This! This! Maybe the kid has a diagnosable disorder, maybe the kid doesn’t. And for people who actively want to learn to eat more foods than they currently enjoy, I am glad doctors exist with diagnoses and strategies. But for everyone else…what if we just let people eat what they wanted to eat and stopped judging them for it?
I was a wildly picky eater as a child. I eventually taught myself to eat more foods, cooked and seasoned to my taste. I credit my ability to do this entirely to my parents never making food an area of conflict; I ate what I ate, and if that meant I had cereal and a banana for dinner more nights than not, oh well, I knew where the milk was in the fridge. Friends who struggled with their parents over food as a kid have, in my observation, so much more accumulated trauma that it’s harder for them to expand their diets as an adult, because everything is tangled up in anger and shame instead of neutral, “huh, I didn’t like this before but it’s been a few decades; maybe if I sautéed it instead of eating it raw the way my mom likes to serve it, it could be okay? Oh, it’s not, oh well, guess that goes in the trash and I’m having cereal tonight.”
no subject
I was a wildly picky eater as a child. I eventually taught myself to eat more foods, cooked and seasoned to my taste. I credit my ability to do this entirely to my parents never making food an area of conflict; I ate what I ate, and if that meant I had cereal and a banana for dinner more nights than not, oh well, I knew where the milk was in the fridge. Friends who struggled with their parents over food as a kid have, in my observation, so much more accumulated trauma that it’s harder for them to expand their diets as an adult, because everything is tangled up in anger and shame instead of neutral, “huh, I didn’t like this before but it’s been a few decades; maybe if I sautéed it instead of eating it raw the way my mom likes to serve it, it could be okay? Oh, it’s not, oh well, guess that goes in the trash and I’m having cereal tonight.”