Our Family’s Two Completely Different Types of Picky Eaters
The other day, I was talking to my youngest daughter about her picky eating. She commented about how she is a picky eater, but her brother is a picky eater, and he has an excuse. Then she said she was so sorry about being a picky eater. After some thought, I realized my family has two types of picky eaters.
Our Picky Eater #1 – My Son
Our family’s number one picky eater is my son. He has tactile defensiveness. (Read more about his challenges with tactile defensiveness). If you’ve been following this blog, you’ve heard about it, but for a quick overview, my son doesn’t like how things feel on his skin. This also includes how food feels in his mouth. Because he has tactile defensiveness in his mouth, he has difficulty eating certain foods.
Finding something for him to eat at mealtime is challenging and a daily struggle. He won’t eat anything slimy or gooey, such as soup or pasta with any sauce. What usually ends up happening is he will find something he likes to eat, and then he eats that until he doesn’t like it anymore, and then the process starts all over. This makes it hard for me to make dinner for him. He will usually try something new if it doesn’t look too gooey. A lot of the time, I typically have to find something else for him to eat other than what we are having for dinner.
I know there are a lot of you out there who are probably saying make him eat what you cook. With him, it just isn’t that simple. I try to make food for dinner that he will eat, but sometimes, I like to make what I want to eat. I make him try it, and sometimes he will, but he often doesn’t like how it feels in his mouth. So, with him, I try to do the best I can.
Our Picky Eater #2 – My Youngest Daughter
Our family’s number two picky eater is my youngest daughter. She doesn’t like anything. Listen, I mean anything when I say she doesn’t like anything. I try to make a variety of food for her, but she won’t eat anything. She is the most stubborn person I have ever met! Her essential meal is pasta but without sauce. It’s just plain old pasta, sometimes with melted butter. There are very few other things that she will eat.
It is hard to explain why she has to eat something when her brother doesn’t. She has grown up watching her brother being a picky eater, so she comes by it honestly and thinks she doesn’t have to eat something if he doesn’t. She is still young and doesn’t fully understand her brother’s condition. We have tried explaining it to her, but it is hard for her to comprehend. Now that she is getting older, she is starting to understand, but that hasn’t made up for the years of her picky eating.
I believe most of her picky eating comes from being afraid. She’s often afraid to try something new and thinks she will not like it, so she doesn’t try it.
How Do I Handle My Family’s Picky Eaters?
Now that you understand more about what kind of picky eaters I have, you are probably wondering how I handle it. Honestly, there is no magical way to handle it. The best thing I do to help them with their picky eating is encouragement. I try to encourage them to try new foods. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, it feels like such a milestone for me and for them.
Is there some magical way to get your picky eater to eat? I am going to say no. I think each child is different. What works with my son doesn’t work with my daughter. I would do the best you can with your child. They can be stubborn, that is for sure. I must remind myself to keep going constantly; you are doing great!
I would love to hear from anyone with a picky eater and how they deal with it. I often feel at my wits’ end. Please comment and share your knowledge so we can all help each other.
How Am I Supposed To Get My Son Ready For College?
I went to a meeting last night that was a huge eye-opener! My son is a junior in high school. Maybe that can give you a hint. The meeting was about how to pay for college. I was screaming inside the whole time I was at this meeting.
In my mind, I was like, there is no way I have a child old enough to start looking into going to college. Where do you start? The only nice thing for us is that my son knows exactly what he wants to do. That narrows down the college choices and the applications.
I came home with two main concerns about starting the college process. First, I feel have nowhere near taught my son enough to be out there on his own. Second, how are we going to pay for this? These kept me up all night long.
Sending my child out into the real world is such a scary thought. I feel like I still have so much to teach him and such little time. He hasn’t even had his first job yet, and I have to start thinking about college. This can’t be. I know it is impossible to teach your child everything, but they still need to learn to be successful before you send them out there.
The list of things I want to teach him seems a mile long. On top of that, he is a teenager and doesn’t want to learn anything right now. So how do I teach him without him knowing I am teaching him?! I guess that is the million-dollar question. I want my children to be successful and be a good person in society. I might be more concerned about my son because he is an introvert and ikes to be at home. He doesn’t like to go out and be in the public. That issue is a whole other post. My top priority for the next two years is just teaching him life skills.
My second concern is paying for college. I haven’t been out of college for that long, but I guess it has been longer than I thought. Back in the day, I thought my college was expensive. Compared to the expense of college now, it was so cheap. When I took financial classes in high school or college, they only discussed saving for retirement. There was never any mention of saving for your children’s college education.
