sethsmom
04-21-2007, 07:02 AM
...except milk, dried fruit, and Cheerios. He has suddenly decided that he will not eat baby food. He has not and will not touch anything that is slightly damp, and though we've been trying finger foods, he is refusing most everything. The pediatrician said at his 18-month appointment to give it to 20 months and we will go to a specialist. But that was when he was eating jarred food still. He's not eaten jarred food (and, thus, meat or veggies) since last Saturday now. I can make an appointment to see the pediatrician next week, but what do I do in the meantime. Continue to let him eat fruit and Cheerios and offer foods PRAYING that he'll eat or do I (as DH suggests) refuse to give him fruit or Cheerios on the premise that he'll get hungry enough to eat the finger foods?
SnuggleBuggles
04-21-2007, 07:53 AM
I'd just keep offering lots of things and up the quantities available of non cheerios and the dried fruit. My dh is always more hard core abouot ds' eating (like he is not willing to give him something else for dinner if he doesn't like what I made- ds is almost 5 so I have been agreeing with dh more now but not back at 18 months).
Make the appointment and in the meantime this Dr. Sears article had some ideas that helped us. It had some ideas that I didn't really think of. Turns out that ketchup was a lifesaver for a little while. :)
Oh, first, what about lunchmeat (no nitrates, nitrites)? He might like that texture.
FEEDING TODDLERS: 17 TIPS FOR PLEASING THE PICKY EATER
When our first few children were toddlers, we dreaded dinnertime. We would prepare all kinds of sensible meals composed of what we thought were healthy, appealing foods. Most of these offerings would end up splattering the high-chair tray and carpeting the floor. To make matters worse, we took our kids' rejection of our cuisine personally, sure that this was a sign of parental lapse on our part. What was wrong? Why were these kids such picky eaters?
Why toddlers are picky. Being a picky eater is part of what it means to be a toddler. We have since learned that there are developmental reasons why kids between one and three years of age peck and poke at their food. After a year of rapid growth (the average one-year-old has tripled her birth weight), toddlers gain weight more slowly. So, of course, they need less food. The fact that these little ones are always on the go also affects their eating patterns. They don't sit still for anything, even food. Snacking their way through the day is more compatible with these busy explorers' lifestyle than sitting down to a full-fledged feast.
Learning this helped us relax. We now realize that our job is simply to buy the right food, prepare it nutritiously (steamed rather than boiled, baked rather than fried), and serve it creatively. We leave the rest up to the kids. How much they eat, when they eat, and if they eat is mostly their responsibility; we've learned to take neither the credit nor the blame.
Toddlers like to binge on one food at a time. They may eat only fruits one day, and vegetables the next. Since erratic eating habits are as normal as toddler mood swings, expect your child to eat well one day and eat practically nothing the next. Toddlers from one to three years need between 1,000 and 1,300 calories a day, yet they may not eat this amount every day. Aim for a nutritionally-balanced week, not a balanced day.
All this is not to say that parents shouldn't encourage their toddlers to eat well and develop healthy food habits. Based on our hands-on experience with eight children, we've developed 17 tactics to tempt little taste buds and minimize mealtime hassles.
1. Offer a nibble tray. Toddlers like to graze their way through a variety of foods, so why not offer them a customized smorgasbord? The first tip from the Sears' kitchen is to offer toddlers a nibble tray. Use an ice-cube tray, a muffin tin, or a compartmentalized dish, and put bite-size portions of colorful and nutritious foods in each section. Call these finger foods playful names that a two-year-old can appreciate, such as:
* apple moons (thinly sliced)
* avocado boats (a quarter of an avocado)
* banana wheels
* broccoli trees (steamed broccoli florets)
* carrot swords (cooked and thinly sliced)
* cheese building blocks
* egg canoes (hard- boiled egg wedges)
* little O's (o-shaped cereal)
Place the food on an easy-to-reach table. As your toddler makes his rounds through the house, he can stop, sit down, nibble a bit, and, when he's done, continue on his way. These foods have a table-life of an hour or two.
NUTRITIP: Good Grazing – Good Behavior
A child's demeanor often parallels her eating patterns. Parents often notice that a toddler's behavior deteriorates toward the end of the morning or mid-afternoon. Notice the connection? Behavior is at its worst the longer they go without food. Grazing minimizes blood-sugar swings and lessens the resulting undesirable behavior.
