I’m not sure my child has a varied enough diet. Please help!

[PancakePatty]

Hi everyone. I have had problems weaning my son from the get go. He is now 20 months. He was bottle fed from birth. When I started to introduce solids at 6 months, he wasn’t interested. He seemed to like his food pureed, wouldn’t attempt to put anything in his mouth in his own. He didn’t put anything in his own mouth by himself until he was a year old.
Fast forward to today and this his list of foods he will eat:
Peanut butter on brown toast
Cream crackers
tomato
cucumber
apple
banana
porridge
cheese sandwich (sometimes)
bacon roll
natural yoghurt
peppers
raisins
dates prunes
crisps
biscuits
breadsticks
jam
melon
Obviously he doesn’t have crisps & biscuits everyday!
Won’t eat any puréed food now.
I am desperately worried about his diet, he seems to be so behind other children his age.
Does anyone have any advice?
Thank you.

He is a happy boy, seems to be growing well. Only started walking 2 months ago but now he is trying to run everywhere!
He has never been ill once, never had a temperature or a cold (touch wood). We spend a fair amount of time outdoors on the farm, he must have built a good immune system!
Oh wow, I am glad your story had a happy ending and your daughter started eating eventually. This gives me hope.

Thanks I will add it to the shopping list. I’m off to google Ellyn Satter now.

Thanks im
not on instagram but my friend is, she will help me look at this.

Make the normal meals but add something onto his plate that he’ll eat. So the meat, veg, potatoes and a cracker for example or even a nugget if he eats those. And yes don’t make him anything else after.

Yes tried both of these on numerous occasions 😅 will keep trying though

Thank you, will try this tomorrow. He has never tried nuggets before.

Glad to help! It was a while ago (DC is now a teen who eats all sorts!) but I think it was a very simple boiled egg in an egg cup, with some lightly buttered toast fingers on the plate.

They liked very plain food for a long time but would eat a good range and gradually became more and more flexible over time.

My dd would eat hot or cold custard with banana. I used to make it from scratch with eggs and milk, and reduce the sugar significantly (the banana offset it).

She also ate crustless baked egg custard, and semolina/rice pudding (both of which make me gag!)

You can also mix a beaten egg into porridge to bump up the protein.

I'd keep giving his yoghurt for pudding regardless of if he's eaten his dinner. It's not a reward for eating his main, it's yoghurt.

If you're worried he'll be hungry overnight, give supper. Three meals a day is a relatively modern concept. Eating little and often is standard.

At that age dd would have:

Breakfast - porridge with some sort of fruit.

Lunch - a sandwich, some fruit/veg, yoghurt

Dinner - cooked meal, dessert - a milk pudding of some sort

Supper - banana or, if she'd not eaten a lot of dinner, porridge or toast.

Fruit and veg were available if she was hungry between meals, sometimes she was, sometimes she wasn't.

Thanks, will give this a go. My husband is fully on board with the egg & soldier plan 😄

I will try home made custard & rice pudding, thank you.
It is definitely hot dinners that we are having issues with. He just won’t eat anything I put down but could be as previous posters have suggested he is not liking “mixed up food” casseroles, stews etc. I haven’t been able to get him to eat potatoes or hot veg either.

Im out of the other side of this by a decade or more, but one piece of advice that saved my sanity was…

in no time at all they will be a teen, living, and indeed thriving on a diet of pizza and energy drinks the second they get out of your sight..

this was said to me by a relative who was a bloody professional in child development when I was stressing over a toddler with a much much more limited diet than the one you describe OP. And now said toddler is a teen. Can confirm. Honestly you are doing a bloody brilliant job. Do not beat yourself up here.

Check out this page https://www.instagram.com/sr_nutrition?igsh=ZzA3ZmJxNmsweGZ4 She’s got wonderful advice on dealing with fussy eaters. My dd was great at eating til 18 months, then became super fussy, her diet became quite limited and really there were only a couple of dinners she’d reliably eat. Am pleased to tell you she turned a corner at 4 and now eats a very varied diet. Hang in there! I think it’s maybe a control thing.

That’s great! While obviously variety is very important in a diet, there is also a lot to be said for familiarity and repeated presentation of the same dish to toddlers, to build up trust.

Have you also thought of making a photo album of his food? Include pictures of food that he does happily eat and also food that you would like him to try. But it must be presented as normal in the pictures, on your own plates. Plus a photo of him. Then ‘read’ this book with each other, with him featuring in the story ‘On Tuesday X ate some boiled egg, some…’. Might be worth a try!

Would he eat mash with beans? Jacket potato with cheese. Beans on toast, simple meals but are more filling than snacky bits

To prevent the food ending up on the floor you could have a bowl next to his plate that he puts in any food that he doesn't like. It won't be as quick a reaction as throwing it so you may find he does it less and also gives him the opportunity to go back to it during the meal if he wants. It still gives him the choice but in a more controlled way. It may also help to break the cycle / habit of him disregarding it straight away. Most the meal ending up on the floor must be really disheartening.

