Feeding the ungratefuls

[luuknam]

Picky is genuine dislike ime.

 

What I meant is genuine dislike vs picky aka "just not in the mood - would rather have something yummier". And I know they've gotten picky... variations of the following scenario happen way too often in my house:

 

x, y & z are things they like and eat regularly

 

Kid: "I'm hungry"

Me: "What do you want?"

Kid: "I don't know"

Me: "You want x?"

Kid: "No"

Me: "You want y?"

Kid: "No"

Me: "z?"

Kid: "No"

Me: "You can have one of those"

Kid either picks one of those or decides that kid isn't hungry after all and happily goes play

[Joker]

Yeah, the dessert thing would never work here as we don't really like sweets. Dessert is not a thing here. Sweets are rare because we are rarely in the mood for them. I will not make them having fruit dependent on them eating dinner. That's dumb. I have no comparison for the action given above. What would I keep from my dds if they didn't try a certain number of bites? Would I really tell them they couldn't have something healthy after dinner because they didn't like what I cooked? That seems so ridiculous to me. It's also unnecessary as it all worked out in the end and dds, now teens, are now both adventurous eaters. 

[eternalsummer]

For us, what works much much better is:

 

Kid: "I'm hungry."

 

Me:  "Dinner's in a couple of hours.  Go check out what we have in the fridge."

 

Kid either eats something in the fridge/cabinet (90% of the time) or decides there's nothing worth eating, and waits for dinner.  In your case I'd keep things I know they like and are relatively healthy (crackers, cheese, fruit, etc.) available and not worry if that's what they want to eat, as it's healthy enough.  If you don't want them to forage for cookies all day you'll have to either lock up the cookies or just not buy more than the family will eat in one sitting (this is what we do).

[maize]

I came across some research recently about the way nutrient absorption from food is impacted by how much we like/want to eat the food. Basically, we absorb less from food that is unappealing to us.

 

Thought this might be relevant to the discussion at hand. Trying to coerce our kids into eating what is not appealing to them may not be even nutritionally as beneficial as we would expect it to be.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/opinion/20brown.html?_r=0