Kids, not the baby goat variety, but the small human person sort. My own kids, in particular.
They are very picky eaters. Toph and I don’t mean to encourage this, but we also don’t want to inflict life-long food aversions on our kids. So, we let them choose their foods, to a point. When we sit down to dinner, they are still supposed to eat a balanced meal. If that means they eat baby carrots as their one and only vegetable every single night, so be it.
The strategy is slowly paying off with J. She’s starting to branch out to new foods. She’s a bit of a mystery though, simply because when she was a toddler, she’d eat ANYTHING. She loved our spicy chili, thought spaghetti with sauce was the be all and end all, and she had no problems eating anything put in front of her. We think her tonsils got the better of her then. She started complaining of all things tomato (except ketchup) making her tongue and throat tingle funny. We gave in. We let her have pasta without sauce. We made her pizza with a garlic-butter sauce instead of a tomato based sauce. She’s coming around though. She had her tonsils out in 2006 (I think it was) and since then she will eat regular pizza if she has no other choice. She’s also trying other things. One of her favorites is Toph’s Lemon Garlic Chicken. She loves that. At least she’s not picky about garlic…she might starve in our house if she didn’t like garlic!
X has never been other than a picky eater. His whims change often, too. He tends to avoid the things his sister avoids. He also tends to demand packaged sweets, although he doesn’t get them as often as he’d like. What’s funny about X is that he’s very specific about the dishes and utensils he will use at any given time. When he asks for a glass of water, he’s very specific: “I want a white cup with a Disney castle and Mickey ears on it, with ice and water in it. And a blue striped straw.” Pause as I look at him with a raised eyebrow. “Please can I have it? Please? Can I?” He used to throw an absolute fit if we didn’t have the particular dish he wanted clean. Luckily, he’s starting to outgrow that. Or maybe he’s just acquired a rotating list of favorites. It’s hard to tell with him.
I guess I can’t blame my kids for being picky eaters. Toph and I can still be picky eaters. At least he and I agree on the two things we won’t ever serve in our house: seafood and mushrooms!
Were you a picky eater? Are your kids (if you have any) picky eaters? How was/is it handled in your family?
