3 year old will not eat!!!

Im with soz.
why sneak?
I mean.. i UNDERSTAND that how some parents have begun feeding their kids, they will HAVE TO sneak because they did not introduce them to real food right away..
but your childs taste pallet is a reflection of your shopping. Period. They learn to enjoy the food they are given no matter what. Parents can not dodge that responsibility no matter what they say.

a kid will never 'crave' or throw a fit for chicken nuggets if they have never had one. There will come a point in their lives where the hear of it.. and want to try it SURE. It may even involve a tantrum ( in a smaller child) mostly because it is a NO answer.
But they dont KNOW IT.. they wont WANT it ..

they should know fruits, veggies..etc.

I know kids who will eat an entire head of cauliflower because they LIKE it
Spinach in their sandwich BECAUSE they like it
Kids who love lightly baked crunchy kale..

a babies pallet is made by the parents. Period.

exactly!

like i suggested before.. make a smoothie but dont use SUGAR.. use a black banana. sweet ..sweet ..sweet and good!

One way to look at it...

The whole world knows a little kid's normal reaction to alcohol or tobacco is correct; why would anybody think that same little kid's reaction to green veggies was wrong?? When something tastes that bad, your body is trying to tell you something.

what the ****.?

we are omnivores. we eat plants AND animals.

no, we dont eat ALL plants.. some are deadly.
but green stuff usually isnt.


dude.
go put your cheese back on your cracker pleeeaaassee

I used to worry about my boys and what they would eat. So much so that I would try to make things palatable to them that just - well - it just wasn't. At 3 years of age - two bites of everything on their plate was enough.

Now they are 11 and 8 - they take 4 bites of everything on their plate whether they like it or not. This may sound mean - but - I have seen them start enjoying things they would not touch with a stick before. Thankfully - I taught them young that I mean what I say. They know it. They would just as soon eat what is before them as they would miss playing xbox. If I can deal with incessant drumming, I can deal with incessant whining as well. I am in this to win it. When they are adults - they will rise up and call me blessed.

We were not originally omnivores. You don't need to believe in evolution to comprehend that Elaine Morgan is correct in thinking that humans originally lived in water, we share a hundred or more traits with the aquatic mammals. That also says that the original human diet was some combination of shellfish and fruit and the human taste for sweet things arises from that original fruit diet; a cat or a dog would starve to death in a room full of sweet things.

That also says that nobody should be forcing children to eat green vegetables.

http://www.amazon.com/Aquatic-Hypothesis-Condor-Indep-Voices/dp/0285635182

we were originally many things.

we are not made in our current state to survive on ANY of our 'original' diet no matter if we were aquatic ( which is possible too) , a derivative of the ape, or a surprise creation as according to american religion,.
What we were thousands of years ago is NOT what we are now and NOT what our bodies need.

our bodies NEED a plethora of vitamins, minerals, trace elements and metals, protein both fibrous and non. Why? Because the amounts of nutrients that our bodies RUN on requires a very vast diet.
Yes, we can pop powder vitamins and expect to survive.. optimal nutrition comes from a grazing life style ... eating bits of EVERYTHING.

it isnt forceful to introduce your kids to green veggies and keep them as a small portion of your childs diet. We need things from those too.

itis however a bit redundant to rely only on a handful of things to live from.

What fruits grow in water?

I think of far more veggie-type things in water -- seaweed etc.

(I think the whole thing is bunk of course, just pointing out the lack of even internal logic in the idea of water-dwelling creatures having access to fruit but not veggies.)

i agree... but if you give any theory thousands of years to morph ( according to them ) all could be possible..

besides.. who truly knows? No one frankly..

Well, there's a lot that is known.

I'm quite confident in saying that the idea that the human diet should exclude vegetables because we used to be aquatic and ate a lot of fruit (but not veggies) back then in the good ol' aquatic days is complete bunk, for example. Due to many known components.

likely that you've run up against a bad cook

Well....liver and I have never found common ground. BUT - there are other things I like that can replace the nutrients found there. That is also something to take into consideration...sometimes - personal taste just will not change. Rutabega's are another thing that will make me want to run from the room. Still in all...I would try it - just to make sure my taste hasn't changed.

I used to hate tomatoes. So crazy. Somewhere along the way - I started enjoying them. But I kept trying them anyway. Mainly because my mother encouraged me to.

there is a sort of joy in how our actual physical taste buds do change over the years - they mostly get less sensitive so things that were too sharp or bitter or sweet or whatever are less annoying when you get older

childrens' taste buds are more effective/sensitive but it is fun to find out what unexpected things they like. I'm always amazed by how many small children love love love calamari of all sorts ... and anchovies and caviar. Things parents don't always think of offering.


