Fussy but healthy

[Ughdoihaveto]

If your child is a bit of a fussy eater but what they do eat is fairly healthy do you mind? My 4 year old doesn’t eat much variety but what he eats is healthy and covers all the food groups, plus he gets a multivitamin every day. Sometimes I stress a bit that I’m basically rotating the same meals constantly but then I try to remember that it’s all quite good food (I think!) and he’s clearly fit and healthy. It just becomes a bit of a grind especially when he’s often not eating the same dinner that we are.

He eats eggs (soft boiled with soldiers or scrambled),
Rice Krispies,
croissants,
porridge and banana,
chocolate “milkshakes” (blended milk, frozen banana, frozen avocado, unsweetened cocoa powder and a squirt of honey),
sugar free petit filous
cheese or tuna sandwiches(wholemeal bread),
fish fingers,
homemade chicken curry,
Homemade pasta bolognese,
Homemade lentil soup
rice cakes with humous or peanut butter,
strawberries, bananas, apples, mangoes, occasionally grapes

That’s everything he eats (apart from chocolate or biscuits!) Have tried him with some favourites of ours (roast dinner, risottos, salmon, tacos with various fillings, steak pie) but he’s not interested in trying and I don’t force it. If your child eats a small selection of food like this but it’s “healthy enough” do you worry or just let them be for now ?

Veggies are the obvious thing missing here. Otherwise looks decent enough.

Yeah that stresses me out but I cram them in the bolognese, curry and soup to make up for it but he won’t eat them in any other way unfortunately. I think he’s getting plenty in those meals (onion, carrots, garlic, spinach, broccoli) We love vegetables and he sees us eating them with our dinners but won’t try any. Tonight we had pulled chicken tacos with homemade guacamole and dips. He had leftover bolognese from last night and a couple of dry tacos instead of spaghetti to have with it.

i have 4 kids. Youngest DS was very fussy abt food. I would have been overjoyed with delight if DS (at age 4, 8, 12 ...) ate as much variety as OP's son does at 4yo. Example: I literally danced with joy when DS ate some Wotsits (DS was probably about 4yo then).

What else can you do but do your best to maximise healthy stuff & minimise empty calories, worry solves nothing. I didn't given DS vitamins... I don't believe in them unless there is clear deficiency/truly high risk of deficiency.

DS is 17yo now & recently ate something with sauce (given to him at work in posh hotel where he is a bartender)... he was talking about eating it with pride. He's a super nice kid & actually very interested in nutrition, fitness, baking & is a competent cook (including of things he'd never eat himself).

Friend's son literally has lived his whole life consuming just 5 foods, among them milk & orange juice are the two healthiest items. He's a super nice kid, too.

Thank you. I’m going to remember “worry solves nothing” and keep saying this to myself. It was recommended to give him healthy start vitamins from infancy for A, C and D I think so I’ve just continued but now with the soft chewy vitamins for 3+

Just don't stop trying.

Not forcing is right, but the trap I've seen family/friends with kids fall into is, "My son doesn't like roast dinners, so I've stopped making roast dinners". You don't need to force them, but children often take a long time to like or accept foods, but if you take away the food that they 'don't like' they will never get to experience liking it.

My son was like this with mushrooms, lettuce, peppers etc. All things he didn't like.. and then one day, after having them on his plate and in his dishes for ages he suddenly "liked them". I was the same with eggs as a kid, and I think most of us can identify times of realizing that we now like things we didn't before.

So my only advice is - the range of stuff your child is eating is fine, it isn't that extreme.. and it will naturally get wider if you don't start to reduce/take away options just because they "don't like them"

Thanks for the advice, do you think I need to put it on his plate? At the moment if we’re having a roast dinner say, I’ll just ask if he wants any. It’s always “no” which is depressing. We don’t stop making these things as we eat what we want to eat and he sees that, but I have stopped putting it on his plate as he often starts with “I don’t like that it’s yucky” and I just can’t be bothered hearing it. I say things like “we think it’s yummy. Maybe one day your tastebuds will think it’s yummy too.” It’s aggravating to hear that kind of chat when you’ve cooked a nice meal though.

