I often hear about fussy children such as the following story from Lilly.
I have an extremely fussy 4 year old who had reflux for over 3 years. She has an extremely limited range of foods that she will eat and is sensitive to alterations in taste eg when we went to OS for a holiday she wouldn’t eat a honey sandwich (one of the few things she eats) because the honey and butter tasted different. I also have a 14 year son with Aspergers with similar problems.
I saw you mention super tasters in one of your posts so was wondering if any of your ebooks had information on this? The recipe books you can buy for fussy kids aren’t much good because you can’t hide vegies in meals if they won’t even eat the meals you hide them in eg pasta, meatballs, sausage rolls soup etc!
Hi Lilly, You are not alone in having a fussy eater! Many food sensitive children are supertasters, and supersensitive to many aspects of their food and their environment. This does mean that we can expect them to have a limited range of food. I see many children who will not eat an accepted food that is different in any way. You are better than some parents who do not realize that if the honey or dairy taste different at all, it will be refused. I expect you learned by managing your 14 year old son with Aspergers. You can get help at first particularly from Fussy Baby which I wrote exactly for families such as yours! It has a chapter on Eating Development which describes all the many aspects of food that tiny children have to develop to manage. We can all understand that some children have speech delay or coordination delay, so we can realize that some children are so sensitive that normal progression in eating has to be understood as “eating delay”. In Chap 2 you can see each of the factors that you can consider and how you can help your special daughter to ever-so-gradually progress. You will note that there may be some areas that she is doing well. And you will really enjoy reading Chapter 4 on Supersensitivities in children.
Chapter 3 considers the question “Is your baby, or child, food sensitive?” This is worth considering as, if you do investigate diet for any reactions and get a positive response, you can be lucky and have the extreme sensitivities decrease. This then means you may be able to expand the diet, still gradually. The detail that can help with diet investigation is in the second book “Are You Food Sensitive?” which you may look at after reading Fussy Baby, but Fussy Baby is the book to help you at the moment. I agree with you about the difficulties of hiding foods! Once you have learned about eating development you can see how to have just a bit of progress over time. It would also be good for you to see a dietitian to discuss the ides in Fussy Baby, especially to ensure that your daughter’s diet has the right balance of nutrients. I wish you progress even if slower than you would like. Joan
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