In this meeting, they talked a lot about scholarships. I know that is a good option, but that was so overwhelming. There are so many options out there that I don’t even know where to begin. Scholarships are great, but there is no guarantee. More likely than not, even if you get a scholarship, you will still have to pay a lot in tuition. The other question is, Do you help pay for your child’s college or make them pay for themselves?
I am sure you can tell how overwhelmed and stressed I felt after this meeting. So until I can figure it out, I advise you to start teaching life skills as soon as they are age-appropriate and save for college as soon as possible!!!
The Biggest Challenge Our Son Faces with Tactile Defensiveness
Our son has had a lot of different challenges with tactile defensiveness, from being delayed in learning to walk to his not wanting to touch slimy, gooey things; however, the unexpected biggest challenge that we have had for almost fourteen years since his diagnosis has been the difficulty he has with eating.
When our son received a tactile defensiveness diagnosis, we thought it was just a sensitivity to his skin. It took us a while to realize that he also had some sensory problems in his mouth. Until then, I had always thought he was just a picky eater. Once I started paying a little more attention to his eating, I realized that he would only eat certain types of food, and it was based on their texture.
Our son was about 18 months old when we got his tactile defensiveness diagnosis. By that point, he was off a bottle and eating solid foods. He struggled with it once he got old enough to eat baby food. He did not like it. He never took to rice cereal. I could get him to eat a few fruits, but that was it. He ate a little better when he started eating solid foods, but not much. He was a little closer to two years old when we finally realized he had sensitivity issues in his mouth.
When he was young, our son had four main foods that he would eat: chicken nuggets, quesadillas, frozen burritos, and mac and cheese. That was it. I have no idea how or why he ate mac and cheese or the burrito because they are both a little gooey. Eventually, he stopped eating burritos; to this day, I can’t get him to eat any. He would eat a lot of snacky foods like crackers and pretzels. He would never eat yogurt or applesauce. He would look at food, decide it was gooey, and have nothing to do with it. I couldn’t even get him to try something new; he would refuse to put it in his mouth if it looked gooey. He didn’t like the look of sauce on pizza, so he didn’t have his first piece of pizza until he was five or six years old.
As he grew older, getting him to try new foods became a little easier. He eats a lot better now, but he still isn’t a great eater. He never eats fruits or veggies because he didn’t eat them as a kid. Right now, I try to get him to try them, and he will take a bite, but he doesn’t like them. The one thing he will refuse to try, even at his age, is soup. I love to make soup in the winter, but he will not try it. I have tried bribing him, and he still won’t try it.
Eating is such a chore for him at this point in his life. I love to cook, and I love food. I love to try different recipes. However, he doesn’t like to sit down and eat. It is just a pain for him. He picks at his food and takes little nibbles so it can take him a long time to eat.
As you can imagine he is very skinny and we are always concerned about him gaining weight. I always have to ensure he gets enough calories daily to gain weight or at least not lose any. As I continue to work with him on his eating, I will try to share recipes he will eat. He does enjoy chicken, so if anyone has any ideas on recipes he might enjoy, I would love to hear about new recipes!
5 Things No One Told Me About Tactile Defensiveness
Looking back over the years, I realize that there were so many things I had to learn about tactile defensiveness. These five things stand out the most and that I wish I had known from the very beginning.
It’s important to understand that tactile defensiveness is something a person will carry throughout their life. It’s not something that disappears or goes away over time.
When my son was diagnosed with tactile defensiveness, our therapist never explained to us that this was something that he would always have to deal with. He told us what tactile defensiveness was, but that was it. I had to go out to the car and call my husband to have him look up what it meant for our son to be diagnosed. We were young, and this was our first child; I didn’t know what questions to ask. Knowing what I know now, I would have asked many follow-up questions.
We learned quickly after researching that he would have to deal with this his whole life. Our job as a parent was to help him learn how to cope with tactile defensiveness. We were there to help him learn and understand the skills he would need to improve his daily life.
You will spend most of their younger lives explaining tactile defensiveness to others.
No one knew what tactile defensiveness was when we talked to everyone in our families on both sides. Everyone had heard of sensory issues but not tactile defensiveness. We had to explain it to every person we spoke to. When he started school, we would meet with his new teacher every year and explain what he had. In those younger years, he sometimes had trouble with snack time in preschool. He also wouldn’t do crafts if he didn’t like touching the items they used, such as feathers or even the glue he wouldn’t like if it got on his fingers. Once he was out of elementary school, we didn’t need to meet with his teachers. We even had to tell the ladies that would cut his hair because he would always scrunch his shoulders up when they would cut his hair. He did not like the feeling of the hair falling on his face and neck.
Tactile defensiveness is a condition that many doctors are not familiar with.
