DD (3) and food battles - help

[BeepBeepB]

DD is 3 and has never been a big eater. She was bf then we did BLW, but she didn’t take much food until she was well over 1. She’s perfectly within her weight and height, just never a big eater - prefers snacks/smaller meals, and was better at nursery. This is something we’ve just worked around. We also have a DS(5) who loves food and happily eats/tries most things, and both DH and I cook and and enjoy lots of different food.

Over the last few weeks food has somehow become a real issue for us. She seems to purposely ask for things and then refuses to eat it (she did it with toast this morning). She won’t try anything new, and has stopped eating things she liked before (beans on toast used to be an easy one she enjoyed). She will still eat porridge, cereal and fruit, toast, and yoghurt - but won’t even try any of the meals we have (general family stuff - pasta, meat/fish/veg, rice, sausages, potatoes, omelettes).

She also doesn’t eat sandwiches/wraps/pittas, hummous, tuna, eggs in any form, fish fingers, nuggets (or anything with a crispy coating), sausages, spaghetti hoops, anything with vegetables in it, pieces of meat or fish, potatoes apart from the odd chip, or salads.

We’ve got a relaxed attitude towards food - she’s not expected to clear her plate and we all sit and eat and chat together, but I’m getting really tired of throwing away toast she said she wanted, pasta she said she’d eat, or her picking the ham out of the ham sandwich she insisted on having and having two bites of the bread. When we put a plate of food in front of her she just goes quiet and shakes her head, or says ‘I don’t like it’, so she ends up with weetabix and a banana shortly after. She’s perfectly healthy in other ways - chatty, intelligent, engaging and funny little girl.

Any ideas? 😫

I've recently read My Child Won't Eat as my 2 yr old is a fussy eater and always has been. I've been following his approach for the last few weeks and it's no magic bullet but I do think it is helping to some extent, mainly in reducing stress for all of us even if it hasn't hugely improved DD's eating. I would deffo recommend it.

Sorry if this doesn't help, meant to be supportive. My youngest weaned on everything and ate near enough what we all did.

After some food refusal, some pandering to her requests and vaguely trying (but probably not concealing) stress and "encouragement" to eat better we were on a worsening trend of "fussy" and by 3 dd only ate ham sandwiches, sausages, Weetabix, some types of cake and apples. She drank milk.

Now at nearly 5 she nearly eats what we do again. Cucumber, carrots, broccoli, potato, sweetcorn, tuna wraps, fish fingers, cheese sandwiches, all fruits (and now also any sweets or cakes offered! Ah well!).

This has been by a shift to genuine no pressure, at the start she only had to allow us to leave a little of our food on her plate, knowing it wont be eaten but can go back in fridge. Occasional comment about how a slightly younger cousin loves eating xyz because he is older now. If we talked about food and she said "I don't want sweetcorn" I would say "that's right, you don't eat sweetcorn, you are only 3, we like sweetcorn but you don't eat it" or "I eat sweetcorn, but I am 39" and she did start to notice her younger cousins were praised for eating their dinners when we were together. Then when she first ate tuna wraps we said "that's right you are 3 which is a big girl, you can eat tuna wraps".
This sounds nuts when written down! We didn't spend the whole time psychologically manipulating her!! But in the end it was wanting to conform and be like on of the older ones/not to be thought of as a baby (we NEVER said she was a baby - just that she probably wasn't old enough - yet).

Thank you both so much for your replies, I will definitely check that book out. She’s a clever wee thing and from being quite little has been switched on to our reactions in a way DS never was - I see her watching me to see how I’ll respond to things, and the asking for/refusing food seems tied in to that. I do understand that the whole lockdown situation has been hard for her too - we were self-isolating from mid-March, and she really misses her little friends with not being at nursery, and she couldn’t have her birthday party. She’s been very bored and hard to occupy, and maybe the change in routine has triggered this off for her.

I think it’s just got worse with her eating such limited things - not being able to quickly do a sandwich, or scrambled eggs or beans on toast (easy kid stuff which DS loves), is quite hard - sometimes I stand in the kitchen and I literally don’t know what to give her. I’ve started with a multivitamin for her too to make sure she gets what she needs.