aspergers and eating

[easydoesit]

Does anyone know how to encourage children with aspergers to try different foods??

I've done a lot of work with my ds (AS, age 9) over the past few years and he has a good nutritional diet now. It's still a bit rubbish with social foods though, mainly because he doesn't do food combinations like pizza, burgers etc. I've only just got him to accept sandwiches and breakfast cereal in the last four months!

It's useful to work on obsessive interests as motivation, use lots of praise and rewards, my ds responds well to charts and visuals of what he's working on. We do one or two foods at a time, gradually introducing them by discussing each one first, then I involve him in coming shopping to buy them. We draw up progress monitoring charts together, he gets to edit them if necessary.

As for trying the foods themselves, we start with just tolerating them on the plate, building up slowly to touching them, licking, holding in the mouth and eventually swallowing. It helps to give a lot of notice about when you'll try the food again, again with a visual timetable if possible.

I can help out with some advice and charts etc but probably not for a couple of weeks. I have a lot of problems to sort out for my elderly mother atm so I'm not very available.

Email me at [email protected] and I'll keep you in my inbox, then send you some stuff when things quieten down.

wow that would be very helpful thank you

My DS is 9 and still very resistant to trying anything outside his very restricted diet. I find it best to try when he is not anxious about anything else (diet becomes even more restricted then).
I use a visual reward system (star chart) with the promise of a treat (has to be something he really wants!) after he has earned a certain number of stars works best.

hiya i have as and so does my ds and dd is somewhere on the spectrum.

so..................

my mum and dad tried to get me to eat many a different kind of food when i was a kid, (noone knew i was asd) i would refuse and forgo sweets and puddings, nothing worked, it wasnt until i was in my late 20,s that i could stomach garlic,mushrooms,anything with a slighty stronger smell.
the only thing i think that made me eat this sort of food is that it was around me, my family ate it, my dh, and i gradually got used to the look of it, i used to pick up mushrooms in my hands and play with them,cutting them (obviously no good for kids!!!) and making garlic bread myself helped me overcome it, i was convinced that if i touched a mushroom i would die of poisoning cos id seen a programme when i was a child about someone confusing toadstools and mushrooms and dying as a result, that stayed in my mind for many years.
im waffling now...........
with dd we got her to play with different foods and she will tolerate more than just mash and beans,and the same with ds.
i think its linked to anxiety, i know it was with me.
sorry for waffling on too much

We've had a surprising amount of success with things that he's cooked himself. A friend gave him a children's cookbook at Christmas, and our everything-must-be-beige, no-mixed-foods child decided the stirfried peppers and chicken in lime and ginger sauce looked really rather tasty.

Not sure I've got over the shock yet!

Easydoesit, email me if you want charts and info.