Fixing the Feeding

So, unfortunately, the Monster is a rather picky eater.

Finding something he’s going to eat is often a challenge.  There are things that he’ll eat away from home – chicken fingers, for example – that he won’t touch in-house.  Or the the appearance of those things has to be exactly the same each time he’s getting it, or he won’t treat it like the same, familiar food.  This is getting to be a problem, since the diversity of what he’s eating is actually, gradually narrowing, rather than broadening as you would expect with a six year old.

So a few weeks back, he finally got into a feeding program to try to do something about the matter.

One afternoon a week, the wife is taking him down to the feeding clinic to try to work on his diet.  They’ve been trying the more gentle approach, of having him there and trying to bribe him with rewards for eating what they put in front of him.  Now… anyone with a six year old knows how stubborn they can be, and so it’s probably not hard to imagine that the Monster is being fairly resistant, even with his favorite bribe.

(Which is, for the record, almost funny to me.  He gets home from school beforehand and complains about being hungry, and isn’t given anything to eat so that he’ll theoretically eat when he gets to the center.  Then he refuses to eat there, and comes home, where he’s happy to scarf down dinner with the most minimal bribery.  It’s like he’s trying to spite us.)

There is, though, a more intensive option that would have him pulled out of school for a few days on home-and-hospital to basically work on this for his waking hours.  We’re not yet at that point, but it’s definitely been talked about between the wife and the therapist as an option if things don’t start progressing.   That’d obviously cause other problems – scheduling with R, getting pre-authorization from the insurance again, not to mention the therapies he’d be missing at school and outside of it while he’s going through the program.  Clearly, that’s not what we really want… but we do want him to eat better and more things.

On a positive, though, for the first time in ages yesterday, he came home with everything eaten/drunk in his lunch at school…

Leave a Reply
