Ok....so there I was, the smug mum whose DD eats everything, tries new things, clears her plate............

[domesticallychallenged]

.......and then along came DS (aged 3.10) who eats such a small selection of food! He would live off ham sandwiches if I let him!

How do you tempt fussy eaters? HELP!!!!!!! arrrrrgggghhhhh!!!

I don't know but I feel your pain. DD gets offered the same as us, no alternatives. Eats hardly anything at mealtimes instead lives on fruit, yoghurt and breakfast cereal.
Today has turned down lovely chicken and mushroom risotto in favour of licking her finger and picking up parmesan.

Er...you don't. You just wait for them to grow out of it.

DD, 10, is, umm, much improved now but I think most people would still class her as a nightmare to feed.

i think you just have to leave them alone and hope they get better. there was a programme on last year about fussy eaters and basically once you rule out that you're the problem in some way (hectoring, babying, other parental weirdnesses) then it just leaves kids who are very sensitive to change and to textures and tastes and bless them, they'll get to the point that they want to get out of it.
anyway, nothing wrong with a ham sandwich.

Agree you wait . DD is now 10 and also much improved by my standards, though not sure about other people. She is much more up for trying new things and has discovered she likes chicken tikka and bombay potatoes, which is nothing short of a miracle.

DS aged 3 is very fussy too. Basically I just keep trying to press forward with any positive changes. So over the last few months he has become quite keen on raw carrots so I make sure we have those more often than I would really want to. Then recently he will accept pasta sauce on his pasta, so have been sneaking in extra vegetables and then whizzing them up with the blender. I also keep presenting vegetables even though he refuses to eat them and serve him with stuff he is unlikely to eat such as lasagne, on the basis that maybe he will sometimes.

have to admit its a bit of a pain, and socially embarassing too, thought I would have one of those DCs that wolfed down spinach and ricotta ravioli and such like.

don't make a fuss
just keep offering tiny portions of something esp when you know they're hungry.

DD1 was a right PITA and now is pretty good (still fussy though, like a sprinkling of any herb when we're out means i have to sit there picking it all off grrrr)

DD2 now 3.7 was great and is now a complete fuss pot.

Oh, I forgot, if you can persuade him to eat soup at some point, that is a major breakthrough.

You can conceal all sorts of healthy things in an innocuous soup.

Just relax

It is quite, quite normal for small children to have different tastes to adults and we forget that, a generation ago, hardly any of us as children had anything like the range of food on offer that children today have. As a child in the 1970s - in a relatively affluent, sophisticated, middle-class household - the range of foods I ate was nothing like the range of foods offered to my children today.

Children survive very well indeed on a diet of chicken, sausages, fish fingers and ham, with a few peas and cherry tomatoes thrown in for good measure and an apple, banana or clementine for dessert

Thank you all - I will carry on as normal then. We eat together and he gets the same as everyone else. I try not to make it into an issue (was convinced the same tact made DD the dream eater she is but DS had proved that wrong).

Thanks again for the advice and reassurance that he is normal