yoghurt)?

I would ditch non-fruit pudding for a while. A friend’s DS’s diet is still 80% fruit yoghurt at age 10 due to her always feeding it to him when he wouldn’t eat other food (which he did because he learned early on that food refusal = yoghurt). I’m surprised he has any teeth left (but I guess he’s got strong bones!).

My daughter loves dessert too but she only gets it once she’s eaten (most of) her main. If she doesn’t eat her main, she doesn’t get dessert. Simple. It’s a treat to be earned 😊

There's no requirement for any kind of dessert to follow a main meal. When I was a kid, we only ever had a proper dessert/pudding on a Sunday. The rest of the time we either had nothing, some bread & butter to fill up with, a piece of fruit like an apple or orange, or maybe a yogurt. Occasionally a small piece of cake if the housekeeping money stretched to it that week.