My 4 year old son is one of the most difficult kids I've ever been around. Keeping in mind I work in special education so I work with kids who have behavior needs. Behavior strategies generally work well at work. However they do not work for my son. Mainly bc he knows the right way to behave but chooses not to and takes any consequence with a sly smile. It's not just me either. I heard a teacher at church talking to him in a kind "motherly" voice and I thought oh man... he'll never listen to her. I was right. They came to get me. I wish I could be a mother like that and never yell, but my kid treats them like push overs. Hence my mother...
My mother will watch 1/2 kids at a time bc she says she can only handle 1 at a time. She once watched both of them for 3 hours on my anniversary and I had to hear about it for weeks after from both her and my dad.
Today we went over to my parents for dinner. It was pizza (typical kid approved dinner). To describe my child as a picky eater is an understatement. He use to throw up at every meal particularly if it was a new food (even normal kid foods.) I had to deal with this at every meal until I finally snapped and screamed "Don't even think about it!!" And yelled when he gagged. Fast forward to today and I found the smallest piece of pizza and told him he needed to eat it. He ate a few bites after a half hour and left 1 piece at the end to which my other son knocked on the floor. I yelled "we're leaving now. " he immediately ran to my mother to manipulate her and threw a tantrum.
On my way home I got a text from my mother saying " I will never have you over for dinner. You are horrible." Then talking about how she is sick.... blah blah all about her. I deal with his food issues every. Single. Day. I don't even want to go anywhere with food and him bc it's horrible.
It just makes me feel like such a terrible mother and I don't even think I'm wrong. Most parents force their kids to eat vegetables and I just want him to eat normal food.
Why is parenting so hard? Why do parents forget what it's like being a parent?
I've got a picky 10-year-old who would eat hot pockets for every meal if we let her, and of course ice cream. The other kids get on her case for finishing off the ice cream. She's the last picky kid, and the last one that can't eat spicy food. Well, I have a picky 14-year-old who hates ketchup, burgers, and sandwiches, but she can cook and she eats kimchi if not other vegetables and started expanding her palate, so I don't worry about her health when it comes to nutrition. She also eats kimchi, which is pretty good for a vegetable dish as far as nutrition goes.
My 10-year-old likes green juice that has fruit juice with all those vegetables in it. My wife made some that she will drink.
He might be a bit old for this, but when my kids were little, when it was hard to feed them, if they took a bite, I might clap my hands. My wife and I would cheer as if the kid had just hit a home run. When they were really little, that worked sometimes. Another thing that might work is offering ice cream if the child eats a certain amount of food, like one child-sized slice of pizza or a glass of green juice.
Something else to think about is balancing dietary habits versus nutrition. Ice cream has a lot of sugar and fats. If they don't eat much, that probably won't hurt them in the short run, but you don't want them to have a long-term habit of eating ice cream all the time. But ice cream can have protein, fats, carbs, and whatever vitamins or nutrients is associated with the flavor. For example real strawberries would have some antioxidants, depending on the brand you get. You kind hide nutrients and fiber in smoothies.
If he does actually eat ice cream or pudding or whatever, and wants it, if you tell him you don't want to give him something heavy like ice cream or pudding if he throws up, he might try not to throw up to get the dessert. Then you sneak some nutrition into the dessert. BAWAHAHAHAHA! Pudding can have protein or good fats from egg in it for example, for example.
Some people say if they get hungry enough they will eat. There is probably something to that. But as parents, we want to see them at least eat what we think is a minimal amount at a meal. Maybe there is something to just eating when they are healthy as far as health is concerned.
You could just let the child not eat until he or she gets hungry, and then present the child with something just a hair outside of the child's comfort zone. I remember when my son was just under a year old, he didn't eat a good dinner, but he did eat. He woke up crying. We though it was a diaper, but he was bawling because he was hungry. So we had some meat, some kind of cutlet that he wasn't interested in before. We gave that to him when he was hungry and he gobbled it up and gained an appreciation for a different meal than he would normally eat. I wouldn't do this with Brussel sprouts, but if there is something you think that he would like that is just a little bit of a leap outside of his normal routine, something you think he would like if he gave it a try, this might be a good time.
He was picky as a two-year old, but we could get him to eat sausages, boiled eggs, and bakso--a kind of meat ball soup. My wife would take him out to the bakso place if he hadn't been eating well for a while because of his pickiness.
If they like fried food, there is tempura, fried vegetables. At one point we fried spinach and made chips out of them. If you can get the child to take a first bit of a really healthy homemade vegetable chip like that, they get the oil, the batter, but also the nutrition. Gradually they may be able to gain an appreciation of a vegetable.
I'll tell you something else that sounds crazy. My kids all loved these little seaweed rectangle about as thin as paper that Koreans (and maybe Japanese) wrap rice in with their chopsticks. I was talking to a blonde haired, blue-eye'd neighbor, whose little blonde-haired, blue eye'd child played with one of my children. I had one of those packs of squares in my hand, and I told her I thought her little boy would like it. She didn't think so, but we gave it to him, and he gobbled them up. For me, eating them straight the first time would have been overwhelming, almost a fishy greens flavor. But they are salty, and a variety they sell at Costco have sesame seed oil in the recipe and they taste really good. They call them 'laver.' Seaweed is really nutritious for having a lot of nutrients. I'd imagine ocean crops probably have lots of micronutrients that might eventually get lost from depleted soils that use artificial fertilizers.
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