Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Drew answers a question about strategies for dealing with a picky eater.
Benjamin:
Drew, you’ve written about one of your sons being a very picky eater, to the extent that you brought him to a "therapist" (for lack of a better term). Has his eating improved? How long did it take? Dad of two younger picky eaters here, and I need some light at the end of the tunnel. I can only eat chicken nuggets so many times.
It WAS a food therapist! No shame in using that term. And it worked! You will be disappointed, but not terribly surprised, to learn that it didn’t happen overnight. Our son had to go to his food therapist once a week for a couple of years. She started off getting him to describe, in detail, the food on his plate: what it smelled like, how it looked, how it tasted if he dared to take a bite. To help picky eaters, you can’t just try food chaining, or one of the other stock methods that pops up while doing a Google search. You have to get the patient to think critically about food, same as you have to teach students in an English class to think critically about the books they read. It’s an education, with no shortcuts included.
After a few months, our therapist got our son comfortable with weird (to him) foods on his plate, to know the difference between not liking a food and not being ready for it just yet, and how to make basic quesadillas using a hot plate. Eventually, he stopped making whiny kid groans if we served food he wasn’t into. Then, at long last, we didn’t have to make sure every restaurant we went to had either fries or chicken nuggets on its menu. I knew we’d turned a corner when I made steak one night and our son said, “This is SO good.” He’d never been so effusive about real food. He kept asking for more of “the white part” of the ribeye, a clear sign that he understood fat equals flavor. Now we barely register his food hangups at all. We can take him anywhere, confident that he’ll find something he likes. Usually it’s overpriced grilled salmon, but whatever. It ain’t Raising Cane’s, so that’s a win.
That's the good news for you Benjamin: it indeed does get better. The bad news is that it never feels that way when you’re in the shit. However, time eventually comes over to your side... IF you, the parent, are willing to put in the correct sort of effort. That can mean ponying up for outside help, but it also means always giving your kid a wide variety of food options, eating and cooking a wide variety of foods yourself, and never EVER making them feel stressed or ashamed at mealtime. The goal is to have your kids associate eating with positive thoughts. Screaming EAT THAT CREAM CHIPPED BEEF OR NO DESSERT tends to backfire in that regard.
By the way, quesadillas are now our son’s favorite food. He makes them all the time for himself, and it’s the only thing he’s ever ordered at Chipotle. Our therapist has created a quesadilla monster.
