At our house anxiety about food goes up and down in parallel with stress and anxiety in other areas. However, we have made huge progress in this area.
My DS was very, very inflexible about food. Then I reached the point where I really got tired of dealing with the food (same dinner every night for some 3 years-- balanced but limiting our lifestyle). We changed the rules: he had to eat what we eat for dinner. We set a minimum number of bites he HAD to eat before being excused from the table, and a higher number he could eat to win a reward (at first this was YouTube videos, but it has changed over time). Every time he took a bite that was difficult for him, we made a big positive fuss (high fives, big smiles, adoring comments).
We had yelling, crying, complaining, and hateful comments at the table, but he ate. And has continued to eat. Now the range of acceptable food is larger; he still gets anxious or eats too slowly with unfamiliar foods, but he is eating them, and the range is continuing to increase. He surprises us with comments. ("I like tacos." !!!!) We are going to *restaurants* now, with pleasure. What a change. After that we worked on related issues with lunch, especially going through the lunch line at school and tolerating the school cheeseburger that is not just like the cheeseburger at home. It worked.
Critical to our success was that we really worked on flexibility in play and in other activities first, before tackling the food problem. He needed to learn that flexibility first, or I think our dinner work would have failed completely. And because his ABA therapy program taught him to obey instructions and hang in there for a reward, we were able to follow through on the food issue.
I do think that solving the food problem is important, because it limits a person's social world to not be able to eat in restaurants or be invited to dinner and know they might not be able to eat what’s there. It is part of the overall project of raising a person who can be flexible enough to participate joyfully in whatever comes along in his life.
For our other kid (long story), we have had some success with a feeding clinic, where they specialize in behavior modification around food. That's another perfectly valid way to go. If it's anxiety, the overall behavior change will support changing the food behavior, and it may be better to tackle the overall problem of being flexible across the board first.
DeeDee