2. Dip it. Young children think that immersing foods in a tasty dip is pure fun (and delightfully messy). Some possibilities to dip into:
* cottage cheese or tofu dip
* cream cheese
* fruit juice-sweetened preserves
* guacamole
* peanut butter, thinly spread
* pureed fruits or vegetables
* yogurt, plain or sweetened with juice concentrate
Those dips serve equally well as spreads on apple or pear slices, bell-pepper strips, rice cakes, bagels, toast, or other nutritious platforms.
3. Spread it. Toddlers like spreading, or more accurately, smearing. Show them how to use a table knife to spread cheese, peanut butter, and fruit concentrate onto crackers, toast, or rice cakes.
4. Top it. Toddlers are into toppings. Putting nutritious, familiar favorites on top of new and less-desirable foods is a way to broaden the finicky toddler's menu. Favorite toppings are yogurt, cream cheese, melted cheese, guacamole, tomato sauce, applesauce, and peanut butter.
5. Drink it. If your youngster would rather drink than eat, don't despair. Make a smoothie – together. Milk and fruit – along with supplements such as juice, egg powder, wheat germ, yogurt, honey, and peanut butter – can be the basis of very healthy meals. So what if they are consumed through a straw? One note of caution: Avoid any drinks with raw eggs or you'll risk salmonella poisoning.
6. Cut it up. How much a child will eat often depends on how you cut it. Cut sandwiches, pancakes, waffles, and pizza into various shapes using cookie cutters.
7. Package it. Appearance is important. For something new and different, why not use your child's own toy plates for dishing out a snack? Our kids enjoy the unexpected and fanciful when it comes to serving dishes – anything from plastic measuring cups to ice-cream cones.
You can also try the scaled-down approach. Either serve pint-size portions or, when they're available, buy munchkin-size foodstuffs, such as mini bagels, mini quiches, chicken drummettes (the meat part of the wing), and tiny muffins.
8. Become a veggie vendor. I must have heard, "Doctor, he won't eat his vegetables" a thousand times. Yet, the child keeps right on growing. Vegetables require some creative marketing, as they seem to be the most contested food in households with young children. How much vegetables do toddlers need? Although kids should be offered three to five servings of veggies a day, for children under five, each serving need be only a tablespoon for each year of age. In other words, a two- year-old should ideally consume two tablespoons of vegetables three to five times a day. So if you aren't the proud parent of a veggie lover, try the following tricks:
* Plant a garden with your child. Let her help care for the plants, harvest the ripe vegetables, and wash and prepare them. She will probably be much more interested in eating what she has helped to grow.
* Slip grated or diced vegetables into favorite foods. Try adding them to rice, cottage cheese, cream cheese, guacamole, or even macaroni and cheese. Zucchini pancakes are a big hit at our house, as are carrot muffins.
* Camouflage vegetables with a favorite sauce.
* Use vegetables as finger foods and dip them in a favorite sauce or dip.
* Using a small cookie cutter, cut the vegetables into interesting shapes.
* Steam your greens. They are much more flavorful and usually sweeter than when raw.
* Make veggie art . Create colorful faces with olive- slice eyes, tomato ears, mushroom noses, bell-pepper mustaches, and any other playful features you can think of. Our eighth child, Lauren, loved to put olives on the tip of each finger. "Olive fingers" would then nibble this nutritious and nutrient-dense food off her fingertips. Zucchini pancakes make a terrific face to which you can add pea eyes, a carrot nose, and cheese hair.
* Concoct creative camouflages. There are all kinds of possible variations on the old standby "cheese in the trees" (cheese melted on steamed broccoli florets). Or, you can all enjoy the pleasure of veggies topped with peanut- butter sauce, a specialty of Asian cuisines.
9. Share it. If your child is going through a picky-eater stage, invite over a friend who is the same age or slightly older whom you know "likes to eat." Your child will catch on. Group feeding lets the other kids set the example.
10. Respect tiny tummies. Keep food servings small. Wondering how much to offer? Here's a rule of thumb – or, rather, of hand. A young child's stomach is approximately the size of his fist. So dole out small portions at first and refill the plate when your child asks for more. This less-is-more meal plan is not only more successful with picky eaters, it also has the added benefit of stabilizing blood-sugar levels, which in turn minimizes mood swings. As most parents know, a hungry kid is generally not a happy kid.
