My 4 Yr Old Daugther Wont Eat!

[clairebearball]

My Daughter is Four Nearly and for nearly 3 years we have been fighting a loosing battle with her as she will not eat or try anything. The only food she will eat is Corned Beef / Mashed up (her nan's recipe) which is like baby slop and she 's four, or if not chicken nuggetts she used to eat chips and tomato pasta but now she wont try anything. when she was a baby like others say whilst on baby milk her weight was fine and she wasnt a thriving baby taken a long time to put weight on, but she did eat, but since we stopped milk at 16mths old we have had yrs of problems. i've been to my gp a dietician, a paedatrician etc.etc. and people dont seem to listen and test her incase she has a medical problem they just decide to say we should be tougher and starve her, but when you are faced with this problem every day 24 hours a day it' gets you so down, we argue, fight, and i am so worried about her starting full time school she wont touch bread vegetables or fruit. so how on earth will she stay alert at school for that many hours with no food inside her. she gets infections every month, and has had so much time off school i will be getting a letter soon i bet.  We are wondering if it is because she was born with a perferated tounge, which the gp said it's very unusual and only found in adults, i am wondering if her pallet/tongue is preventing her from trying things. please help a mother in despair! i dont know what else to do, wev'e tried making funny things on plates, she weighs 26lbs and in age 1 1/2 clothes and age 4. please help.


This discussion is related to 4 year old boy won't eat..

[sammi1234]

My son (now 12 ) was the same, ate everything untill aged 2 then lived on chicken nuggets, potatoe shapes and yoghurt, the health visitors just said go with it, he will change, I did...just let him eat what he liked and gave him vitamins, when he hit 6 he suddenly decided to try new foods all by himself, now he eats me out of house and home. I didn't stress and didn't make a big deal. Now my 4 year old daughter is the same...again started at about 2 and now she will eat only fromage frais, pizza and chicken nuggets, and special k cereal! i give her apple juice to up her fruit intake and figure that she is getting protein, carbs and vits from her cereal.....I'm gonna just sit tight and wait for her to cure herself like my son did.

[Siobhan252]

My daughter has oral aversion (she's had it since almost birth due to being a premature baby and all the tubes in her throat really messed her up there). She also has reflux. She can't eat solids.. just learning now and she is 4 years old. However I've always made sure to get her calories into her; first I was taught (by a specialist SLT) to feed her a formula/fruit puree mix via syringe into her mouth until she was 3.5 years old, now she is on smooth pureed "soups", which are basically whatever we're eating, whizzed through a very powerful mixer (like a Vitamix), with milk and a knob of butter added to make it runny enough for her to swallow.
Since your daughter is that tiny at 4 years old, I'd DEFINITELY push to have her seen by a specialist - are you in the UK, or US? Either way you can have your child seen by a specialist feeding pathologist or speech language therapist specialising in feeding disorders. I'd guess her perforated tongue probably does have something to do with it - our daughter had great difficulties due to having oversized tonsils and things have improved greatly since they were removed last year, but it's still a struggle. I'm certain my daughter will learn to eat properly one day, maybe in a year or so, as she actually enjoys food, but whenever she gets a cold or her reflux meds stop working we're back to fighting over every spoonful again and it really does try our patience.
Anyway, when my DD was young, I also had the advice to starve her which was absolute rubbish - a child that can't eat, or feels uncomfortable eating, will prefer to starve rather than eat. If your GP isn't worried about the fact that your daughter is so vastly underweight, then get yourself a new GP, and demand to see a specialist, Great Ormond Street have a very good feeding clinic if you're in the UK, and they don't recommend starving a child at all - get in touch with them if you have to.
What you can already do though is go with what your daughter can do, i.e. the "pureed slop", get yourself a very high-power mixer, and whizz up everything for her.. add milk until she's happy about the "stickiness" of it, and see if she's ok with that.
Good luck,
Siobhan