picky eaters

[boxofdelights]

I still remember - and still resent -- everyone who, knowing I had a picky eater, told me that her kids never tried that, because they knew she wouldn't put up with it. I understand how pleasant it is to make confident pronouncements of how well you would have solved a problem, if only it had come to you. I still think you're a jerk. Also, probably wrong.

I was a very obedient little girl, because my parents wouldn't have put up with anything else, and not a particularly picky eater, but some cooked vegetables smelled, to me, like sewage. When my parents decided that I would eat three bites of spinach anyway, I held my breath and swallowed the first bite. Then I took a breath. Smelling the spinach, and knowing that I had just swallowed some of that, made me put the spinach and the rest of my stomach contents back on my plate.

It was a valuable lesson in the use of passive aggression to resist tyranny.


I can teach obedience, you know. Two of my dogs came to me as adults with entrenched habits of running away. I taught them to come when they were called, even when they were offleash outside, even when there was something really interesting going on. I didn't teach my children to obey me because I chose not to.

And now they are sixteen and nineteen, and they make nutritional choices that are different from what I would choose for them -- one of them is vegan, and the other drinks whey protein when he goes to the gym in hopes of packing more muscle on his skinny frame -- but:

1.THEIR BODY. THEIR DECISION.

Also,

2. They're both reasonably healthy.
3. They talk to me about stuff, including food stuff and body stuff and health stuff, even when they know I don't agree with their decisions.

But those are secondary back-up reasons. I mention them because they're true, and relevant, but I don't want them to distract from the main reason, because even if 2 and 3 were not the case, 1 would be enough to make my choice RIGHT.


Here's the part where I am also a jerk.

About ten years ago -- so, when I had a six-year-old picky eater -- I was in a book group reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. One of the other women also had a six-year-old picky eater. We were discussing a scene in which the youngest son is punished for refusing to eat his dinner. I know that most people dislike my parenting style and I mostly don't talk about it, but each time someone tried to sum up that part of the discussion with, "Sometimes you just have to be the parent," I protested. You don't have to lean on your child to eat or not eat things. Respecting his decisions will not do him any long-term harm. You can offer (and I do mean offer -- you have to take no for an answer, or it's just more coercion) him good nutritional information, and your help finding nourishing foods he's willing to eat, even as you respect HIS BODY HIS DECISION. I was mostly quoting Ellyn Satter here, who is more authoritarian than I am, but she says:

It is the parent's responsibility to provide nutritious food.
It is the child's responsibility to choose what, whether, and how much to eat.

and she has degrees and research and many years' experience with many families to back her up.

But eventually I had to say why I thought it was worth trying to avoid coercing children about food. I said, well, none of you would make a child submit to an unwanted kiss, right? I think making a child eat something is wrong for the same reasons. It might even be more of a violation of bodily autonomy, since it involves accepting something into the body. I think it's equally harmful.

I think I seriously offended the other mother of a picky eater. Anyway, I had been going to that book group for eleven years, but that was when I stopped.

Comments

[bcholmes]

*listening*

[kalmn]

I think a fair number of parents would make their kid put up with an unwanted kiss.

I am too tired to have many other comments. But Aglet is eating what he wants to eat-- we're not forcing anything, like we could. My goal is for him to not starve to death. I think we can do that.

[jesse_the_k]

Respecting his decisions sounds like being a great parent to me. Honestly, this idea that "being a parent" means "bullying and controlling" just doesn't parse for me.

(The parent I wished I had! But they didn't force me to eat. Did force me to hug and kiss. Yuck.

[the_siobhan]

I was a picky eater and I fought with my parents over food on a daily basis. For pretty much my entire childhood. It was pretty traumatic.

[darius]

Thank you for writing this -- it's still cheering to see someone acknowledge children's agency, decades after it stopped being an issue for me.

[loligo]

How do people even have the energy to fight with their kids about food? It is not uncommon for my kids to substitute yogurt or PBJ for the main course at dinner. Once Chuckles turned nine, she started eating the grown-up food more often than not, and I have every hope that Squeaky will eventually do the same.

[snippy]

Absolutely agree in both cases (food and affection). And now I have kids that eat nearly anything, but they still know exactly what they like and what they don't like.

[badgerbag]

I agree with you 100% on this, and I find other people's parenting around food actively creepy sometimes.