It sounds like he is getting plenty of goodness but I would try to keep offering other foods to avoid him becoming more picky, chances are when he feels like trying them he’ll enjoy at least some!
You could try the safe food approach so always give something he will eat alongside new foods or things he usually rejects and just keep persevering. Just having different things on his plate will help them become more familiar.
You could also try including him in something like a roast dinner and allow him to self-serve so he is in control of what goes onto his plate.
My LO will always tell me they don’t like tomatoes but sometimes I just stick a quartered cherry tomato on the plate and around 50% of the time they do try it (still don’t like them though!)

I do worry about him suddenly becoming pickier and dropping things he currently enjoys, especially if he thinks there’s pressure on him. I will keep trying him with different foods. I’ve tried letting him serve himself but he simply won’t put things on his plate. He will try new things with encouragement sometimes but will always say it’s “yucky” although I know it can be a long game with this sort of thing.

I've got a picky eater who's also got a lot of food allergies and dietary restrictions due to reflux
Most of the time I don't worry about her limited diet as long as it's relatively balanced. The only time I have been worried was when it was also associated with her being more lethargic than usual, asking to go to bed early when she always normally has to be forced to go to bed and also only ate a bite of a cake we made. That turned out to be due to allergens in her diet.

On our worst weeks she will only eat pasta, chicken or chick peas, peas, sweet corn and olive oil. We've just seen her dietitian and she said as long as she was getting her multivitamins and this only went on for days to a week at a time and not weeks and weeks we shouldn't worry. She went through her diet to ensure she was getting enough calcium, iron, iodine and omega 3 - the restrictions to her diet mean these are the nutrients she's more likely to be missing. She has a cup of oat milk a day plus more in breakfast which gives her enough calcium and iodine. She diet is deficient in iron but the multivitamin covers that. She has porridge for breakfast and it's been suggested we do a mix of porridge oats and a ready brek type porridge to get the fortifications. She can't have fish so we have been recommended to look into a vegan omega 3 supplements.

For us it's a balance of all not forcing things but also not letting the heavily restricted diet drag on too long. If she's dropped back to the plain pasta stage we give her a couple of days at that then start adding more stuff in and try her with slightly more risky options. She completely goes off anything with a sauce so we side step into other fairly dry dishes and build from there. Broths and gravy are the next step before trying to get her back to sauces. It's a very up and down journey!

I have a 3.5 year old who can be quite fussy (but not as limited as OP’s). She used to be worse but it is starting to improve.
Our strategy, which I realise won’t work for everyone, has been to keep offering the foods she doesn’t like but make sure there is always something she likes on the plate. So in your example of the roast dinner I would have put a small bit of everything on his plate with some rice cakes as well. He can just eat the rice cakes or he can try any of the other things. No fuss made either way. With the chicken tacos I would have given him a small amount of filling seperate with plain tacos which you know he eats.
We also introduced ‘supper’ before bed which is different every night- if she hasn’t eaten much dinner then I will give her something more substantial like yogurt or some crackers etc. Means I know she isn’t hungry at bedtime but she isn’t waiting for something ‘better’ as she has no idea what it will be.

Also recently I have started doing ‘picky plates’ at lunch- a plate full of small amounts of different things. This has worked well to introduce different veg (celery and sugar snap peas recent additions).
I also respect where she has preference for the way something is served- she likes her rice (white or brown) served without any sauce on for instance. She also likes raw veggies, carrot particularly but won’t touch the cooked version. No harm in me giving her some raw carrot with her dinner while we have cooked.

The one exception to all this is sweet potato which she genuinely seems to hate- I have tried it in multiple different forms but it truely makes her gag!