Even my 7mo eating sweet potato has encouraged my 2yo to eat it when they don't normally like it so I agree with eating around other children. And just keep offering the foods they don't like and don't offer a separate meal straight away.

I'm confused.

You say he doesnt eat the food that's put in front of him. But do you actually feed him it?

Are you placing a plate in front of him & expecting him to eat it independently??

At this age (& often for years later) you need to put a scoop of food on a plastic spoon & put it in his mouth. Are you doing this?

Most DCs will swallow bland food that's actually put in their mouth eg mashed potato, turnip, carrot parsnip. Then you can add small pieces of fish/chicken/red meat to these spoonfuls.

Or blended soups, have you tried those?

He can't be expected to feed himself. That's too much of a demand on him. He may have a dexterity issue. Or finds the choice of items on the plate or 'mixing' overwhelming.

If he's throwing food off the plate don't put the plate in front of him. Keep it with you/do and one of you sit with him putting the food in his mouth.

Does he like playing with food? If you were to do a teddy bear's picnic kind of affair with some of his toys, and some pretend food, he can go around and offer bites of food to the toys and to you and you all pretend to eat it and go mmm delicious, he pretends as well, you say you're still hungry, introduce some small bits of real food and offer it to the toys, they go mmm, it's offered to you and you take a bite, see if he joins in? In an unobtrusive way, not making a bit deal of it, it's just part of the game.

Or playing with food to explore textures - using dry cereal to feel and hopefully crunch, and then sloppy stuff like custard or jelly. Making some fun pictures out of food, the classic funny face lunch plate! Ooh don't eat his eyes, ooh you crunched his nose, etc. My favourite fun with food thing as a kid was a mashed potato and baked bean volcano.

And my friend's kid when he was 3 or 4 loved to steal food from other people's plates, we had to pretend not to notice then make a big fuss of oh no where has my bit of sausage gone, help, thief, etc. Or "food ghosts" would come and steal the food from his plate. He found sitting at a table and eating very boring, kids are all about playing and making things a game was one way to keep his interest. That or distracting him (sadly with a tablet but needs must sometimes) and then posting in a few spoonfuls of spaghetti bolognaise.

My sons diet is just as restrictive and he is 23 months. I have sought professional advice on this and was reassured to hear that as long as he's getting something from each food group and is a healthy weight, they aren't worried. He didn't meet the criteria to be referred for further supports.

Unlike yourself, he was a dream to wean, was sticking his fists into our curries when he was too early to try food! The first 6-9 months after we introduced food were amazing and he tried lots of things, then the fussiness crept in. He had a couple of stomach bugs that always seems to make things worse afterwards.

I see a lot of people here who haven't dealt with a fussy child giving advice. My son would rather eat nothing than most of the dinners we put in front of him, even if he's very hungry. We did put him to bed without anything sometimes (which felt horrible) but it made no difference, he just ate more at breakfast the next day and then our doctor said not to do it, that it's very outdated advice and to offer a small supper removed from dinner, if dinner is completely rejected. What that means is that you don't jump up and make something else at the dinner table, but maybe just before pyjamas you sit down with a book and some peanut butter on toast.

Sending you support and solidarity, it's not easy.

Thank you for posting, I am glad your teenager grew out of this ☺️

Thank you for this, I will check it out.
Could be a control thing, he has started pushing boundaries in other areas.

Might be worth a try, thank you. Willing to try anything. He does like a book.

Regularly try him with mash, hasn’t entertained it so far but will keep trying. He loves cheese so I mash some cheese in sometimes.
We eat jacket potato at least once a week. He hasn’t got involved with it yet but will keep trying. Thank you.

I wouldn't be too worried about what he eats. It seems quite a good list.
I'd say my DD didn't really eat proper meals until the last year (she has just turned 3). Before that it was elements of meals but not full meals.

I found with my eldest that offering something else when he refused the on offer meal prolonged the fussiness. I'd offer three or four alteratives and it become the way he expected meals to be. With my DD I didn't do this and she switched to eating what we were eating alot quicker.

I offer one meal for everyone but I do make allowances for their likes/dislikes e.g. broccili for DS and carrots for DD, or pasta separate for DS rather than mixes if like a pasta bake style dish for DD. But the fundamental elements of the meal are the same.
I do also offer a banana if they eat nothing for dinner....but I know its not their favourite fruit and they will only eat it if they are really hungry.

He will often put the stuff he doesn’t want on mine or dad’s plate so that sounds like a good idea to give him his own plate to put the food he doesn’t want on.
Thanks

@PancakePatty that list of things your child will eat is about 3 times as long as the list of things my (at the time) 3yo would eat when we were discharged from the nutritionist consultant because there were "no concerns". Basically as long as the list contains some kind of carb, 2 or 3 kinds of veg/fruit and some protein, any intervention is going to do more harm than good. Please stop worrying, you aren't in competition with anyone with prizes for the child with the most varied diet. Make mealtimes unstressful and do not try to force the child to try anything that isn't known and accepted. Make new foods available regularly but don't push them or comment if they aren't tried. Reward and praise for trying something new even if it is spat out.