I was a little surprised that I had to explain tactile defensiveness to every one of his doctors. I had to explain it to his primary care doctor, which is the one who gave us the reference to the physical therapist who diagnosed our son.
We had to explain tactile defensiveness to his dentists. As you can imagine, with his sensitive mouth, the dentist was an issue for several years. Now that he is older, he can handle going to the dentist.
Once our son was diagnosed with ADHD, we ended up going to a specialist to help us with him and to discuss medication. We had to explain TD to him, and I have learned since then that children with ADHD can sometimes have TD.
I have been surprised at how many professionals we have had to explain tactile defensiveness to over the years.
Because tactile defensiveness is not something you can physically see, It is hard to explain to your children and others why and how it can affect their everyday lives.
Since most people have no idea what tactile defensiveness is, it can be challenging for you to explain the symptoms of it to other people so that they understand. Our son couldn’t even walk because of tactile defensiveness. We had to train him to feel things on the bottom of his feet for him to start walking. People would assume he was late learning to walk, but that wasn’t the case.
For my son, explaining why he has difficulty eating has been the most challenging aspect of tactile defensiveness. This challenge is what he has to deal with every single day. And not every day but also every single meal. This one is the hardest because, once again, people assume he is a picky eater, which is not the case. We even had a therapist tell us when he was younger that it was all in his head.
Comments like that were and are very hurtful because it is not all in his head. It is a physical struggle. This is why it is so hard for people to understand him. They think it is just in his head, or he is making it up.
You always seem to be by yourself as a parent and wish someone would understand. His meal times are just one of his daily struggles with tactile defensiveness. There are many meals where he has to have something different to eat because of the texture of what the rest of our family is eating.
The small milestones are the greatest!
I wanted to end on an upbeat note. When your child has tactile defensiveness, no one tells you that the little milestones are some of the greatest joys. When we first discovered he had tactile defensiveness, he wouldn’t put his feet down on anything, not even my lap. The day that he finally stood up on my lap was the happiest moment up to that point. We celebrated even more when he finally put his little feet in the grass. It was the little milestones like these that no one tells you you will be so excited about.
Now that our son is older, the milestones are fewer and far between, but we still get excited and celebrate with him when he has a milestone. Nowadays, it is mostly when he can put a new food in his mouth!!
For those of you who have just received a diagnosis of tactile defensiveness in your young child, I hope this list helps you over the years. Just know that you are not alone in this, even though some days it feels like no one understands!
School Strategies for an ADHD-Inattentive Child
Children with ADHD struggle with attention and organization, challenging academic success. However, these children can succeed in the classroom with appropriate strategies and support from parents, educators, and the school community, as has been our experience, even though it hasn’t been easy. Here are a few strategies that help us with our ADHD-inattentive son.
Create a Structured Environment
Children with ADHD often benefit from a structured environment. Establish a consistent routine at home that includes specific times for studying, completing homework, and engaging in extracurricular activities. In the classroom, teachers can provide visual aids, such as daily schedules, to help the child anticipate tasks and transitions. Organizational tools like color-coded folders or assignment notebooks can also aid in keeping track of assignments and due dates.
Break Tasks into Manageable Chunks
Large tasks can overwhelm children with ADHD, leading to procrastination or avoidance. This is especially true with our son. If he feels a task is too large, he will delay and procrastinate completing the task. Encourage breaking down assignments into smaller, more manageable steps. This approach allows the child to focus on one task at a time, reducing anxiety and increasing productivity. Teachers can provide clear instructions and divide assignments into smaller components, providing frequent check-ins and guidance.
Utilize Multisensory Learning
Engaging multiple senses can enhance attention and retention for children with ADHD-Inattentive. Incorporate visual aids, hands-on activities, and interactive technologies in the learning process. For instance, using colored markers or highlighting important information can help improve focus. Educators can integrate multimedia resources, such as educational videos or interactive software, to make lessons more engaging and accessible.
Implement Behavior Management Strategies
Behavior management techniques can foster positive learning environments for children with ADHD. Encourage the use of reward systems, where the child earns points or privileges for completing tasks or demonstrating desired behaviors. Collaborate with teachers to establish consistent expectations and consequences, ensuring a structured approach to discipline. Praising and reinforcing the child’s efforts and progress can boost their self-esteem and motivation.
Conclusion
Supporting a child with ADHD-Inattentive in their academic journey requires a collaborative effort from parents, teachers, and the school community. By creating a structured environment, breaking tasks into manageable chunks, and implementing behavior management strategies, we can empower these children to thrive in the classroom and reach their full potential.
Remember, every child with ADHD is unique, so it’s essential to tailor interventions and strategies to their needs and strengths. With patience, understanding, and consistent support, we can positively impact their educational experience.
