Picky EatersFollow

My spawn'll eat anything, but the trick is getting her to eat enough. She'll take a few bites of everything and then complain about being full.

For clarity's sake, my anecdote was food-by-food, not the whole meal.

If a kid didn't like a particular food, we just didn't put it on their plate. The flip side to that was that we had a bare minimum of what you'd call junk food in the house at any given time so if the kid wanted an alternative, it was still a healthy choice.

Having said all that, the kids would eat most anything as long as it wasn't too weird. The eldest daughter, for example, hated pickled herring. My son, on the other hand , enjoyed spooning up chili con queso by the bowl at age two, so...

If she's refusing to eat food she used to eat, it's just a phase. It could be a dental issue, or she's trying your limits. My younger sister went through it and my older sister's kids are going through it. They'll grow out of it, or they'll become picky for life and people will hate them for it. Not much you can do about it except offer her a varied diet and insist that she eats something before going to bed.

Being Scandinavian, we always had rye bread and cold cuts in the house. If we didn't like a dish, we were told that we could go make ourselves a "leverpostejsmad" (open liver pate sandwich). I don't recall ever doing that, though, because whatever was being served was better than a rye bread sandwich with liver pate. I like liver pate, but it's not very interesting when served on rye bread (traditional open sandwich here).

It's important that you don't bribe your kid with something she wants, like candy or junk food. That's the entire point of her charade, if it's not a dental issue. She wants the stuff she knows and loves, so she's refusing to eat anything else, hoping you give in and let her have the other stuff. If you tell her that she can have junk food tomorrow if she eats her carrots today, she'll realize that it's working and keep doing it.

Make her some spaghetti bolognese. You can put all kinds of vegetables in the sauce (I suggest ground carrots, but be careful with the onions) and she'll get her dose of meat as well. She liked pasta products, right? Add some ketchup to sweeten the dish.

You can also make some frikadeller (pan-fried dumplings). Seriously, kids love that stuff here.

Like I said earlier, it's important that you don't bribe her. Bribing is exactly what she wants. It would be like Paris and the vikings all over again. The vikings sailed down to Paris and held the city ransom. The Parisians, being French and all, surrendered and paid the vikings who then left, as promised. Next year, however, the vikings returned and demanded more...

Sorry, I'm in the middle of writing a lesson plan about viking travels and that comparison just popped up.

They're eating somewhere. Don't worry about it. They eat when they're hungry. They really do. Their bodies won't let them not starve. I always just told my kids "If you don't like it, you can go make yourself a sandwich. Or go to your room." There are plenty of times when Charmaine or Steven or Anthony lived on PB&J sandwiches for a week because I went on a creative spree and the kids didn't want to see what I made with gizzards or pork belly.

Growing up in a family with 5 kids and not a lot of money, neither myself nor my siblings are picky eaters. The closest is one of my sisters doesn't like onions, but that really developed later during her first pregnancy. Well, that and my oldest sister, whose picky eating is random, changes, and we're all pretty sure is just about getting people to pay attention to her. As kids though, if you didn't want to finish what was put on your plate, someone else would gladly finish it for you. Said lesson was learned pretty quickly and not often repeated. If you refused to eat dinner, you went to bed hungry. It was that simple.

That's interesting. I am, in fact, a supertaster!

I cannot stand mushrooms in any form, they are slimy and just eww! However, if you hide them in things like spaghetti, I will eat them. Peas are the same, put them in ramen, chinese food or stew and I will eat them. I have learned to like raw spinach and broccoli. I have adjusted to eat things like chili and tacos, but I cannot eat table pepper, it burns. Yes, I am weird.

Spoiler

My brother and I were both picky eaters as children. My parents got around this by being a bit creative. We didn't like spaghetti sauce, so when my mom would make spaghetti, she'd set some aside from us and basically use tomato soup and melted cheese(or cheez whiz) to make it comparable to canned Heinz Pasta or Chef Boyardee. She'd trick us into eating spaghetti sauce sometimes by making a sauce for mac & cheese(I won't say Kraft Dinner for the sake of you non-Canadians), that was more or less the same as her spaghetti sauce(minus a couple of the veggie ingredients, making it a tomato sauce with onions and cut up hot dog), but made with bits of hot dog, and hence appealing to us. As far as fruits or veggies went, she cooked a lot with peas and corn, and bought a lot of pears and bananas(and broccoli. We did the whole, not eating much meat outside of McDonalds Chicken McNuggets too, problem was solved by my mom either buying breaded chicken nuggets from the store, or, in one case, taking a shot at making them from scratch. You just gotta get creative, call things by names that don't indicate that the things they don't like are in it, or make non-processed versions of processed foods. Maybe get her into cooking, it might help. I might have some recipes if you'd like("might". I'm preparing to move next month, so I may have boxed them all up already, and I'm not going to be going through boxes until the move is done), I can take a look, just send me a PM.

It may be necessary though, to just let it go, and just wait for her tastes to change, making sure she gets all the nutrients and vitamins she needs from other sources.

These days, I find I like almost everything. There are so many different flavours, textures, and ways of making things. I stopped being picky as soon as I started cooking as a career choice. Going to school for it only broadened my tastes, and you can't really be picky at all after you've eaten something that's very much still alive and found it to be delicious. You can't name any dish on the planet that I wouldn't eat at this point.

Edited, Nov 16th 2012 4:22pm by Driftwood

To be fair, I said McDonalds, but it basically applied to all fast food chicken things. Also, to be more fair, despite liking them more, we rarely got the Chicken McNuggets. Fast food was a bit of a rarity in our home due to the moneys.

Sounds like me as a child honestly. I was a stubborn pain in the *** with a lot of things. My only guess is to push the "you haven't even tried it." bit. It's kind of a lose-lose situation. If given the choice I wasn't going to try it, but if I was ordered/forced to eat something I'd be so stubborn that even if I ended up not disliking the taste or texture I wouldn't admit it and would stand firm that I didn't like it.

I eventually grew out of my food-stubbornness, but that took years.

Edited, Nov 16th 2012 10:48pm by Deadgye

We had to have it out with my youngest a couple years ago. He sat there until he ate it, or until bedtime. Eventually we won, and now with an application of good manners they can ask to apply the three bites rule: you can just have three reasonable sized bites of whatever. Caveat: That's all you get. You can't have something different, we're not making you a special dinner.

Once manners have been established I'll meet them halfway. For example, Junior doesn't like seafood, so when I made seafood Alfredo I made his with a hot dog.

I missed it in scrollback, how old is the protester?