Picky eaters

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For any of you parents who have a child on the spectrum and/or a child that is NT. Are any of them picky eaters? For instance say you are making a chicken dish that calls for bread crumbs in the recipe. Your child sees you making it but then gives attitude and says that she/he doesn't like bread crumbs. Is this type of attitude particular in teens? Or maybe typical in a kindergarten student?
I know with some disabilities the child can be a little immature compared to his or her peers. I know I was when I was a child. But now as an adult I see myself as more mature than some of my co workers.

Yes, I can remember ever since i was a child I was a picky eater. If it had pepper on it i wouldnt eat it. now if it has coconut milk in it i wont eat it. If the texture isnt right i wont eat it. if its too this or too that, it wont get eaten... I prefer friend or backed potato's and wont have them any other way except for chips. I am 22 and I am still as picky when it comes to what i consume food wise, as when i was child.

My son won't eat saucy, or liquidy things, too strongly flavored things or things that are too bland in color or visually unappealing to him. He is seven now and it used to be much worse when he was younger. He used to only eat a few limited things plus a variety of seedless fruits.

I can see a 7 year old being picky. But I'm talking about a NT 13 year old girl being picky or I don't know what else to call it. Mom was making this chicken dish that called for bread crumbs in the recipe. A cousin had attitude in front of mom while she's cooking saying how much she hates bread crumbs. This girl is 13 years old and is NOT autistic and doesn't have any LD or other disabilities. I'm sure I was like this at 13, but I have aspergers AND LD. I also believed that Asian teens tend to be more respectful to towards elders than US teens, but in this case it's so not true. I have seen my other cousin's boys ages 6 and 7 be picky but one boy has LD and the other has ADD. Plus their age group I know can be very picky and hate certain things. Maybe my 13 year old cousin is just spoiled back at home or is stupid?

Hmmm. I guess it is possible to have a sensory response to breadcrumbs but if she has no sensory issues of any kind that would be pretty unusual.

Well first she's living with my parents and I. She is a foreign exchange student. She goes back to Korea this Sat and not sure when and if she comes back. She started her periods at age 11, but now she hasn't had one in 3 months. She lost a lot of weight over the summer. She's 5'4 and only 95 pounds. She was never overweight though. She was probably 110 pounds when she left to go back to Korea this June. So in two months she lost the weight by eating maybe one meal a day. Her personality has changed a lot too. She started going to a private school here in VA in March. So she goes back to Korea winter break and of course summer time. Her eating habits have changed. She doesn't like egg yolks where as before she had no issues. So when dad makes boiled or fried eggs, she eats just the white part. I read that the yolk has high omega and high Vitamin D. She hates butter and salad dressing. She hates fried foods and has told mom this. Her portion size is so tiny. She runs on the treadmill for 30-45 min every day. She doesn't lift weights. She has these red bruises or some scabs on her knuckles. I'm not sure if she's throwing up her food but she's in the bathroom a lot after meals. She is not autistic at all and has no LD. Her younger sister however is slightly overweight and is severely autistic. Her dad is a millioniare too so I thought she would be better off than me.

I read somewhere that kids have a lot more taste buds than adults and that could be why some foods taste terrible to them as a kid but they develop a taste for it when they grow up. Adults aren't supposed to mind bitter stuff like coffee like kids usually do and not like sweet stuff as much but I find coffee is often too bitter and I still have a real sweet tooth. I know I desperately need eat more fruits and veggies but I find if a fresh fruit isn't perfect I almost choke on it. Almost every fruit now has bruising, too ripe, not ripe enough, blemishes on the skin, too sour, too dry, too mushy, and the really GOOD fruit is too expensive now. Fresh veggies often spoil and lose their nutrients too quickly, the canned stuff is no good unless you drink the liquid it's in (yeech) and should only be bought and stored in case of a disaster, and frozen veggies taste like cardboard unless you ad them as an ingredient to things like stir-fry or spaghetti sauce. Frozen fruit is slimy and gross when thawed and canned fruit has a weird, sickly rotten-fruit odor to it. I mostly now drink fruit and vegetable juice even though the health/diet Nazis say that's not a good thing and that pop is actually less fattening and has less sugar than orange juice. But it's better than nothing at all, isn't it?

I'm 25 and my mom still gives me grief about being "juvenile" with my food choices. I never understood it. I'm eating and I'm healthy. Why do people feel like they have to dictate my choice of food?

I can't even imagine a single legitimate dietitian who would recommend pop over vegetable juice.

OP, so you are writing about the girl you were writing about on your other thread?

I still think she has might have anorexia. She is either looking for an "excuse" not to eat dinner, or is fearful of the additional carbs in breadcrumbs. Would she have really eaten otherwise? Given the other things you have written, I don't know what you can do about it, if she is going back to S. Korea and her parents refuse to be concerned.

Regarding the other commenter talking about health nuts preferring diet sodas. Only being concerned about calories as opposed to nutrition makes them calorie-counting nuts not health nuts. Health nuts care about actual nutrition.

Yes I believe that she may have what people may call borderline anorexia. Just like someone I know has borderline diabetes. If her eating gets worse then it may be anorexia. But its a bit immature to tell my mom that she hates fried foods, right? I mean at 13 to complain about foods in front of the cook? For a small child of 5 it would be tolerable I think. Plus it's just downright rude. I have no idea why her parents even thought of sending her back here if clearly her health was going downhill this summer. Her and her mom were arguing a lot about why she wasn't eating normal meals. Jenny's mom is a great cook. I don't think its fair to me or especially my parents to have to care for Jenny when clearly she has some issue going on that her parents should deal with. Mom is Jenny's great aunt, not her mom.

