When my daughter was a toddler she polished off about eight very spicy wings (probably grilled in Frank’s Red Hot Sauce). I thought she’d take one bite and spit it out, but she ate them all.
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I was reading a book on abnormal psychology and it described a woman who complained that she had to beat her toddler with a belt to get them to eat. She told her mother this and her mom said “Yes that’s what I had to do with you.” At that point the other shoe dropped and the woman realized she had learned a pattern of coaching the child into an eating disorder,. Even though she’d been blaming the kid, right there she realized she was somewhere in a grey zone between being a shitty parent and an outright child abuser.
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Well, that depends on the toddler. I can out-stubborn about 98% of 'em.
Unfortunately, my daughter was in that remaining 2%. Turns out she was born with more inherent willpower than the rest of the family combined.
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Some toddlers will go through a phase of eating only one food for a couple months. Like my brother would only eat peanut butter. He was a skinny little thing, fairly undersized until high school then he became strong and 6’ plus. However, because he had been underweight, I was forced to clean my plate and I have a vivid memory of sitting with a plate of rigatoni in front of me until bed time. So I grew up a little “husky” as they said back then.
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The worst part is that there’s no reason to it at all. My daughter will not eat feta cheese or brussel sprouts, but tonight we had pasta with feta cheese and brussel sprouts and she ate it. Yesterday morning she asked for honey nut cheerios, but cried when we gave her a bowl. She likes asparagus and broccoli but not lettuce, likes pizza with lots of sauce, but won’t eat spaghetti (except when she will!?!?!), and for sure won’t eat tomatoes. Unless they’re diced in pasta. Likes raw carrots but won’t eat carrots cooked in butter and brown sugar. Likes cauliflower with cheese and macaroni and cheese but won’t eat macaraoni and cheese with cauliflower in it.
Meanwhile my son stoically eats everything put in front of him, but considers any non-sugar food a distraction at best. I suspect that he’s hungry all the time, but he won’t admit it. No matter how small a portion we give him (even of something he loves, like barbecue), he will never ask for seconds.
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Yeah, that’s what worked for my elder daughter. I thought it would work for the younger…
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I wonder where she got it from? 
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I can’t wait for the next editions:
Use The Fucking Potty
Tie Your Fucking Shoes
No, You Can’t Use The Fucking Car
Stop Spending Your Fucking Allowance So Fucking Fast, You Fuck
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Nope, op should have said that you cannot out-stubborn your own toddler. Other people’s children are not valid data points.
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You’re not talking about the author’s bank account, I’m assuming?
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I am envy. Dad and I love spicy food. It’s changed how we have to approach cooking some things, and not in a good way. The flip side is that we now have an entire door compartment in our fridge dedicated to hot sauces. 
We stopped at one because the boy didn’t sleep for the first 15-ish months of his life, and I was very fearful that a second could actually be worse. Our neighbors tried to do the wide range of food thing with both their kids, and it failed hard. They caved in and started cooking three meals a night - one for the parents, and separate ones for each kid. Utter madness. Eventually, they resorted to subterfuge to get veggies into their kids via smoothies. Combined with time, that’s sorta worked, the kids will now eat a limited range of veggies without coercion.
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A delightful twist would be if some future research shows that vegetables aren’t good for you and the kids were right all the time in rejecting them.
I know you’re joking, but there is a legitimate reason for the distaste: many vegetables aren’t readily digestible and can even be poisonous if not cooked. It’s actually easier to get a 9-12 month old baby to eat new things than a toddler, because evolutionarily speaking, any toddler who wandered off and started eating whatever plants were within reach could end up getting very sick and even dying, so there’s a window during toddlerhood when they WILL NOT EAT anything they aren’t already accustomed to. You need to get them eating various tastes before then or mealtime can be rough for a few years…which can start a longer term trend: better to ride it out with the same-old, same-old for 1-2 years and then go back to more interesting menus instead of trying to fight a toddler’s instinct.
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Our daughter did not sleep through the night until she was four years old. We tried that “let her cry it out” thing once, but the neighbors formed a lynch mob after four or five hours… they could hear her from inside their houses.
We’ve been more successful with food. I’ve always used the Calvin & Hobbes approach - “let’s eat something really gross! How about squid with extra tentacles? Mmmmm, delicious! Look, these green things are trees from a very tiny world where we are giants! Fee, Fi, Fo, Yum! I EAT YOUR TREES! Muahahahahaha!”
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Holy shit! Are your kid and my kid some sort of cosmic copies of each other?!
Those “burgers” of yours, we call those “Cheesies” at our house. :::sigh:::
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Do you have trouble getting them at a fast food place (“the chicken store”)?
Don’t order a grilled cheese – which is the buns inverted, cheese emplaced, and toasted – because “THAT’S NOT A BURGER!!!”
You have to order a cheeseburger “with no meat, no pickles, no onions, no ketchup, no NOTHING except for cheese. And don’t turn the buns inside out.” And it will still take a hushed conference with 2 other co-workers and a manager to get the thing keyed-in and produced. And half-the time it will still have meat on it.
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Agreed! The first book was pretty funny. This looks like “Let me apply the same word to every part of my child’s life and see how much $$ I can make.”
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This is amazing and such an accurate summary of being a parent in so many ways.
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My mom tried calling Brussels sprouts “Martian brains.” I laughed… but still wouldn’t eat the nasty little things.