[kaigou]

Thinking back to being a kid, it seems like there are different things meant by the phrase "picky eater". Me, there were certain foods that I just didn't like the texture of -- and to this day, it's texture, not taste, that will make me lean away from a dish. (Like I love the flavor of most tripe-dishes, but I loathe the texture of tripe itself.)

I've heard "picky eater" applied to kids with allergies, like my cousin who, as a kid, was allergic to wheat and milk. He learned to be picky because he never knew when something might make him violently ill. I heard adults describing other kids as "picky eaters" who to me didn't seem picky about food so much as determined to only eat one dish, every day, for days on end. That seemed less picky and more just plain obsessive. And then there were friends who were "picky eaters" who to me just seemed utterly disinterested in ever trying anything new. They'd just take one look at something, and if they didn't recognize it, they'd point-blank refuse to even try.

My parents tolerated that there were certain foods I didn't like, or my sister didn't like, and they tolerated our phases of only wanting the spaghetti sauce on the side (and the cheese in a little pile, thank you) or not liking certain vegetables cooked, only raw (or vice versa). But what they didn't tolerate was us refusing to even try. Taking one look and point-blank refusing was out of the question. And we did get passes, like the stewed okra that had been way overcooked (texture, again), especially since they knew I loved pickled okra and fried okra. So I wouldn't say my parents didn't tolerate discrimination (in terms of choosing what you like and don't like) so much as blind refusal without even trying.

I don't know any parents who have coerced their kids into eating. Most of the parents I know have done the same as my parents, which is to make "try something new" into a virtue, not a scary thing you should avoid at all costs. I mean, kids learn from their parents, and if the parents get excited at new and unfamiliar dishes, the kids will soon cultivate the same attitude. Except for the random phases of spaghetti on the side or an obsession with french onion soup, but those pass soon enough.

Then again, it's not like I know an entire horde of kids, being kidless myself. So could just be my limited anecdotal experience.

Tangential

[amaebi]

You know, your parenting style seems fine to me. Though maybe you've been being Discreet with me! :D

I truly think there's something screwy about Fort Collins, though. Perhaps if we'd been living there I'd have had people getting Outraged at my parenting.

Which I would say has proved my long-held contention that mostly you can be a friend, and just Parent in emergencies.

[commodorified]

My mother coerced me - fairly gently - into having good manners about what I did and did not eat - take a spoonful of everything and eat it even if you choose to drown it in sauce - some exceptions were allowed, five per kid or so, for stuff we flat out loathed, don't go on about what you hate, just say 'it looks lovely but may I have more X and Y instead, please?", etc and so forth.

The bribe used was that when I could manage that reasonably I could Go Out for supper and Eat With The Grownups on holidays, stuff like that.

And basically all that was only supper: the rest of the time she asked what we'd like and within reason make it. If you'd ASKED for it then you did have to eat it, barring asking for chili and then realising you had strep, which did happen once...

[wired]

I had that same experience with curry. Ugh! Supertasters do not love tuna curry.

I felt like my mellow attitude toward food paid off when Baz said. "Thank you, but I prefer not to eat that today". Or maybe when he asked for ahi tuna, brussels sprouts, and homemade cheesecake for his 7th birthday dinner.

[em_h]

I was a moderately picky eater, and my sister was a very picky eater, but luckily (for us, though not for her) our mother had such vivid and terrible memories of what she went through as a picky kid -- including being forced to sit at the table for entire days sometimes, staring at the food she refused to eat -- that she never tried to make us eat anything we didn't want.

Although ham, which I hated so much I wouldn't be in the same room, is something I still find disgusting and will not touch, both of us now happily eat pretty much everything else we refused as children. Thinking back, it seems to me that most of the ick factor was texture, though smell played a part in a few cases (the notorious ham in particular).

My daughter, very unusually for a child with autism, has always been an enthusiastic eater of pretty much anything edible, though for a few years she went through a phase of refusing bananas, and a shorter phase when she picked tomatoes out of anything they were in. Texture in her case too, I suspect.

Anyway -- I like your approach, is what I'm saying.

[mishalak]

Looking back now I am not sure that my parents doing the "no thank you helping" was helpful or hurtful. No idea really. I now love many of the things I objected to when I was young and find my youthful dislike funny. I think I may have disliked them more out of acculturation than from actual dislike.