<p>My D loved broccoli when she was little - she still does. She only liked the florets and she called them trees. She would ask for them as “twees” and for a while, I didn’t know what she wanted until she was eating them one day and when they were all gone, she demanded “twees!”</p>
<p>Since I can say this from the perspective of a mom with grown and nearly grown children: The best piece of advice I ever received about raising children was from my son’s Mommy and Me teacher when he was 4 months old.</p>
<p>(Eliminating medical issues obviously) “No child ever goes to college with their binky (pacifer), banky (baby blanket) and in diapers. Chill out…all kids grow and mature in their own time. We just need to accept that and move on.”</p>
<p>Ooops - my D took her “banky” to college and they are there now. “Banky,” who has another name, comes home to be laundered because D is afraid the commercial washers will damage her.</p>
<p>ellebud, our pediatrician told us that in twenty five years of practice he had never had a kid start kindergarten in diapers!</p>
<p>But Cartera it is HER decision. :)…I think it’s all good as long as the binky stayed at home. And methinks that the pediatrician and my Mommy and Me leader were wise enough to read the same calming information. And since we lived during the Better Baby Institute days, and the show business kumbaya crowd (until the competition ramped up for who walked first and what private school and the best nanny…well, you get that picture) sanity was a necessary part of raising kids.</p>
<p>I thought my D would never stop sucking her thumb, and I went through lots of “advice” as to how to stop her. I knew it was an uphill battle because I have a sonagram in which she is very clearly sucking her thumb. My pediatrician assured me she wouldn’t go to college doing it, but I have heard there are adults who suck their thumbs.</p>
<p>My sister sucked her thumb until high school. When she was about 7, she tried to get me to do it – even gave lessons on technique. Somehow, I could never get the hang of it.</p>
<p>Ours went to creamofrice + formula at 2months. Fresh Watermelon, cantalope, and peaches at 4 months. We would put food into his mouth and he’d store it in his cheek. We’d yell at him to move his jaw, swallow, and open up. He knew the hot points to frustrate mommy.</p>
<p>Evidently my BIL, at 60 still sucks his thumb. Never seen him do it, but MIL told me that he does when he is distracted.</p>
<p>I do think that the thumb sucking question is interesting. I never sucked my thumb or used a pacifier. Neither did any of my kids. Husband doesn’t remember, but knowing my MIL she would have been too busy to even think about giving him a pacifier. Yet, BIL has, all his life.</p>
<p>I was a dyed in the wool thumbsucker until I fell off a bike and couldn’t lift my arm for a few weeks without excruciating pain (in hindsight I am pretty sure it was broken, but I think my parents saw it as a godsend to stop me from thumbsucking and didn’t take me to a doctor.) I was seven. DS was sucking his thumb on the sonogram. As an infant, he would interrupt a feeding to suck his thumb. There I would be with milk spraying all over him while he paused for a little thumbsuck. His grandpa was a dentist and told me that it’s a heck of a lot easier to fix teeth than to fix a psyche and not to worry about it. He sucked his thumb until he was ten. He was an incredibly easy child because at any given moment, he could just calm himself right down. None of my other kids ever sucked their thumb. He also had a blankie that was loved until it was see-through. It’s still stored in a drawer in his room while he’s at college. I’m certain he will never throw it away.</p>
<p>Okay, so we used some of the advice in this thread today.</p>
<p>One issue is that her dad, my partner, is kind of paranoid and controlling when it comes to food. He thinks it’s merely an issue of exerting his will forcefully enough. In other words, he spends his time trying to cram large spoonfuls of stuff into her mouth when she’s not looking. It makes her gag and wipe the food out of her mouth with her fingers. He’s literally worried she’ll starve to death or something. She in the 10th percentile of weight, which is low, but I think that’s just her body type. She’s perfectly energetic and healthy. I bought a book about feeding toddlers today and then proceeded to read paragraphs about how toddlers should not be force-fed to my partner – the disembodied literary voice of some unknown expert meant much more to him than the opinions of, oh, everyone around him.</p>
<p>Anyway, I think D may have some sensory issues with new foods – but I also think it’s a control issue. She’s already caught onto many manipulative behaviors. For instance, she knows it drives her dad crazy when she climbs on the couch (whereas I just let her, and supervise – he freaks out and thinks she will fall – he’s a bit of a hoverer), and so she tries acrobatics on the couch with him but not me. She is very attuned to what gets each of us in a tizzy, in other words.</p>
<p>So I did manage to badger my partner into letting me give some new feeding styles a go today. For her first meal, I put her in a new high chair I got her that attaches securely to the table and just put a bowl of pureed green beans in front of her. I sat on the other side of the room and read a book while occasionally glancing at D. She played around with the food for about fifteen minutes… and then she started eating it. Then I set some slices of toast with a very thin spread of baby food on it on the coffee table. I ate some but didn’t say or do anything else about it. She would walk over to it and stare at it, study it, occasionally poke it for about a half an hour. After two hours of letting it sit there and letting her just touch it and look at it as she would, she licked a piece. Fifteen minutes later, she ate a small bit of it. </p>
<p>We kept going like this for most of the day… until I did some chores and let Daddy take over. He put her in her old high chair and tried to force apple sauce on her while she wailed bloody murder. Luckily that seemed to teach him his lesson, and he let me keep going as I had been after that. </p>