We did a period of you eat it or you leave it and then supper before bed if he refused. Just a bowl of porridge. In your example he would eat the rice cake or dry taco and nothing else which is not a dinner. Then he’d be starving and accept a bowl of porridge every night before bed. This seemed madness to me as he’d be having porridge for breakfast often, then holding out for porridge for supper and missing dinner altogether, instead of getting something filling, healthy, and varied like bolognese, eggs, or fish finger sandwich with fruit salad on the side (all things he’d happily eat while we had what we’re having). It also made me feel stressed at dinner as it was a failure every night and he’d eat only the single thing on his plate that he liked and then want down from the table. It’s much nicer to see him tucking in to the healthy food he does love to eat while we all chat happily at the table.

Up and down definitely sums it up. My son loves porridge too. He has it with sliced banana on top but he also likes peanut butter drizzled over it and I mix flax seeds or chia seeds into it when I’m cooking to boost the nutrition.

I can understand that. We had (still have occasionally) nights where all she ate was some raw carrot then a yogurt or a slice of peanut butter bread before bed. If she said she was hungry I would produce her dinner again- sometimes she then ate it. However that’s how it improved. Also I would make sure that if it was a dinner I didn’t think she would eat I would make sure she had a good balanced lunch and I wouldn’t have 2 days in a row of dinners I wasn’t sure about. The theory was if she was hungry she would eat it- obviously doesn’t work if there are additional needs etc involved but did work here.
It can be really stressful though particularly trying to act like I didn’t care if she ate it or not!
How about if you did it the other way round- Gave him a portion (not a massive one but enough he won’t be starving) of what he would usually have then a small amount of what your having on the plate, then he has the option of trying or not but atleast he is being exposed to it.
personally if I ask DD if she wants to try something the answer will always be no but if it’s just there with no fuss made then she might try it.

No additional needs. Yes, I think you’re right I probably just need to put some bits and bobs on his plate with his other food rather than asking. The answer is no 100% of the time if I ask him. I’ll start just putting some of what we’re having out for him and if he says it’s yucky I’ll just say “that’s ok you can try it or leave it” and carry on talking about other things.

We have had exactly that this evening. Pasta in a cream cheese and tomato sauce (which I know she likes) with bacon and peas (which she won’t try). I put less bacon in her pasta (made separate as it has dairy free cheese) and kept her peas separate. As soon as I put the plate down I got ‘I don’t like bacon or peas’. I said ‘that’s fine don’t eat it then’. She picked the pasta out avoiding the bacon and ignored the peas. Then about half way through out the corner of my eye I saw her pop a pea in (pulled an awful face), only 1 but she tried it. No success with bacon though! I will give her some fruit for supper to make up for the no veg.

I have done similar before. I forgot that he also will have just plain red pesto pasta. I have tried adding things to it (small pieces of chicken, peas, sweetcorn) and he’ll just politely say “mummy can you please never make it with peas again?” and I think, what do you say to that? I say “ok” because if it were me and someone added something I didn’t like to one of my favourite meals, I wouldn’t want it like that again either.

I think I would just say ‘well you don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to’. Im helped by the fact we are all eating the same meal so I can just say ‘mummy and daddy like it, you don’t have to eat it’.
I do also sometimes explain to DD that all foods do different things for our body so I might explain that I have added chicken because that meal doesn’t have much protein in it for instance.

He’s very interested in what foods do and what different vitamins are for but it hasn’t helped expand his palette yet. Hopefully that will change with time. He’s always asking which vitamins are in different foods. When I’ve tried different things in the pesto I don’t make it again that night or give something different, I just say he can leave it if he doesn’t want it, but I haven’t made it like that again as he politely requested I don’t add anything again 😬 I make bolognese, curry, and soup more often than we might normally have so that we do eat the same meal together often.

Yes mine is very interested in that too. We had similar with scrambled egg- she loves it but doesn’t want us to put tomato or mushrooms or anything else in it. So I said that’s fine but then put veg on the side. So she still has the veg but it isn’t mixed in with a favourite meal.