6 months and counting of food refusing - help!

[fourlegstwolegs]

DS is now just over 2. He was a brilliant eater up until about 6 months ago - when he suddenly became fussy. It is a total nightmare. Half the time he just point blank refuses to even try what's in front of him. Other times he will try one bit and refuse any more. Occasionally he will have a few bites.
Fruit he will just lick and put down (apart from bananas, which he does eat). He asks for apples but either just carries them around or licks them.
He goes no nursery twice per week and they say that 9/10 he flat out refuses to eat, despite all the kids around eating.
I try not to make a big deal out of it and never offer an alternative or pudding if he refuses to even try.
It is pretty soul destroying though and I am worried he isn't getting all his vits and mins. He eats breakfast no problem and will eat pasta and rice, but he won't eat anything else.
I don't know what to do :(

Ok, i am the adult who was your son as a toddler. Based on how my parents dealt with it this is my advice to you;

Keep offering dinner/lunch, but always have something on the plate that you know he does like and eats.

Dont put any pressure on him at meals. Set the plate down and begin a conversation about something else, like peppa pig or something to distract him- you eat as normal, try not to watch him eating/not eating.

Offer him smaller meals, (perhaps more often) they can seem less daunting to a child wary of food.

Involve him in preparation- where possible. Make it a fun activity for him. Even if its just him stirring a sauce. Get him involved and talk about how good a job he is doing and how much you will love his food.

Relax. I know, i know how hard this is to do- you are worried about him getting enough, but as long as he is eating something then he will be fine. I speak as a totally healthy adult who ate only cereal and chips until i was around 13. I still dont eat any fruit and very very little veg and have a very bland diet. I have never been ill other than a cold or a tummy bug. My food refusal has lasted for life due to how it was dealt with by those around me as a child. Please dont make the same mistake with your son.

Relax, keep offering, know that he will be fine.

Oh- and dont talk about his food refusal infront of or within earshot of him. He doesnt need to become aware there is an issue- if he does then he will view himself that way and labels stick. As far as he is concerned it is just food he likes and food he doesnt- dont make it any bigger than that for him.

Surly has it spot on. Lots of small meals is the way to go. Mostly things he'll eat with tiny portions of non-favoured foods offered on the side, with no pressure to eat them.

I assume he is getting enough food/calories not to be dangerously underweight?

He looks fine to me weight wise, although I think his legs look skinny perhaps that's because he is shooting upwards really fast. I think the nursery would say something if they were worried about his weight. With the huge amount he eats at breakfast I don't think he will waste away just yet, its the variety and balance I am worried about.
Good advice surly, thank you.

It is worrying when your child doesnt eat. All parents would worry so that is normal. Most children i know went through 'fussy/refusal' stages and most came out the other end with perfectly balanced diets and no lasting effects. There is no doubt in my mind that had my parents just let my refusal run its course then i'd have fallen back into normal eating habits in no time, im pretty sure i was just doing the normal toddler fussiness thing and being their PFB they panicked and thought it was some massive issue, which of course made it become a massive issue. I understand how that happened but i so wish it hadnt.

Your boy is only 2, still plenty of time for this to settle, as i said, relax, dont make an issue of it, make sure he gets plenty of the foods he does like and just get on with normal life. This only becomes an issue if you make it one. Personally i wouldnt bother getting him weighed unless he looked underweight but if it puts your mind at rest you could speak to HV.

Does he drink milk and do you give him multivitamins? I have a fussy 18mo and am reassured that she gets the calories from milk and the vitamins from Abidec if she has had a rubbish eating day. Makes it much easier to be relaxed about food refusal knowing there is a back up.

He refuses the liquid multivitamin. I wonder if there's another way I can get them into him? He LOVES milk!

We had the chewy bassets multivitamins. We called them sweets. You could only have one sweet after breakfast.

Yes my DC love the chewy type vitamins. Cant remember which brand but they look and tast just like sweeties. One after breakfast.

I can remember my Mum telling me my brother only ate bananas for 6 months - he then graduated to beans on toast for the next 6. He is now 49 and cooks and eats anything he can get his hands on. Except bananas and beans on toast, funnily enough

I can really sympathise, my 2 year old dd is very similar and it is hard not to stress about it. But I am learning to use my best poker face so she doesn't twig that it bothers me as much as it does! She also tends to eat a decent sized breakfast but often very little lunch or dinner. She's a real snacker and just doesn't do big meals. I'm just trying to work around the way she wants to eat rather than trying to change it.
Surlycue if you don't mind me asking, what was it your parents did that made the problem worse do you think? It'd be really helpful to know what to avoid doing!

