Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Introducing my DS to things--it has to be his idea

We have two of those.
I could have written platypus' post. It IS exhausting. We do all the nudging and careful introducing and racing to the bathroom, but I have been heard screaming in utter desperation "because I said so! It won't kill you! Now go!"

With food, I have resorted to raw force. YMMV. In our case, DD had eaten herself into chronic constipation. Even daily triple dosages of laxatives wouldn't make her go for many days, and she would scream in pain. Her belly was so bloated she looked like 6 months pregnant. Ultrasound showed that her rectum was already pathologically distended, so she was in danger of not being able to actually excrete on her own even if she had been eating normally. She refused every single bit of fruit or vegetables, with the exception of the occasional banana. She would not drink juice, eat ice cream, butter on her bread, sauce on her pasta, nada. Refuse did not mean saying "I don't like it" after one taste, it meant throwing the food screaming around the room, and scream for hours until she fell asleep in exhaustion, We had to work up to her tolerating the food in the vicinity of her plate first, before we could even get started on the actual eating bit.

Peds just shrugged and prescribed more laxatives. She was a perfectly normal cute well behaved child at ped visits. None of them ever tried to get her to eat a bite of apple sauce or carrot.

I found the book "Cure your child with food" by Kelly Dorfman (horrible title for excellent book), consulted with the woman twice over the phone about her program for picky eaters for a horrendous price. Worth every penny. She was the one who pointed out to me that there must be sensory issues at play, which gave a me a whole lot of ideas. We actually went back to baby food first, the jars of puréed fruit and veggies she used to tolerate as a baby or young toddler when I was not around for breast-feeding, then pureeing home made vegetables, then steaming them until mushy and slicing them in tiny bits, then slightly larger bits etc. Over YEARS. And she HAD to try, or she would get nothing else.

I vividly recall the day when, after she was happily eating pre-sliced steamed carrots and declaring she liked then, we put a WHOLE steamed carrot on her plate the first time, for her to slice bits off with her fork (everything still being steamed to almost mush). She threw the carrot screaming around the room and hid behind the sofa. I wedged my chair between the table and the sofa and told her I would not let her out without eating that carrot because I knew she was going to like it. She was shaking and sobbing when she finally came up to me after twenty minutes or so, to take her first panicky bite. Then she ate up the carrot, told me "I liked it!" And happily ran off to play? Me? You could have fed me to the dogs after these kinds of confrontations.

So, instead of forcing medication down our child's throat, she will go hungry if she does not finish up her vegetables and fruit on her plate first. Any type of vegetables now - after all, if you complain about everything anyway, you can as well eat the asparagus and complain about it. No, no ham and no potatoes until it's gone. No dessert either and no snack until dinner.

People will tell you you are creating an eating disorder. Dorfman says to respond "I am curing an eating disorder". People whose kids are of the "they have to have one bite and then they can tell new they don't like it" garden variety pickiness and eat at least one type of fruit or vegetable have no idea what people like us even talk about.