(hunh, interesting, the three examples that spring to mind for me based on my experience are fishy things)

this is when it helps to have been ahead of the game by introducing kids to your own home-made chicken nuggets. the commercial ones will rarely taste as good and they'll be disappointed.

I love that phrase - " there is a sort of joy in how our actual physical taste buds do change over the years". So true. Very mysterious that.

One of the twinks eats raw bell peppers and whole cucumbers like they were bananas (of course peeled). There are very few things they turn their noses up at...though I find it bizarre that peanut butter is one of them - and cheese. They did not get this from me. How can you not like cheese? So bizarre. I have one that doesn't like bread. What the heck? He has been offered that from the time he was a baby. There is no explaining that.

the thing that I've really come around to in terms of taste is ginger - especially the pickled ginger that you get at sushi joints

I used to spit out anything that hinted of ginger. Now I can eat chunks of the stuff really really happily and cook with it regularly. Love the zing it adds (my aging taste buds probably need the zing).

Yes, that's the direction I've gone too. I used to really dislike spicy foods (and my dad really liked spicy foods, so that was a frequent struggle). Now I like them a lot.

I don't think it was a situation where he was right all along -- I think the age difference really makes a difference with spiciness, just how sensitive your taste buds are.

Sozlet likes spicy foods more now than she did when she was littler, but her tolerance is still far lower than mine or E.G.'s (and I don't push it).

But tastes just change in general too. I see I've already quoted it here a couple of times, but the thing about people often needing to try a new food 10-15 times really made an impression on me. I definitely saw that with sozlet when she was little -- when she didn't like something we'd just kinda say "OK" and move on, and then introduce it again later. And many of the things that got a nose-wrinkle initially became favorites several tries down the line.

Right now she has zero permanent dislikes. She's big on novelty, though, which means various fruits (especially) rotate in and out of her favored list. Bananas do a lot of rotating. She loves them for a while and then won't touch them for a while.

It's certainly true that you get used to what you've been given as a child. My mother never gave us candy, pop, or chips, and we rarely had desserts. She wouldn't buy any processed foods and we always ate brown bread. Remember when cheese slices came out? We so wanted them but no, all we got was cheddar! lol

I don't have a sweet or salty tooth, and since I think North American food is boring and bland, I fed my kids on a lot of ethnic foods - lots of spices and flavours - Thai, Indian, Chinese, Malaysian, etc. I never made desserts, and never bought pop or chips (or candy), either. I personally don't care for them and it just wasn't an issue for them. I also don't like boxed or processed foods, like pop tarts, stove top stuffing, minute rice, mashed potatoes, so they never got them, either.

My son has always hated certain textures, like cooked mushrooms and raw tomatoes... I hate the texture of beans - lima, kidney, pinto, chickpeas - anything powdery. I think you need to respect your kids' tastes and dislikes unless they feel that way about 98% of the food out there.

But there are a host of foods out there that kids should be getting fed and a zillion ways to make them interesting. Chop broccoli up really small and throw it in a salad, add it to soups where it basically dissolves but is still there. All you need is an imagination.

Speaking of unexpected foods kids like - my son was a fan of smoked oysters and my daughter ate broccoli raw as a snack when she was in kindergarten.

None. The idea was to get clams, oysters, mussels etc. which fish can't do anything with but which humans (hands) can deal with, and then walk up on shore for fruit which grew wild.

Not having a fur coat on is a total disadaptation for anything on land; it works for life in water assuming you have fat (we do, apes usually don't) for insulation.

The most visible difference between us and monkeys/apes is the legs being the major limbs; that's an adaptation for swimming and wading.

Voluntary control over breathing is an adaptation for aquatic life. Apes not having it is the only reason they can't be taught English, they learn deaf signs perfectly well and easily.

All land animals other than humans do sex doggy-style; face-to-face sex is seen only in the aquatic mammals.

The list is fairly long, see Elaine Morgans writings for further elucidation.

It may have gotten better over the last 50 years, but not likely by very much.

When I was a child, all American women cooked green veggies the same way i.e. into a sort of a green glue and then flavored it to taste like C-Rations, K-Rations, and all the stuff they grew up with and loved during the depression and WW-II. My parents finally got tired of watching me throw up at the table trying to eat that **** and gave up on it.

Worst was asparagus, if anybody was cooking that stuff I had to leave the neighborhood, just leaving my own yard didn't cut it.