Aaiiiiiiigh.
April 30, 2007Some of you have been asking how we're doing around these parts, concerning my son's ongoing food issues. Well! Let me take a break from tearing my hair out to update you!
The update is, there's no update. The child has made zero progress. The prevailing wisdom (and yes, I have read Ellyn Satter; I want Ellyn Satter to come live at my house) seems to be that we should include at least one item he enjoys as part of our dinner, but the number of foods he enjoys seems to be dwindling daily. (He won't eat bread, people. BREAD.) He now refuses any fruit (INCLUDING BLUEBERRIES OH MY GOD). He wants only pasta. Only the small pastas. Orzo and tiny stars and eensy little elbows. With butter or ricotta. Try adding some sauce—just try!—and my god, you will pay.
Not only is he picky, he also has an enormous appetite, so if there's nothing on the table that he'll countenance, he is not happy with you. The Wisdom of the Eating Sages also dictates maintaining a blithe, devil-may-care attitude toward your child's eating, but that's difficult when he's shouting at you and weeping and it's just the two of you because your husband isn't home yet and hmmm, is that a beer I see in the back of the fridge? Indeed it is!
I feel for him. I think this is enormously frustrating for him as well as us. Lately he's been demanding "something un-yoo-sual" for dinner, but of course this is hilarious because "unusual" terrifies him. He's bored with what he likes but scared to try anything new. So tears and tantrums follow shortly thereafter. I've tried to make dinner pleasant, I've made it crystal clear to him that he doesn't have to try anything, but that he also doesn't get to spend dinner time pointing out how yucky everything at the table is, and not once has he managed this. Just keeping quiet about the yuck factor in his vicinity. Not once. It's amazing how one's shoulder muscles can begin to spasm just thinking about this issue! Huh!
Then the other day he stopped dead in his tracks outside a Japanese restaurant, inhaled, and said, "It smells incredible in there." I wanted to drag him inside and pour miso soup down his gullet.
We've limited dessert to one night a week, with the occasional exception, because every dinner was becoming all about dessert. Now every night it's a fight over whether this is a dessert night, or not. His newest line is "I've decided this is a dessert night because I'm the boss, and I get to say when it's dessert night." This is an interesting line, this "I'm the boss" thing, because it has never worked, not once, not ever, and yet he continues to use it about, well, everything. I AM NOT LIKING HIM SO MUCH THESE DAYS.
And look, I know. I KNOW. I know there are worse things we could be going through. He sleeps well. He is a delight in many ways. He's healthy and weighs enough and the pediatrician is unconcerned. But you asked! And this is what's going on. The End.
EDITED TO ADD: Me again! Hi! Listen, please don't confuse what I'm feeling about this issue with what I'm doing. As far as Henry knows, I am the the epitome of nonchalance when it comes to his massive refusal of every food item except tiny teensy pastas. We only address the behavioral issues surrounding dinnertime. We have read everything there is to read. And as for "Maybe he'll like..."--thank you. But no. I mean, probably yes, if he'd deign to put it in his mouth. But he won't! And in this way I am driven bonkers. But all inside, in a quiet way, ssssh. He's not affected by it. Okay?
Reader Comments (110)
What do you say to someone who is afraid of the stars?
http://www.annabelkarmel.com
maybe have him checked out by an OT for food sensory, at least then you'd know what kind of issue it is, or could be. the food-trap is one that constantly haunts me and is just one of my hot-button control issues. i like to be in control, b-i-g-t-i-m-e and it's no wonder my kid gets that from me. so alice, basically, i offer you moral support and i raise my beer in your general direction and wish you the strength to get through this. you are welcome anytime you feel like going over two bridges to stop by for sushi and miso.
donna, you sound like my great grandmother. she was a tough lady who survived near starvation before she came to this country and then raised her kids during the depression. i can still remember her rule of 'if you complain about it you get twice as much that you are required to finish' rule. i shiver just thinking about it. although none of her kids or grandkids or great grandkids ever had sensory issues in her house. i'm just saying.
two- i know you like smoothies for henry- i also know plenty of stuff can be hidden in a smoothie. i think moxie puts spinich in hers! there are probably other good stuff you could 'hide' in his smoothie. for myself, vodka hides pretty well. rum is tastier but leaves a little more of a scent. wait, who said that? again, best of luck on this.
When she won't eat (which is, like, ALWAYS), we snatch some rope from the garage and tie her extremities to the chair. Then we duct tape her head to the chair, too. When she's all constrained and shit, we start shoving mac and cheese down her throat with extreme malice. We've found that enough extra cheese can practically paralyze the gag reflex. It's really something to behold.
Hope that helps.
And hey presto! I turned out just fine (relatively -- and subjectively -- speaking). I'm practically normal-sized, and it turned out that when I did finally allow food inside my mouth, I liked it! All kinds of food! Even crazy things like tofu and raw fish and pesto (er, not together).
Sounds like you've got it together. I'll keep my fingers crossed that Henry outgrows this phase soon.
