Fussy Kids?

[Azaezl]

Hi Lisa,

Have you tried a reward chart / system? You could cook 1 of a few veg, eg 1 piece of broccoli, 1 big piece of carrot, a few sprouts, handful of sweetcorn etc so it seems like they aren't having to eat loads of veg, you could argue 'well it's only 1 piece of that, a few tiny bits of this'.

On the reward chart they get a star for eating all of their tea and the one who has the most stars at the end of the week gets a treat. That way they'll be competing with each other(most kids like a competition) and they'll get a treat if they are the winner. The goal will be to have all of them eating all of the food you give them and so they all get a treat. It doesn't have to be something big, just a cheap toy or some chocolate, or better still what about kinder eggs? Chocolate & a toy! If you take away all treats such as sweets, chocolate, crisp(that's assuming they have them sometimes?) then they'll have more incentive to be the winner as they'll want the choc.

Or how about some pretending with the food? You could say broccoli is tiny little trees that fairies / pixies / aliens or whatever cut down from the magic forest especially for them to eat! LOL Just let you imagination go wild, they'll love it!

Another thing you could try is make a menu for the day, put say 3 diff things on it and let them pick what they want off the menu, give them fun names like 'silly spaghetti with bouncy balls' just try to have the same meal but slightly altered / diff name, if the boys are into creepy crawlies you could have 'tomato surprise with wriggly worms and monsters eggs'(spag bol again LOL) and as mentioned you could blend loads of veg into the tomato sauce.

Another good thing is cutting things into shapes, esp. sandwhiches(which you can put allsorts of fillings into) but you can shape things into other things(does that make sense?) like making a silly face, sausage for a smiley mouth, some chips for hair, some sort of veg for eyes and tomato sauce for a big red nose.

My daughter can be fussy sometimes, some days she refuses to eat pretty much anything even chocolate! Other days she'll be very open about trying new stuff. She hates veg but I keep trying her with it. She's not even 2 yet so I'm not too strict with her but once she's old enough to fully understand it will be a case of eat it or you don't get anything nice afterwards.

I've found that punishing has the reverse effect, if I make a big fuss over something Kyoko gets into even more of a strop so I don't bother. If she won't eat anything I'll ask her if she's sure she doesn't want any and she just shakes her head, I just try again a few days later. If you get annoyed by them not eating something they'll pick up on it and might think ' oh no not veg mum always gets in a mood when we have that, I hate veg!' So just calmly ask if they are sure because that's all that they can have and if they don't want it they don't have to have it but they don't get anything else.

Just a few ideas for you, hope some of them work. I really feel for you, Kyoko drives me mental some days can't imagine how hard it must be having 3 to deal with! Get the food thing sorted and then you could move the reward system onto bedtime / naptime, potty training, just do 1 thing at a time, get it sorted to a point where they don't fuss over it and then move onto the next problem.

GOOD LUCK

 

[Rhiannon]

You have some fantastic ideas there. The rewards chart is fantastic, especially when toilet training, but they have to be old enough to understand about stickers and charts etc.

My daughter is not 2 either, nearly though, and she can be fussy too, but everyone has to understand, which I am sure everyone does, that toddlers and little kids have SOOOOO much going on at once and dont want to eat when they can see that toy over there that they want so badly to play with, or when they can hear or see that a good tv show is on etc.

The only way atm to get my daughter to go to sleep is to say "do you want to see nanny and pa" and she says "ok" and I say "well go to sleep and we can go there after" and she will go to sleep. Sometimes a little bribe doesnt hurt.

Also, by doing quite a bit of reading and finding the same statistics, it takes kids 5 times of trying something unusual before the will accept it. My daughter didnt like tomato, but we kept putting a slice on her plate and she tried it a few times and now she loves it and picks them from the garden and eats them. So the triplets may not be accepting the food because they havent, probably refused, to try tasting it a few times (refused I mean if its vegies!)

You will work it out. But I still think Azaezl has some awesome suggestions.