She did eat the chicken dish last night but scraped off the bread crumbs. She also avoids egg yolk when it comes to fried or boiled eggs. So a lot of waste of food. Kids her age need egg yolks right unless they have egg allergy. They need fats like butter and salad dressing.

So my mother did not cook specially for me, but she also did never force me to eat something or in a way i didnt like. It was ok for me that way. So when we had a sort of local ham with spinach and flat eggs (dont know the word in english, but i think you know what i mean), nobody argued with me that i didnt like the ham, and instead of salting the eggs in the pan, she made it free of salt, so everyone could use as much salt as he wanted after taking a portion of the eggs. But generally i would agree with her, that if you miss one meal, the more hunger you will have on the next meal. (And no, you dont die in western countries because of 10 hours not eating. You are just getting a bit hungry, thats no form or suffering.) ^^

Lots of kids are picky eaters. Lots of adults are picky eaters. Some tastes and textures suit one's taste buds, and some don't. Then you add on layers of what people are used to, and their odd notions of what might make them fat, and so on. Feeding a crowd is fraught with danger, lol!

So, basically, pickiness is totally normal. Not desirable, but normal.

I tend to believe that within one's own home there ought to be an ability to have an honest discussion about what each household member prefers to eat. Good manners, however, dictate that people keep it to themselves when not in their own home. If this girl had whined about the bread crumbs at a friend's house, for example, it would have been extremely rude. In her own home it may be annoying, but parents can also be expected to have some idea what their kids do and don't like to eat, and so she'll feel justified. Parents do, after all, want to see our kids both eat and be happy.

She is a great-niece to your mother and in the Korean culture, I do not know if that means she should consider herself at home in your house or not. In my family it would be considered to be rude to complain to those who are hosting her like that.

Evidently, she was capable of still eating the dish after scraping off the breadcrumbs, and she should have just quietly resigned herself to doing that, if that is how she prefers her chicken. If she is used to that kind of customization (whether needed or not) at home, and since she was staying with you so long, maybe she felt like you all should know her dislikes and abide by them. I can not answer for what is correct in another's culture. I have enough trouble with my own, being Aspie.

My seven year old has a lot of food aversions, but we do not dictate to hosts what they can serve. That is rude. We only will make suggestions if asked what he likes. If he did not have food aversions we would just tell them anything, but I figure if we are asked it is not too rude to answer.

We usually bring food we know he will eat, and if we need to we can get it out of the car and apologize to our hosts and say our son is picky. We don't want him to go hungry and we do not want to impose on others. We have yet to actually have to bring the food in to a hosted event, because we really try hard to make do with what is there if at all possible because of the rudeness issue.


I think the main issue though is not her rudeness (especially since she will be going back home soon.) It is whether she is (borderline) anorexic and whether it is fair for her parents to expect your parents to care for her in the future. It sounds like she needs to be in one place and get help for her issues. I can't imagine staying over in another country without her nuclear family is so stabilizing for her. When will you know if she is to be coming back for the spring semester? What do you parents think about this? If they are unwilling /unable to deal with her they should be able to say "no."

Edited to add: Yes, nutritionally she probably needs more fat content than she is getting but I am not a nutritionist or a doctor. She probably should see one, and get blood tests to make sure she is getting needed nutrients.

Being aspie and LD and only child makes this situation very hard. She's disorganized and messes up my bathroom all the time. It's rude! She at times makes her bed when mom tells her, and sometimes doesn't. I don't know how my parents really feel because I can only ask them in private away from the home that way Jenny can't hear our conversations. I'm not aware of a lot of Korean cultures either. I know that Korean parents push their children in school which I think is bad. Too much pushing can overwhelm the child. But it's always about going to the top school. For instance Jenny wants to get into Phillips Andover which is the number 1 boarding school in the country. She will supposedly be here till 8th grade which is June 2014, then she will go off to boarding school and live on campus. But few weeks ago she did tell mom how she hates fried foods. Mom said that she hates a lot of stuff and that she will have hard time in boarding school. That is no lie. Jenny can't ask the cooks at a boarding school to make something just for her and for her only. Mom knows I can't have anything spicy so she caters to that in a way. There is this Korean rice cake dish that calls for hot sauce. So she makes mine separately without the hot sauce. When I visit grandma she knows I can't have acidic foods so when she makes pasta with sauce, she doesn't include the sauce in my pasta dish. I will still eat what mom or dad makes. They just cater to my needs. But I guess J is different since she's not their child but a guest. They can't just cater to her food desire all the time. She has wasted so much food. Egg yolks, fried foods, etc. I have also looked up boarding school info for her and offered some suggestion, but Jenny or her parents never thanked me. Supposedly her dad told mom how he will pay for my airfare and hotel next summer if I wanted to visit Korea. Ok then. He can easily ask to talk to me and ask me instead of going to mom. I know Korean too. Very rude behavior. If they care for her and my parents, then they should take care of this spoiled rotten dumb daughter.

I think when Jenny leaves you should talk to your parents about how Jenny's visiting effects you. They may or may not care about her wasting food, or being difficult. I do not know. That said, they may not know how annoying/disruptive her visit is to you. It may not change anything, if they feel obligated to Jenny's family. (Sometimes families have certain expectations about how they are supposed to help each other and how much annoying family behavior they have to put up with)

Jenny's father may or may not have meant to be rude to discuss the trip with your mom before talking to you. He may have been trying to figure out a way to reciprocate for your family hosting his child and he wanted to ask your mom first since your parents are the ones spending money on Jenny's food and cooking for her. He may have wanted to see if this would "count" as reciprocation before he or your mom asked you if you wanted to go to Korea. If that is the case I would not necessarily think it was rude. Of course you would know if he is a generally rude person and would be a better judge of this.