Advice on How to Get a 3 Year Old Who Does Not like to Eat to Feed Himself

K., It sounds like you have two problems: your son doesn't like to eat; and your son doesn't like to feed himself. What a quandary for you! My son (26 months and also underweight, in fact has LOST weight) won't let us feed him (so I can't help you in this area), but he also does not really like to eat. It's not even that I would classify him as "picky". He just is hit and miss about food. I would recommend reading "what to expect the toddler years" for some great advice about the parent/toddler relationship regarding food. First and foremost, I had to back off. Don't praise eating, don't encourage eating, stop making a big deal out of it, when he says he's done, let him be done. Eat dinner as a family as often as you can. I was amazed at how much all this helped!!! Other things that helped were: compartment plates (silly, but true), offering smaller amounts of food, always offering at least one thing I know my son will eat, not giving into the "I want ____ instead" request. He gets what he's been given. Don't tie up rewards with eating. You either provide dessert or you don't. If our son wants more of something, we ask him to take a bite of something else on his plate first. He NEVER has to try something he doesn't want to try. When we took the battle out of mealtime, his habits improved drastically.

All that said...I second the allergy hunt idea. For other reasons (ear infections), we took our son off dairy as an experiement, about 8 weeks ago. Not only did he start sleeping 2 hours longer at night and his eczema cleared up substantially, but he changed the way he ate...he stopped requesting banana after banana (2 or 3 a day!) and started trying more veges, also started to eat meat, which we'd never seen him do!! I know it's hard to watch your underweight child really struggle with food. I wish you luck.

I had a lot of issues getting my son to feed himself as well. We did a lot of positive praise if he did ANY self feeding at all. Does he self feed himself snacks? We would "pick" our battles as to when it was a good time or not, in other words not to have a tantrum in public or if we had somewhere to go. But at home, we tried a lot of encouragement and we sat with him while he ate, he had trouble maneuvering the utensils that was a big part for him - scooping and sticking. It lingered over until he was in Kindergarten to be honest and then by then he was eating in school and he HAD to do it on his own. We also used a sticker chart to help him see his progress and accomplishments and if he earned enough stickers for certain things, he got a small prize - and he could choose the prize that was the most rewarding part for him! Good luck!

Thank you for asking...i can't wait to see your responses. My four year old is the same way. He will self feed. At school he is fine, just slow-he and a couple other start 20 minutes before the rest of the class! But at home it could literally take him over an hour with us having to remind him EVERY bite to eat. It is utterly exhausting and most times, we end up getting frustrated and feeding him too. He cries that he CAN do it himself-so we tell him we know he can, but that he doesn't without a fight. Now that we have a 5 month old that needs to be fed, I thought he would see that "babies" need help, not him, but it hasn't gotten any better. Let me know if you find something that works for you so I can try it too.

PS-Last night after dinner, I was thinking of asking the same question today!!!!!

Hey K.,

I agree with what Marian has said completely. I once had a child at my nursery school that would eat and vomit immediately after from nerves. Her mom was at her wits end because she was starting to do the same at home. Out of frustration her mom would scold her and I knew it was because she was so scared her daughter would become ill from not eating. I sat with her one day and asked the mom not to address it at all . She would drop her off and say things like now don't you throw up today and make these nice ladies have to clean it up. She meant well but she was only making matters worse. So what I did was gave her very small amounts of food and would sit with her and have my lunch and we would talk about anything but eating. I would distract her and she would just look at me with fear when the plate was put in front of her so I would just keep talking. Within a few days she stopped vomiting and began eating her food and eventually finished what was on her plate and was asking for more. The point is like Marian said do not make it an issue. Children will not starve themselves. They also will follow our lead so I would sit and eat with him as much as possible and when he is finished just say okay. NO SNACKS THOUGH if he doesn't eat his meal no snacks. Eventually he will get hungry enough to feed himself and if food is not made to be an issue it will not become one. Good luck!!

My 2nd grandson had a lot of issues with eatting when he was young. He was diagnosed with reflux and put on about 6 different medications over the first 2 yrs. It turned out that he was actually allergic to cow milk and once that was removed from his diet he started to put on weight and have a ton of energy.

Of course the duh part of this whole experience was that if we watched the foods to gravitated toward instead of pushing a complete diet on him we would have picked up the clues. Always wanted meats, crispex cereal, veggie and fruits. I'd suggest tracking what he chooses to eat to see if there's a pattern. Does he eat a lot for breakfast and lunch/dinner is a battle? Big lunch eatter? Loves to snack? Use what he tends toward to figure out how to feed him. Why stress over breakfast if dinner is the meal he favors? Or if he's a snacking kid feed him high protein snacks.