From Wikipedia:
"A supertaster is an individual who lives in a more intense taste world. Among individuals of European descent, it is estimated that about 25% of the population are supertasters. The cause of this heightened response is currently unknown, although it is thought to be, at least in part, due to an increased number of fungiform papillae. The evolutionary advantage to supertasting is unclear. In some environments, heightened taste response, particularly to bitterness, would represent an important advantage in avoiding potentially toxic plant alkaloids. However, in other environments, increased response to bitter may have limited the range of palatable foods. In our modern, energy-rich environment, supertasting may be cardioprotective, due to decreased liking and intake of fat, but may increase cancer risk via decreased vegetable intake. It may be a cause of picky eating, but picky eaters are not necessarily supertasters, and vice versa.
"The term originates with experimental psychologist Dr. Linda Bartoshuk who has spent much of her career studying genetic variation in taste. In the early 1990s, Bartoshuk and her colleagues noticed some individuals tested in the laboratory seemed to have an elevated taste response and took to calling them supertasters. This increased taste response is not the result of response bias or a scaling artifact, but appears to have an anatomical/biological basis."
So... er, does that help?
Boo Bug (five) does this thing now where she begs and begs and begs for food, I'm hungry I'm STARVING I TELL YOU, and then the INSTANT she sees dinner on her plate..."I don't like this, or that, or this, or that..."
Then she puts her little head down on the table and sobs and sobs.
Her two older sisters went through the same exact thing; Eldest is *still* picky, but will at least give things a try (and shut up with the 'eeeew, I don't like that, wah, horror, sob, panic' thing). Danger Mouse (7) just suddenly flipped a bit a little while back and now eats just about anything put in front of her (Hope! Sweet Hope! It is out there!!)
We did just what you are doing. None of them starved, none of them have turned into raging Brat Queens. All of them are surviving. I'm told we too will survive. Hang in there.
Also, some kids hate the things you'd expect them to like and then go liking things you would have never dreamed of giving them. My daughter hates every vegetable that grows on land and even hates rice and chicken, yet somehow she likes sushi, herring, and seaweed. I don't get it. But I do know a LOT of kids love sushi.
http://www.eskimo.com/%7Espban/bread.html
O NOES!
Good luck with the kid...I was really picky when I was younger, and while I'm still not up to par with other members of my family, I've gotten better (I can stand pickles...that's a big step for me). Maybe he's got really sensitive taste buds? I know that's part of the reason I couldn't eat a lot of things...and why I still shy away from anything that's spicy. Pasta and potatoes are my friends.
I bet my daughter kicks my a$$ with picky eating, which will drive me wild because I grew up poor enough that you got one serving of one thing plus powdered milk to drink and that was that. I never met a food I didn't like, except for a weird teenage phase in which I loathed orange juice and peanut butter and loved pumpernickel and liverwurst sandwiches. As an adult, I eat everything except as god is my witness I will never drink powdered milk again.
So I had a point here, at one point, but forgot what it was.
I was a stubborn, stubborn little soul, and if Henry is he might just need to be given an out. Like, if it sounded like he really wanted the soup, you could casually mention that it would probably be okay if he tried a taste because it was just a snack, not really a meal. And then do the age-old trick of letting him come up that idea on his own.
I had a cousin who was so picky that, at the tender age of 24, his mother got up before dinner (at someone else's house) was even served and went to the kitchen to make him a peanut butter sandwich. She didn't even make him take a "no thank you bite"! So my true advice is to give it 20 years and then not do that...
Where once there was a "No way!" suddenly it was all about pleasing Grandma.
And so, when I want my son to try something new, I bring it to Grandma's house.
1. Lie. We call yogurt "pudding" around here. Olivia knows she's being duped, but likes "pudding and granola" and so says things like, "Some people call it yogurt, but in our family, we call it pudding!" We also purchase Trader Joe's juice boxes because they have no reference to any fruit on the box. Thus, we drink Farmer Juice and Mermaid Juice in our house. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
2. Give birth to another child who eats anything (and I mean anything--the other day I fished two googly eyes and a fuzzy duck sticker out of his clenched and slobbery jaws.) Just offer small praise as the baby shovels massive quantities of food in his toothless mouth that makes your older child sick (Olivia did things like sink under the table, gagging, while whimpering, "I'm under here. I'm hiding from the banana.") while cheerily offering the food to everyone. This is working for us...sort of. See 3 & 4.
3. Cover it in ketchup. All food except deserts (yes, we have the desert argument all the time here as well) are cut into microscopic pieces and served next to a mound of ketchup the size of a...a gerbil, maybe.
4. Offer to do insane dances that ultimately can put you, the parent, in a good deal of pain. Recently, after my daughter downed a sliver of green bean covered in ketchup I did a dance that ended in "the splits" (yes, I said, "the splits!" as I fell to the kitchen floor). I am 36. I could never do the splits. I had trouble getting in and out of the car for days.
Feel free to use any of these helpful hints. Of course, there's always yelling and just putting your head down on the table. And yes, we find beer works wonders, too.
No advice, thanks for sharing!
Small shell, Annie's pasta with a little extra cheese, please. Do not deviate. Do not try another shape. Do NOT give me anything of what the adults are eating. Or it's your head, lady.
As an adult with a full subscription of food issues, I'm deathly afraid of the dinner battles. So 9.99 times out of 10 I give in, creating, I'm sure, a whole host of other nightmares. Yippee!