 

[newtankgirl]

I'm not a mum so this is all theoretical but I do have close friends who have gone through same. The main issue they found was that this turns quickly into a spiralling problem if its a big issue for you then sub consciously you make it a big issue for your kids. They now know how to wind mummy up!... It's worrying I'm sure I'm not disputing that at all, but if you tense up at meal times your kids will pick up on that. From reading you sound like a fab mum - triplets - flipping heck!
Someone menetioned getting them to make their own food - if you can bear it this does work to but again not as a big deal thing - just as a bit of fun. Anyway hope helps, good luck! x

 

[LisaLQ]

Thanks guys, I am still checking in now and again but been horrendously busy here. We had a massive improvement from all three, but over the last 3-4 days Jack's gone from bad to worse and is now refusing all food saying he doesn't like it, or he feels poorly, and not even drinking either. I could swing for him, as he asks for the food, says he wants it, then one mouthful in he's making himself throw up and pretending to be poorly. Funny how jelly babies dont make him poorly, innit?

But Becca and Joe are doing really well - Joe always was a gannet, but Becca was the fussiest of the lot - she now loves trying to eat all her tea up, and impressing me - she's been a real trooper

 

[Miss Wiggle]

glad things are improving a bit Lisa

 

[Azaezl]

That's really good to hear, was wondering how it was going, haven't noticed you around here for a few days. Hopefully Jack will copy his siblings and start eating, maybe he is slightly ill(or thinks he is LOL) and just won't turn jelly babies down because they are yummy! My daughter had a really bad water infection a few weeks ago(we had her up at the hospital at one point because she had such a high fever) and wouldn't eat anything for days even when we offered her junk, eventually she ate a bit of chocolate and then that was it for about a week she'd refuse anything except chocolate, she's back to normal now, although she still tries it on with chocolate but she knows now that she can't have it all the time, no matter how much she screams LOL.

 

[angelmouse]

One of my daughters won`t eat veg, so if we bolagnase or something i put all her veg in the blender and then mix it in, she hasn`t noticed yet and eats it all. At lease i know she`s getting something healthy even if she does`nt
Angel

 

[PlecMama]

We've had no back up from health visitors since they were 1.

Ain't that the truth. We had one visit when we moved here and never heard from them again. We actually made an appointment to go see her and she told us that because he was so smart and was going to excel in the world, it wasn't worth visiting. Nice but not really helpful. Especially since we are first time parents and no one told us we have to do all the "getting a school" thing ourselves, we sat here until February waiting for some sort of letter asking us which school we wanted to send him to, then I called the school to ask them what was up and they said that we should have done it last August. Doh!

Fortunately, we made an instant appeal and they accepted him. But all the same, I sympathise with you "no one's helping" problem. Heck, I had to take him back to the hospital five times with a broken leg before anyone actually put a cast on it. That's a WHOLE 'nother story...

Now about the food.

If they don't like it, they won't eat it. I remember my mother chasing me round the house with this egg & mushroom cream she'd made that I absolutely hated, force-feeding me one spoonful at a time while I cried. Sometimes you actually just don't like stuff. And it's been my experience with Bu that sometimes they won't eat something for years but then start eating it like they always have loved it. My kid will eat a whole cucumber in one sitting with no dip if I just slice it up for him, but he wouldn't eat an egg if I held him down with my knee (and I'm not suggesting that anyone tries that) - but from the time I was 7 weeks pregnant with him, I couldn't even think about a fried egg without throwing up. I didn't get one until he was about 4 months old. He's always hated them, embryo and boy

Just give them what they will eat, call it good. I expect they'll grow out of it, and to be honest, reading your follow up post about them, it sounds like they have more to deal with then whether they are going to eat a carrot or not. Just try to make it happy. Keep offering things but put something you know they'll eat on the plate. He's had sausages and cucumber for dinner before when we have Mexican or something. I know he won't eat it, so I make him something he will eat and make it kind look like ours. Wrap the sausage and cuc in the tortilla and make it look nice. If he unwraps it and tips it all out, so what. It was only a bit of bread anyway.

I think the parents get a lot more hung up about this then the kids do. I have fought battles with him over it but in the end he just dug his heels in and it's a lot easier to NOT eat something then to be the one trying to make someone eat something. The stress is all yours. They are just like "uh huh, well not eating that, knock yourself out mom".

But definitely don't give the treat food when they are hungry from not eating. Get yogurt and put it as part of the dinner (works with the tortillas as above) so it doesn't look like a treat, just a regular part of dinner, then they can't assume they got a reward.

When I ask him what he wants to eat, it's always "sausages or pizza", but I try not to ask unless we actually wanted one of those things. Yesterday we started with porridge, then dinner up the park while playing baseball was corned beef sandwiches & fruit, and tea last night was bbq burgers (with cucumber slices cos he wont eat lettuce), chips, beans and ice cream.