Use what we call "the bite rule" to encourage the reluctant eater: "Take one bite, two bites…" (how ever far you think you can push it without force-feeding). The bite rule at least gets your child to taste a new food, while giving her some control over the feeding. As much as you possibly can, let your child – and his appetite – set the pace for meals. But if you want your child to eat dinner at the same time you do, try to time his snack-meals so that they are at least two hours before dinner.
11. Make it accessible. Give your toddler shelf space. Reserve a low shelf in the refrigerator for a variety of your toddler's favorite (nutritious) foods and drinks. Whenever she wants a snack, open the door for her and let her choose one. This tactic also enables children to eat when they are hungry, an important step in acquiring a healthy attitude about food.
12. Use sit-still strategies. One reason why toddlers don't like to sit still at the family table is that their feet dangle. Try sitting on a stool while eating. You naturally begin to squirm and want to get up and move around. Children are likely to sit and eat longer at a child-size table and chair where their feet touch the ground.
13. Turn meals upside down. The distinctions between breakfast, lunch, and dinner have little meaning to a child. If your youngster insists on eating pizza in the morning or fruit and cereal in the evening, go with it – better than her not eating at all. This is not to say that you should become a short-order cook, filling lots of special requests, but why not let your toddler set the menu sometimes? Other family members will probably enjoy the novelty of waffles and hash browns for dinner.
14. Let them cook. Children are more likely to eat their own creations, so, when appropriate, let your child help prepare the food. Use cookie cutters to create edible designs out of foods like cheese, bread, thin meat slices, or cooked lasagna noodles. Give your assistant such jobs as tearing and washing lettuce, scrubbing potatoes, or stirring batter. Put pancake batter in a squeeze bottle and let your child supervise as you squeeze the batter onto the hot griddle in fun shapes, such as hearts, numbers, letters, or even spell the child's name.
15. Make every calorie count. Offer your child foods that pack lots of nutrition into small doses. This is particularly important for toddlers who are often as active as rabbits, but who seem to eat like mice.
Nutrient-dense foods that most children are willing to eat include:
* Avocados
* Pasta
* Broccoli
* Peanut butter
* Brown rice and other grains
* Potatoes
* Cheese
* Poultry
* Eggs
* Squash
* Fish
* Sweet potatoes
* Kidney beans
* Tofu
* Yogurt
16. Count on inconsistency. For young children, what and how much they are willing to eat may vary daily. This capriciousness is due in large part to their ambivalence about independence, and eating is an area where they can act out this confusion. So don't be surprised if your child eats a heaping plateful of food one day and practically nothing the next, adores broccoli on Tuesday and refuses it on Thursday, wants to feed herself at one meal and be totally catered to at another. As a parent in our practice said, "The only thing consistent about toddler feeding is inconsistency." Try to simply roll with these mood swings, and don't take them personally.
17. Relax. Sometime between her second and third birthday, you can expect your child to become set in her ideas on just about everything – including the way food is prepared. Expect food fixations . If the peanut butter must be on top of the jelly and you put the jelly on top of the peanut butter, be prepared for a protest. It's not easy to reason with an opinionated two-year-old. Better to learn to make the sandwich the child's way. Don't interpret this as being stubborn. Toddlers have a mindset about the order of things in their world. Any alternative is unacceptable. This is a passing stage.
(For more information see: ABC's of Teaching Nutrition to Kids
Back to top
GRAZING
We have noticed that children's behavior often deteriorates in the late morning and late afternoon, or three to four hours after a meal. Children simply run out of fuel. When blood-sugar levels go down, stress hormones kick in to raise it up again, but this can cause behavioral problems and diminished concentration. To smooth out the blood-sugar mood swings, try the fine art of grazing. Let your child nibble, or graze, on nutritious foods throughout the day. Make them easily accessible in a lunch pack at school. (Smart teachers allow even upper-grade children to have a mid-morning snack.) Carry snacks with you when you are away from home. While at home, keep a supply of healthy snacks readily available in the pantry or refrigerator.
Here's a trick from the Sears' family kitchen for the preschool child. Prepare a nibble tray. Use an ice cube tray, a muffin tin, or a compartmentalized plastic dish and fill each section with bite-size portions of colorful and nutritious foods. Give the foods fun names, such as avocado boats (a quarter of an avocado sectioned lengthwise), banana or cooked carrot wheels, broccoli trees, cheese blocks, little O's (O-shaped cereal), canoe eggs (hard-boiled eggs cut lengthwise in wedges), moons (peeled apple slices, thinly spread with peanut butter), or shells and worms (different shapes of pasta).
