Wednesday 22 February 2012
The Most Frustrated Chef on the Block
Over the last few months we have been fighting some food battles with L. My little girl who used to eat everything, without complaining, has now become a picky eater. If it is not peanut butter and jelly or Kraft dinner (heaven forbid I try to make a homemade mac and cheese) L will have nothing to do with it. Oh wait, she will also eat fruit until her stomach explodes..... literally..... I have to cut her off of fruit otherwise she would have chronic diarrhea. But, I digress. So, as a result of this fussy eating dinner time has become the most frustrating part of my day. No matter what I make, even if it is something that she usually loves, she will look at her plate and announce that she is finished and would like to be excused. At first, we would sit at the table forever trying to get her to eat but that always turned out bad. After many frustrating dinners I started reading articles and books trying to get some ideas to solve this sudden problem. Most things I read agreed that it is not worth fighting your kid. Simply let them leave the table but they do not get anything to eat until breakfast the next day. So, we have been doing that for the past week...... L has not had dinner in a week. We have discovered that she will happily go to bed without eating a thing, even if she has not had a single snack since lunch. Ahhhhhhhh! All the experts say that once the child goes to bed a few times hungry they will start eating their supper. Wrong! Might I add that L has also been waking up at 5:00am every morning starving. She will not go back to sleep even though she is clearly still tired. That little girl is so exhausted! L can be stubborn but I have never considered her to be a "strong willed" child, she just will not eat dinner. Today, after drinking her water and declaring that she was finished dinner, she told me that she only likes breakfast and lunch. Then, in my extreme frustration, I muttered, "Well, until you start eating your dinner I'm not feeding you any breakfast". Seriously, Nancy?? You're going to starve your kid until she starts eating dinner? I am getting very tired of making supper every night, placing it on the table and hearing, "I don't want to eat this". I am also very tired of waking up at 5:00am. The experts seem to be all out of advice. I guess I am just going to have to start serving dinner for breakfast since L "only likes breakfast and lunch". Sigh.
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Dinner is a hard time for us too, however thankfully we've never had to deal with the early morning hunger issue. Would she eat bread or a bun, if you had that on the table? I don't usually serve bread with dinner, but I'll make an exception if I want something that I know Annika just won't eat (because then she'll at least have bread to eat). Or raw veggies? We sometimes play the "crunch" game with raw veggies - who can make the biggest crunch when they take a bite. One other thing we've tried is letting her serve herself - then she's in control of how much ends up on her plate (of course, we make sure she doesn't take way too much, so not too much is wasted!).
ReplyDeleteI've done some reading on the subject too, and what I've come across most often is to not force a child to eat. As parents, we can control what we serve and when, but we can't control how much they eat. However, I will still push for "3 more bites" - it's just goes against my intuition to not try to get her to eat!
Hope things get better for you soon. I feel your pain.
That sounds super frustrating. We had something similar. We started having Yuri help us make supper, he got to choose one part of the meal, and we prepared the meal based on that side dish (um, can you say noodles and ketchup for every meal) but we made the meals together and that seemed to help. We also stopped calling it 'supper' and made up silly names for all our meals. Hope it gets better soon!
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