I don’t disagree but I was that picky kid growing up and my parents did try very hard to get me to eat my food. I’m exceeding stubborn and didn’t mind sitting at the table the whole day, food was not going to be eaten and if anything it made my distaste for certain things worse. Something that held until i lived on my own and started cooking for myself, i was then able to open up my palate and try stuff i didn’t like before.
I don’t have kids but i think a good suggestion would be to involve the kids in deciding what to make to eat and have them help with the process where it is safe to do so. My biggest thing as a kid was that i just didn’t understand what i was eating and there was something psychologically unpleasant about certain things i was eating when in reality it wasnt that big of a deal.
Certainly parents arent always going to have time for this but as an occasional thing to do and making it fun and interesting for kids might do more good than forcing them to eat something.
This is pretty much what we did, and GirlChild eats all sorts of veggies (and begs me to buy asparagus).
But there are weirdnesses to any child’s preferences. for example, she decided at some point that the seeds from large pickles are tasty, but definitely not pickles themselves…
I do counterpoint exactly that, i’m not going to tell people how to raise their kids but hope i can give enough reasons to not force a kid to eat something
Providing food to your kids is a basic parental responsibility, be it humans or (most) animals. There’s a trust/bond in that. It is nature/nurture, just how it goes. Baby birds in a nest don’t complain that mom just barfed up worms for dinner… AGAIN.
My cousin always made a scene come time to eat. If his food wasn’t super-plain (like just a burger bun & patty, nothing else) he would throw a fit, hid under the table… growl at people… it was fucked up. Everyone told my aunt this wasn’t normal and could be a sign of something bad. She ignored his ways, didn’t even bother to explore what was behind all of it.
Today, cousin is a mid-30’s schizophrenic zombied by meds. Extreme case, yes… but kids reacting to food with tantrums and whatever is unnatural - a clue something is wrong, either with the parenting or the kid’s brain.
Be gentle in exploring what the problem is, could be simple as a general distaste for a certain foods (I detest raw green peppers and melons), or kid doesn’t like asparagus pee.
I guess when it comes to basic human activities… eating, shitting, sleeping… there’s ‘normal’ and there’s ‘WTF?’ behaviors.
Everyone is born broken in some way.
Edit - I don’t have kids but I have cats, so I understand the frustration of fussy meal times and the ensuing vomit protests.
But forcing them to eat isn’t going to help. Depending on how it’s done, it’s borderline if not outright abuse… see the scene from Mother Dearest for example. I do agree that they don’t get to eat whatever they want, but there are far better ways to go about it than making them have a fraught relationship with food… That’s part of what leads to things like eating disorders.
and by doing things like forcing them to eat, you break that trust bond.
I doubt their parents not forcing them to eat was what caused the schizophrenia.
Some kids (like kids on the spectrum) have issues with certain textures, it’s not just kids being picky sometimes.
Forcing kids to eat, on pain of punishment, isn’t going to make a person less broken, but probably more so. There are other ways than force to encourage a kid to eat healthy.
