Pasta, plain. Toast, plain. Yoghurt, one specific kind. Apples, peeled, cut into six.
That’s the list. It has been roughly that list since he was two, and for about a year of it I was on a low, constant hum of worry that I did a very good job of pretending was not there.
The year we made it worse
We did everything. We did one more bite, we did the pudding deal, we did the aeroplane, we did a chart. I blended cauliflower into a cheese sauce with a level of care I have not applied to food I actually wanted to eat.
He found the cauliflower. He finds everything. Three-year-olds have standards for what counts as a suspicious green fleck that would embarrass a food safety inspector, and the cost wasn’t the cauliflower, it was that afterwards he wouldn’t eat sauce. Any sauce. The list got shorter because of my clever idea.
The pudding deal was worse in a slower way. I taught him, over several months and with great consistency, that dinner is the price you pay for yoghurt. He learned it perfectly. He is not the one who was wrong.
What we do now
He gets one thing he already eats. Every meal, no exceptions, no matter what the rest of us are having. Usually it’s the pasta.
Everything else goes on the table in bowls, not on his plate. This is the bit that did the most and it took me an embarrassingly long time to see why: a new food on your plate is a demand. A new food in a bowl in the middle of the table that you could reach if you wanted is just a thing on a table. He can look at it for four months. He has.
And we say nothing. Nothing at all. Not “well done”, which I had thought was the safe option and which turns out to be just as much attention as a sigh. He was, I am fairly sure, refusing food partly for the reaction, and when the reaction stopped being available the refusing got much less interesting.
The bit that isn’t advice
He gets down when he’s finished. Sometimes that’s four minutes.
I know some families sit until everyone’s done, and I think if we’d started that at one it might have held. Starting it at three, with a child who was already braced for a fight at the table, would have been a fight, and I did not have another fight in me. So he gets down, and the rest of us keep sitting, and that has turned out to be its own quiet advertisement.
Ten months
I stopped pushing in the March.
He ate a piece of cucumber in the January. Unprompted, off the table, without looking at anybody, and I want to be very clear that I did not react — I looked directly at the wall.
The list is at seven now. Cucumber, breadsticks, and a strange interlude with olives that lasted a fortnight and ended without explanation. That’s three foods in ten months, which as an improvement rate is not going to sell any books. Two of the three now turn up in Nell’s packed lunch as well, which I did not expect. The same trick — everything in parts, nothing assembled — turns out to work on other people’s children too.
But dinner is quiet now. I would have taken quiet over seven foods.
Things people email to ask
- What do you do with a three-year-old who only eats a few foods?
- Put one thing they already eat on every plate, put everything else on the table rather than on their plate, and say nothing about any of it. The safe food means nobody has to be brave in order to sit down, and the food-on-the-table part removes the confrontation — a new thing they can reach for is a completely different proposition from a new thing that has been placed in front of them.
- Should you make a toddler try one more bite?
- It did not work here and I would not do it again. One more bite bought us a single mouthful and cost about three weeks, because it turned the whole table into somewhere he had to defend himself. The mouthful is not worth the association. Children who are not being pressured at dinner eat more over a week, even when they eat less at a given meal.
- Does hiding vegetables in food work?
- Not with ours, and the failure has a cost. He found them every time — a three-year-old’s standards for what counts as a green fleck are extremely high — and afterwards he stopped trusting sauce in general, which shrank the list rather than growing it. Vegetables now go on the table in plain sight and are ignored in plain sight.
- How long does it take for a fussy eater to improve?
- Longer than any article suggests. We stopped pushing in about the March and he ate a piece of cucumber, unprompted, in the following January — ten months, with nothing else changing. In that time the list went from four foods to seven, which is not a transformation but is the direction of travel, and the meals got quiet, which mattered more.
Where we checked
We are not experts in any of this. Where an entry touches something that has a proper answer, here is where the proper answer is.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
Six dinners on a bit of card
Not a meal plan. A list of the six things we can make without thinking, stuck inside a cupboard door, which has done more for our week than three years of proper meal planning ever did.
Trains with two, and why we still do it
The train to my sister’s costs more than the petrol and takes twenty minutes longer, and we do it anyway, because two hours in a car and two hours on a train are not the same two hours for anybody involved.
The lentil soup we’ve made forty times
It is not a good recipe. It is a repeatable one — four things we always have, one pan, and a texture that survives being reheated on a Tuesday by a man who is not paying attention.
Comments
They’re open, but they go through me first — every one is read and approved by hand, which is slow and occasionally very slow. Email is the fastest route, and I answer most of them.
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