4 year old girl never eats

My 4 year old daughter will not eat her food in an acceptable amount of time. The rest of her family(us) finish well before her regardless of the amount of food she is given. She would rather play with it or the plate or napkin. We have tried everything including feeding her whatever she wants that day. Nothing works.It is very common that she will still be at the table(playing with most of her food left,25 minutes after we all finish. She is the thin but healthy. We have started giving her Ensures at night for the calories. She doesnt not like the taste but drinks it. We have tried every punishment with little or no change. It has become a terrible problem for the house over the last year and a half. What in the world can we do?

[ParamedFlorena]

Hi,

It sounds quite troublesome. I have an 8 year old daughter, and we experienced quite much of what you describe during her age 3-5... This does of course not mean that what we did for our daughter is going to be The Solution for your daughter, but perhaps it is worth a try.

First of all we re-organized the table-setting. We are 3 in our family - my daughter, her father and I. She used to sit next to her father, which actually when we considered it, was quite an attention-villain for her.
We moved her to my side of the table.

Then, we figured we simply had to stop trying to force her to eat. She ate as much as she needed even if we didn't look at her.

Third up, we reinforced a "one-pointed attention-rule" which was: When you eat, you eat. We don't joke or let the attention wander off to other things. We don't look out the window. We don't do anything else but eat when we eat. Maybe it sounds awkward but it helped, at least for our daughter. A meal does in general take 15 minutes when we keep our attention to eating. We don't eat for fun. We eat for a purpose of stilling hunger.

Another things is to catch the hunger when it still is hunger - meals being served approximately every 4th hour, a variation of dishes. The 4-hour regularity might help on her appetite.

Good luck!
Florena