<p>D is a wonderful child in every other way. I guess it had to be something. She enjoys bed time, bathing, helping with chores, playing with other kids, going on errands, etc. I know she wants to please us, but she’s also very headstrong. I am definitely the less hover-ey parent. I let her wander off when I take her to play groups, and I don’t follow her – I just make sure I can see her. I let her take more risks than my partner does. For instance, I supervise her when she climbs onto chairs, but don’t discourage it. My partner outright discourages it because he’s so worried she’ll fall. </p>
<p>Anyway, thank you all so much for your wonderful advice. We’re going to try the kiddie table with dollies and loveys thing, and letting her choose food for her lovey (a stuffed animal lamb) idea. </p>
<p>PS: to whomever (I can’t bring myself to muster the energy to find which post it was) commended me for having a college-age kid and a toddler at once, thanks, but I don’t deserve it. I’m here because I’M a college-aged kid. I’m twenty. So I really appreciate all the advice found here. I hang out with a lot of older women because I am a parent, and therefore I have more in common with them than many women my own age, but even the women I hang with who are in their thirties are first-time moms. First-time moms are the only ones with the time and energy to obsess this much! Haha…</p>
<p>Edit: The thing that really gets me is that I did agree with all of you who say to just let kids go at their own pace and that none of them end up at college in diapers and eating baby food, but her pediatrician really made me question myself. I think she may take my opinions less seriously because of my age, but maybe she’s like that with everyone. She has two kids under six, and she forces her way on them (she tells us how wonderfully all her methods worked for her own kids – and therefore they should work for everyone’s kids). We’re getting a new pediatrician.</p>
<p>I hope your partner will agree to stop the force feeding. He can do a quick Google to discover that long term eating disorders can result from being force fed - particularly to the point of inducing a gag. It can create a link between food, control and negativity that can have really serious consequences. Even though he means well, he really needs to stop doing this. </p>
<p>Congratulations on your little successes.</p>
<p>certera, that’s what I told him. He seemed to believe me after I read him sections from the book about feeding toddlers.</p>
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<p>When she’s 17 months old, it’s “headstrong.” When she’s 15 or 20 or 25, it will be “determined” and “focused.” This is just a toddler manifestation of qualities that you want her to have.</p>
<p>My D refused to take a bottle and I had to go back to work after 2 months. She would close her eyes, tighten her mouth, hold her breath and turn bright red and scream. There was no way I could force her but I was freaking out about it as the time to go back to work approached. People assured me that she would take it from others, but she did the same thing with her Dad. Every time someone came to visit, I would ask them to do me a favor and try to give her a bottle. No go. I was using breast milk so it is not as though I was switching her to formula. The day came for me to go to work and I had hired this wonderful baby sitter/nanny who just had this wonderful calming effect on my D. I left for work not knowing whether she would eat or not. I got a call at work from home a few hours later expecting the worst, but was told that she was calmly taking the bottle with no fuss. Turns out I just had to get out of the way.</p>
<p>Congratulations, PhysicsMom! I’m so proud of you for figuring out a way to handle this issue with your daughter. You will have learned to trust your own instincts in a variety of ways through this experience just that much more. There are always tough things that we need to deal with as parents. I have learned that each child is different and unique and comes with their own challenges. That’s part of what makes parenting another human being so interesting and, in the end, so rewarding. Let me say again, I AM SO PROUD OF YOU!</p>
<p>As an aside, my hairdresser, who is in her late 30’s, has a toddler about your daughter’s age that is her first child. She accidentally scratched his cornea last week with a straw from a cup she was carrying (he stood up just as she was bending over). She was crying and beating herself up - thinking she should have never had a child, what a bad mother she was, etc. This is one of the most confident women I know and she’s a wonderful mother. But I knew just how she felt - it’s so hard to watch our kids go through bad things when we feel we are the ones who should be able to protect them from anything.</p>
<p>Oh, and my daughter ate the nasty little baby ‘hot dog’ protein sticks out of a baby food jar until she was 6 years old. It was the only meat I could get her to eat. Third child, eh, I didn’t care at all. Except they looked so nasty to me :eek:</p>
<p>momlove, thank you. Nice to hear I’m not failing. I talked to my partner’s sister who has a three-year-old (my daughter loves to copy her cousin… she DOES eat what she sees her cousin eating, but they don’t live nearby and therefore don’t visit too often!) on the phone tonight, and she says her daughter was much like mine at this age. Her daughter is a great eater now. That was very encouraging. </p>
<p>It’s easy to feel like a bad parent because parenthood is the position of greatest power that most of us will ever have. Every day I feel like I am pretending to be a better person than I am in order to be a good parent to my daughter. It’s very scary to be utterly in control of another human being. I remember going home from the hospital and thinking, “They’re really letting us take her home? They let just anyone raise one of these???”</p>
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<p>Ha ha ha! I remember thinking the exact same thing and I was 30 years old when my first was born! I grew up babysitting in the days of cloth diapers and pins and the whole thing, but when my first was born I asked the nurse how to put the diaper on! She said something to the effect of “Oh, you’re so old I just figured you knew how.” You’re right, it’s so different when all the responsibility is on your shoulders. No one but another parent knows that feeling ;)</p>
<p>I know, it really is different! It just bowls me over that college applications take so much effort and are so seriously scrutinized, but becoming a parent can just happen. Tufts may not think I’m good enough, but I’m legally in charge of a human being! It’s crazy.</p>