Please help - My toddler wont eat properly - wont sleep. I'm struggling to cope

[Jas8085]

Hi all,
I am hoping someone can help me sort this out. DH and I are both struggling to cope. DS has just turned 2. He wants crunchy things all the time or just milk. When I offer dinner, he doesn't eat much and then drinks 2 full bottles of milk through the night - waking up every few hours. We are both exhausted. I also noticed that he gets a lot of wind when he sleeps without eating properly. So he wakes up crying too.

I offer him a lot of different things for dinner just so that he eats well and sleeps well. My evenings are completely consumed with this ritual EVERY SINGLE DAY. Offer item1 - he eats a little bit. Then offer item 2. Then item 3. All these are freshly made food like egg, pita bread with hummus, rice with veg, flatbread with carrots. I started giving him banana milkshake (just banana and milk - no sugar) in the end - before he sleeps. If everything fails, sometimes out of sheer desperation, I let him have cereal.

Its just 11am and I'm so tired already. Poor DH must also be feeling awful at work. I am currently on an extended maternity break - but planning to return to work soon. I'm terrified.

Please can anyone help me? I'm so fed up and tired and desperate. How can I get this guy to eat well and sleep so that I live to see next year?

Stop the milk at night. Easier said than done, I know, but that's the key. Will he eat if you feed him while he's watching tv? Not ideal but something we've done with all ours at various points. Will he eat stuff like pizza, chips, fish fingers? Feed him what he likes until you break the milk habit.

Don't keep offering him loads of different stuff either. I have been guilty of this in the past, but make him something he likes and if he doesn't eat it, move on to pudding, e.g. weetabix and banana, plain sponge cake and yoghurt.

What does he eat during the rest of the day?
How many meals/snacks/milk?
Is he always picky about what he eats?
What times is he eating, when is dinner and bedtime?

If he's waking in the night he'll be tired and not interested in eating, so it's a vicious circle. He's waking in the night more from habit than hunger, I suspect, and then even when exhausted his digestive system will be keeping him awake as it deals with the milk, so that's not doing him any favours. I completely understand how you've got to this point but it needs to stop! For your sake and his.

You need to night wean and stick to you guns. It is really hard. But it takes about two weeks of awfulness and he’ll learn that there’s no milk at night.

Also, only offer one thing for dinner. DD has small portions of what we have (bolognese, fish pie, macaroni, omelette etc) all with lots of veg and loads of carbs. I also find she eats more if I take her out in the fresh air and run her ragged (but we live in the countryside). She isn’t a great eater but my strategy now is to not pay attention to it. She’ll eat if she’s hungry. And I try not to make a fuss out of dinner anymore because she knew something was up. I think she wasn’t eating out of bloody mindedness sometimes.

Is he teething at the moment? It could explain his preference for crunchy things. You could try swapping soft foods for crunchier equivalents such as:

Rice - rice cake
Cooked carrot - carrot sticks
Fish - fish fingers
Bread - Toast, Ryvita, oatcake, crackerbread, bread sticks
Cooked veg - celery, red pepper and cucumber sticks
Apple crumble - pieces of fresh apple plus a biscuit
Cheese - cheese spread/slices on crackers/toast

The not-sleeping stages are so hard!
I agree with above - the milk at night is keeping this going.

It has become a regular part of his calorie in-take and it isn't helping his sleep.

Aim to offer only water at night.

You could 'cold-turkey' it - or you could give a mix of milk and water - that gradually gets to be all water by the end of two weeks.

Be ready for disturbed nights while this happens - if you can 'shift' work it with someone else /get some rest in the day it will help. However this is for the greater good and you will be much happier once you all have nights without feeding.