My fussy eater never eats the veggies I keep serving

My fussy eater never eats the veggies I keep serving

“I’ve been putting the carrots on Ben’s plate for weeks and he totally ignores them”.

“The dietician told me to just serve the veggies and my daughter would learn to eat them”.

“I feel like I’m wasting so much food. I keep serving Cooper a bit of what we eat but he never eats it”.

I hear these statements on a daily basis. Many of the strategies advocated about how to teach a child to eat food are very similar. As parents wanting to do the best for our child we read about what’s going to be helpful and then try to put it into practice.

But what if we do serve the food over and over again and absolutely nothing happens?

Let’s first look at why a fussy eater often doesn’t eat the veggies, or other food that you feel that you have served repeatedly.

While we are doing this we can also look at things that may be helpful. However, be mindful that often the small details are just as important as the big issues. I’d like to tell a story to illustrate this:

As a lifelong insomniac, I really struggled to sleep for the first 47 years of my life. I too had read all the tips and tricks. I had changed my sleep routines, cut out caffeine, redone the bedroom. Everything was in order, but I still wasn’t sleeping.

So, I decided to do some sleep therapy. I worked with the amazing Kim Corley from Cherished Sleep. Did she give me a magic new thing to do (or not do), that made all the difference? No.

What Kim did was pick apart every single thing that contributed to sleep and made little tweaks. She also gifted me a whole new way to look at sleep and sleeping. This was probably the biggest change and possibly the most important.

If I had to pick the most valuable ‘one thing’ I teach families I work with, it’s the way they approach food and feeding and the way they evaluate progress. Let me share a little of that philosophy here as it’s definitely not about the magic bullet, the ‘one…