When is it more than just fussy eating?

[Maranda27]

I’m at loss as to what to do ..
Ive a 17month old toddler who is now just point blank refusing to eat anything bar custard.. she just shakes her head and ends up upset. With a lot of distraction you can get her to take maybe 5 spoons of food.

she had reflux as a baby and ended up with a bottle aversion and stopped totally taking milk at 9/10 months old.

she has been on and off food since but always for a reason (sick/ teething)

but after a flu at 11ish months she started to become very hard to get to eat and needed to watch YouTube to get her to get (bad I know , I know I shouldn’t of started it and it’s was a terrible habit) but now that won’t even work..

I don’t know what to do she’s not sick or teething at the moment and it’s been going on now 2 weeks and progressively getting worse.

any advice please

I hate to be that person but have you ever looked at baby led weaning?

Let her play with food, away from her typical eating situations. Try not to worry whether she's actually eating or not. A few good sessions of smearing whatever food - lasagne, sausage and mash, veggie stew or whatever floats your own boat around and some will probably end up in her mouth.

I think your anxiety and hers are probably linked at this stage. She's too old to be spoon fed.

You know the YouTube thing was a bad idea but if she's separated eating from hunger, that needs fixing too. Let her get a bit hungry then present food to her in a fun setting where you're completely unfocused on whether or not she's actually eating it. Get used to throwing away food, stop praising her for eating, just chat to her about anything but.

@Notmefornow1 i do let her self feed anything solid but just spoon feed her sloppier foods as she’s not got the hang of a spoon very well yet . And everything is ending up on the floor.

@Notmefornow1 I also genuinely do not believe she feels hungry as from 8 weeks when her bottle aversion started she never would cry for a bottle and take maybe 1 ounce and go over 6 hours and not look for a bottle if offered her one and she’d refuse that (ended up only being able to dream fed her the bear minimum)

i will mention ARFID, and it might be worth looking into it.

Its very normal at this age to go food averse, what you have to watch for is them not coming out of it.

One of the signs with my DS was self weaning off milk at 11mo and he's not touched it since.

the biggest advice i can give you through this as a parent to a kid with ARFID is don't make meals a battle ground, feed them what they will eat, offer other foods with no stress or rules about eating/not eating, don't even praise when they DO try something, make it a none event... and let them take the lead.

I went through a phase of putting his meal on my plate as he wouldn't eat his own but would steal from my plate, so mommy 'shared' her food with him.

supplement with vitamins if you have to.

When you have a 'more than fussy' child, fed is best, the 'what' is less important.

@WinterBones I have been thinking it could be arfid, which is why I’m beginning to think it’s more than just fussy.

thing is I’m a ftm and wasn’t listened to about her reflux as she was a happy baby and not losing weight they wouldn’t give medicine and then it led to a bottle aversion which my gp told me she knew nothing about and just keep trying (which is wrong advice I know now )

how do you go about getting a diagnosis for this?

At a similar age, both of my kids became extremely fussy. They would each eat only a handful of foods. The ten year old now likes repetition, but will eat enough different things to be able to hide veggies in. The younger one is still much more restricted and I would say bordering on arfid, but not quite there. He certainly needs to have the same breakfast, lunch and dinner every day and gets very distressed if pressed to eat anything different.

I would suggest that not even chewing anything is a sign that this may be more than just standard fussy eating. Can you leave food somewhere she can grab it herself at any time? Or would that be a choking hazard? I am struggling to remember wat 17 months was like! Worth chatting to a health visitor or gp for more support. Do not pressure her to eat at all, or it becomes a battle of wills, especially if she has developed an aversion from a bad experience.

To be honest I drop the food on the tray and completely ignore my 14 mo while he's protesting at the slop I dared to serve him.

He proceeds to throw it onto the floor (I have a food mat) and I'll pick it up a couple of times without saying anything and he'll eventually eat some food while being annoyed at me.

When all else fails I pop plain yogurt (which he loves) on every piece of his food and he'll eat alot more.

It's a faff but works.

we kind of stumbled into a diagnosis, i had no idea what it was, just that it was a clear sensory aversion to food, and i had to learn to roll with it.

He had a speech delay, never slept through the night, hated water...etc and i just kept being told he'd 'grow out of it'

Eventually school referred him to an OT as he was refusing to write/hold a pencil and had some clear balance issues. He was diagnosed with Dyspraxia and a sensory processing disorder initially but during therapy his OT mentioned ARFID and back then (ds is 18 now) it wasn't really known over here, but i found american sources on it.

Ds was eventually diagnosed with Autism and ADHD as well, and during that process i bought up his restricted eating and they said it probably was ARFID, but they didn't diagnose that here in the UK (this was 8 years ago), it would still class as SPD with a restricted diet.

ARFID has become more recognised in the UK in the last 5 years.. so hopefully you'll get more help than i did, i kind of had to just.. learn as i went.

This was the age at which my daughter massively regressed with her eating. As a baby she’d happily scarf down whatever I made for her. Somewhere between 18m and 2 it just got more and more and more difficult to get her to eat anything other than bland and beige. To be honest, it never got better. Not exactly ARFID but not far off.

In her case it was because she was autistic, although being a girl and not presenting in a stereotypical way, it took years for me to figure it out.

I’m not saying this is why your daughter isn’t eating @Maranda27 but believe me, I do understand what you’re going through. Even now, I get triggered by all the usual advice: get them involved in prepping food, be firm, they’ll eat when they’re hungry 😂 None of that worked for us.