Food Issues, School Lunches, and General Pickiness

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Like I said, I'm not going to *force* him to eat anything. That's just the absolute worst thing to do. Getting him to *try* things, though...that's harder than it needs to be. The rice crispy treat debacle on his brother's birthday was a fine example -- he's never had them, insisted that they were awful, sobbingly refused to try them...and then discovered how much he loved them.

Pizza! We sometimes get pizza, and he's very firm that there can be no sauce on his pizza. Which is fine, since his brother hates sauce as well. But he'll still ask me for bites of MY pizza, which certainly has sauce on it.

As to the tummy aches? My doubt lies in how quickly they go away after the offending food vanishes, and how he'll instantly start declaring how hungry he is, despite the protestations of being "full" only moments earlier.

God knows, I am not the most adventurous eater myself -- I was also very, VERY vehement about foods not touching when I was a kid. And frankly, both myself and his mother are quite overweight, so it's not like our food choices have been all that good.

I'm just worried about his health. We had "failure to thrive" issues when he was young (reflux, which he has since grown out of), and he's such a stark contrast to his brother -- who has always been in the 90% for height and weight. So I am probably more paranoid than I need to be.

I'm going to try cutting things into shapes. I already know that he doesn't like crusts, so it's not like I won''t be altering his food already. And I want to try smaller portions of a few different things, rather than larger portions of the things that he already likes.

I'm also going to get Just Take a Bite this week; thank you for the recommendation!

I was in my twenties before I could get proper food down.

How suspicious is he about a little cheating? So as example mixing some tiny mashed banana into an banana milkshake, if he likes that and so on?

About the pizza stuff: I have issues with lots of mixed tastes. If its a broad vary, then it can get overwhelming to me. I like to separate my food to tastes. (My partner does jokes about me, about reengineering the food.) So Lasagne gets separated into noodles, bechamel-sauce, flesh or vegetable sauce ... Or when when having soup, I like to do the liquid part first and leave everything solid, and then eat that on its own, separated to its tastes. Same goes for mixed vegetables and so on. Pizza is eaten by first eating the cheese, then eating separated whats on the Pizza (first mushrooms, then corn,...) after that comes the tomatoe sauce, and after that the bread and so on. ^^

Additioial, how suspicious is he about a little cheating? So into an soup you could try to mix really, really small diced carotts, normally you cant taste that. Or add as example some vegetables into an sauce for noodles he likes or into lasagne sauce and so on. If he is into: Anything that doesnt come from a package, but lies in natural form on my dish, must taste horrible you could do a mash out of beans and other vegetables, as example, then frie that and serve it. Or if he likes artificial banana milk, you could try to mix some banana into it and so on. Pudding can be done easily at home, so there is still much sugar in it, but at least not at much as in artificial products and at least you can use real milk as example.

Best advice I could give you is to let your child "play" with the food without adding stress. If my mother would have always annoyed about me eating this or that, lots of food I wouldnt have eaten, because of me not having relaxed time to discover how I can separate it. XD

Another thing that helped us was leaving new things on his plate and -not- nagging him to eat them. It turns it into a power play which some kids are sensitive, too. At points we tried the take one bite and then you can have x, but we had very few good results from that. So, we started just leaving things like un-sauced pasta on his plate, so he could get used to touching it. He had to acclimate to the texture first. Now he eats plain pasta.

We do have foods that are "exceptions" to his rules. He hates anything sauced or mixed, but he loves pizza. His does what Schneekugel does and takes it apart. He doesn't view the sauce as a liquid at that pint, and he is OK with it. He also usually will not eat anything soft, but he will eat ice cream and sweetened yogurt b/c his love for sweetness over-rides his sensory issues with soft foods. When he was really little I "tricked" him into trying vanilla ice cream, by putting a bit on the outside of his lips. I would never do that now, but when he was a toddler it seemed OK to do this, to me. So, I am hoping eventually he may agree to eat other soft foods.

Forcing is horrible. I still gag just thinking about eating a raw tomato or a large chunk of tomato mixed in food, because my parents used to make me sit at the table for hours until I managed to gag down the tomato slice they had slapped on my plate with breakfast in the summer. Thank goodness not every day, but at 2-3 times per summer. I had several foods I wouldn't eat including vanilla ice cream, onions, and cherries, but those never offended them and they let me be. When I got older I decided to try them and liked them. I went from being willing to eat the yellow pear tomatoes to gagging at thinking of it from their interference. It wasn't a "try a bite to be sure you still don't like it, and then you don't have to eat it if you don't" sort of thing. It was a 1/4 inch think 4 inch across slab that I had to eat all of. I'm a huge fan of talking my kids into trying foods again, but never forcing.

We get a lot of "I'm full!" followed by, "Well, I <i>am</i> hungry enough for dessert/hot dogs/cheese/other favorite food." Funny how that works, isn't it?

Off topic: Just wondering, with your oldest who is bigger have you ever had people treat him harshly for his age, due to them thinking he is older? I got that a lot when my two oldest (both very, very tall) were younger. Especially with the ADHD kid, who consistently acts immature and hyper. He's immature and people were always trying to act like he should have been acting 8 when he was 5, so even on days when he was acting like every other 5 year old in the room, he'd get reprimanded for being "too big to be acting like that" The Sprout has a different bio-dad (I got remarried) than the older two, and his dad and that entire family is short (about 5'6" is max height for the guys), so we always expected the Sprout to be a lot smaller, and he is. I've found that people react so differently to him acting out at age 4 when he's small enough to pass for 3 than they did toward the middle kid that looked at least 6 at that age. Totally irrelevant, I've just always been kind of curious if other people would have had a similar experience between large and small for their age kids.

With me, it's sweet potatoes. I can't even think about those things now without feeling ill.

A bit. He's nine year old, looks like an eleven year old, and tends to act like a five year old a lot of the time -- he's also on the spectrum, as it happens. We get some parents getting nervous around him, especially because he loves playing with babies and toddlers so much.

Like I said, he probably doesn't understand why he doesn't want to eat certain foods, himself, so is responding in ways he knows how.. "I'm not hungry".. "I have a tummy ache".. "I'm full".. etc

There's an underlying cause for his behaviours I'd look into.

I would not eat most of the school lunch,it was gross and tasted nothing like the food at home.I had a teacher in second grade that tried to force me to eat a sandwich,it was horrible.I can vividly remember that like it was yesterday.And I would not drink milk out of a carton.It had to be in my bottle,which I could not bring to school.Strange how that bottle vanished when we moved.

I too agree with not forcing. With my son, he doesn't gross out and he will eat the veggies if I say "no ice cream later like we had initially planned" or "no more bread products until you have the broccoli." There have been a few times he's said he's not in the mood for broccoli, period, even though he usually likes it, even if it means no ice cream or no chocolate milk or whatever, but he's actually still hungry, so I'll offer something else - pretty much as long as it's plant based, I don't care, and if that won't work for whatever reason he's always allowed to have cheese, fish or chicken. So he's not going to go hungry. And I wouldn't make him wait for any long period of time if he said he was hungry but absolutely could not eat whatever it is. I wouldn't do the eat this and get that approach for certain things that I know he won't eat, say, asparagus, squash, peaches - stuff I know he really really really dislikes. For those items I might just let him see me eating them and put a tiny piece on his plate from time to time in case he ever gets used to it.