I dont mind you asking at all, i'd far rather people avoided creating food issues so i'm happy to share.

According to my mum i suddenly started refusing food at 3 years old. I obviously dont rememer what her initial reaction was but i do remember many many meals spent dripping tears onto my plate, gagging on food and my mum getting really angry and frustrated. Also, everyone referred to me as 'the fussy one' i dont ever remember not being 'fussy' and i still get called it now. It was humiliating having other people discuss me as if i was a freak, right infront of me. Even school friends knew because their parents had obviously talked about me. Teachers took it upon themselves to "fix me" and i was regularly kept in during break and lunchtimes and made to eat whatever they had decided i would eat. Of course i couldnt, i vomitted and refused to eat it so i missed a lot of lunch times. I think my mum had asked the teachers for help out of desperation but it wasnt helping. She also took me to Gps and paediatricians, put me on diet charts with stickers and rewards and would place very daunting meals infront of me because she had decided she was going to fix me once and for all. This happened regularly and would always end in horrible screaming matches because i just couldnt even swallow the food. This all sounds quite horrific and i know is probably so far removed from what you would even contemplate but i can totally see how she ended up on the path that she did. She was worried and frustrated and probably fed up after a while that he couldnt have a normal family meal. People would ask her if i was eating any better which im sure didnt help her as the answer was always no. She probably felt pressure and as if she was failing. She finally saw sense when she brought me to another doctor who basically told her i was healthy, i was happy, leave me be. I was around 9 at this point and had been eating my very restricted diet for about 6 years. Something clicked and she realised the doctor was right. I was fine.

Basically, relax, offer healthy food along with familiar favourites, small meals and no focus on what they arent eating. Keep it positive. And dont lose yourself in stress about it. It will more than likely fix itself, as long as you dont make it an issue.

My MIL loves to tell me how my DH would only eat mashed bananas, porridge and scrambled eggs for about a year (lord knows how he wasn't constipated). He was fine and healthy otherwise and his GP, who fortunately is very straightforward, said he was fine and that it would pass. It did.

By his mid teens when I met him, he way way more adventurous and into food than any of our peers. Now he loves cooking and trying different foods so much that I am barely allowed in the kitchen (not that I mind).

I think so long as your DC isn't wasting away or becoming ill, as pp have said, not making a huge thing if it and waiting for it to pass is a good way forward. I am currently trying to remind myself of that whilst weaning my PFB who takes after his dad just a little too much :)

My little on can be quite fussy at times and was reluctant to try new things but found the following has helped:

• read the book "getting the little blighters to eat". Short, and full of fab ideas!
• taking my DD to the supermarket/farm shop/green grocers . She loves being involved in picking out vegetables and this week has eaten broccoli and sugar snap peas because of this!
• getting my DD involved in cooking! She is now constantly by my side in the kitchen and have bought her lots of child sized utensils so she can get involved! Even a mini Pyrex!
• I bought some vegetable and fruit flash cards from eBay and made up a matching game where she matches her toy vegetables and fruit with the cards. She loves this! She now raids my kitchen for real life veg to match I found a garlic in my magazine rack last week!
• ignore it. I now am much better at ignoring the fussy behaviour and she is much better with eating because of it!

Good luck

Surlycue thanks for sharing, wow that sounds truly awful - for you and your mum! You never really think about these things from a child's perspective, you just focus on needing to get them to eat properly. As a pp said, you definitely feel like you've somehow failed as a parent, or done something wrong if your child is a fussy eater. I will be certain not to take the approach your mum did, even though she did so with the best intentions.

Yes i dont blame her ar all because she was doing it for what she thought was my own good, and i think once she had started down that path it snowballed and was impossible to undo the damage i.e: meal times and eating were such an issue for me that it just wasnt possible to revert back to 'no fuss/relaxing"

Definitely better not to start down that route if it all possible. I think it hits a lot of parents unawares that toddlers go through a fussy stage which they will come out of themselves. They dont realise it is normal and not to panic. Good luck with your DC, best advice i can give is to relax, relax, relax. Both my dcs went through fussy, i handled it badly with PFB, much like my mum. (No doctors or anything but i panicked and started reward charts- basically letting him know there was an issue and putting pressure on him to eat) He is still picky at 9. With ds2 i pretty much carried on business as usual and he eats everything going now aged 5.