Don't forget that children love to dip. Reserve one or two compartments in the tray for your child's favorite dips, such as yogurt or guacamole (without the spices). Encourage the child to sit and nibble from the tray frequently throughout the day, especially late in the morning and in the mid-to-late afternoon, when the fuel from the previous meal begins to wear off. Shorten the spacing between feedings and you are less likely to have spacey children.
http://askdrsears.com/html/3/T030800.asp
Beth
sidmand
04-21-2007, 08:32 AM
Beth has some awesome tips!
I just wanted to add some BTDT advice. I don't think of DS as a picky eater, but he is. His normal every day routine is/was to eat milk, freeze dried strawberries, and if we were lucky, Cheerios or Goldfish. Once in awhile he would eat a spinach pancake, meatballs, etc. (there was quite a variety on the once in awhile, but there were many many more days it was just milk, strawberries, and Cherrios!).
It did worry me. And then I looked at some of my cousins who subsided on peanut butter sandwiches and/or French toast for YEARS and came out fine.
Then I looked at DS who is literally off the charts for height and although he's thin, he's still in the 50-65th percentile for weight. He's not sick very often...so all in all he's doing pretty well. We now add vitamins for his milk. We give him V8 Frusion under the guise of getting some veggies and fruit, we started Nutripals liquid to mix in his milk to get him some more vitamins, but...I stopped worrying so much. Little by little he adds in one food or another that he'll eat (although usually that means he gives some up). I do keep offering. I go on the principle of Ellyn Satter that it's up to me to provide the foods, but it's up to DS to decide whether to eat them. More often than not, he doesn't, but sometimes he surprises me!
Of course, on the other hand, DS has ALWAYS been like this. He never really ate jarred baby food. He only liked crunchy foods (toast not bread, freeze dried strawberries, not regular strawberries). If you rule out a medical reason though...I have friends that do as your DH does and refuse to give the snack food until they've eaten the "real" food. I don't want to create any food battles and I guess I'm also a somewhat of a sucker. I figure if he's eating any foods, it's better than eating none.
Debbie
http://b2.lilypie.com/BI7Tm5.png
DrSally
04-21-2007, 08:31 PM
Also, if he doesn't like anything wet, maybe try dusting things in cheerio dust (tofu cubes, banana, etc.). I'm sure it's just a jag, and he'll start eating other stuff soon. Hang in there.
randomkid
04-23-2007, 11:02 PM
You didn't really say what you have tried or how you have gone about it, so if you have done these things, just ignore me. I'm sure you've done everything you can think of, but I will tell you what has worked for us. My DD wouldn't eat baby food or anything pureed and still won't eat things like mashed potatoes, applesauce, etc. I was getting concerned over her lack of interest in eating and an LC I know made this recommendation - try to make it interesting. Give a whole chicken leg or an ear of corn. Watch closely of course, but let them play with it and maybe they will eat it. This really did work for DD. Now that she is two, she is more selective than she was at 14 months, but we do what we can.
Here are two things that work for us: 1) I leave the room. I put DD at her table with her plate of food, then leave. I can be in the kitchen and see her clearly, so I can watch for any choking or problems. I make sure she has something that I know she will eat and she starts with that. This settles down any fussiness. I don't say anything to her about it and I don't give her anything else. It may take a while, but many times she will start eating the other food on her plate. Maybe not all of it, but it's a start. 2) I hate this one, but it works. I sit her in front of the TV and put on Barney or Baby Einstein. I repeat...I *hate* this! It started when she was in daycare and sick all the time. She wouldn't eat at all, so I would sit with her in front of the TV and hand feed her. Then, she started eating on her own as long as she was in front of the TV. I know this is a lousy habit, but it often is really the ONLY way I can get her to sit still long enough to eat. I know the issues with obesity, but DD is under 5th percentile for weight, so not really a concern for me. When she was only 21 pounds at 22 months, I decided I had to do "whatever it takes". It still works, so we do it. I imagine someday she will actually sit at the table with us.
Hope this helps and sorry so long - that always happens when I'm tired...I ramble.
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.5 Copyright © 2024 vBulletin Solutions Inc. All rights reserved.