LogFAQs > #976154392

OhhhJa posted...

@adjl

Spoken like someone without a toddler lol. Sure, I'm not letting them starve but if you let a toddler get their way with food all the time they'll just be eating cookies and mac n cheese and shit. I'd argue it's abusive to give a toddler junk food instead of being patient and making sure they actually eat a well balanced meal. When i see parents with 10 year olds eating garbage food i feel bad for the child. Spoiling your child like that is literally abusive. You can actually give them all sorts of dietary issues that may not show up until adolescence or adulthood

And on the flip side, if you categorically refuse to tolerate pickiness, you're masking potential legitimate mental health problems and often actually making them worse in the long run than if you'd been more willing to acquiesce. Like most parenting, it's a matter of balance: Trying to cultivate healthy eating habits but also respecting what your kid wants and being aware of when there's a more serious problem than a kid just wanting cookies for dinner. For some kids - especially those with more serious problems that the parents just don't have the resources to recognize and treat - that balance is significantly harder to strike than for others. Categorizing all grown picky eaters as failures of "weak parents" ignores that. Some are. Many - more than most people realize - are more than that.

Beyond that, though, whatever the reason for somebody being a picky eater as an adult, it's not something you're going to fix by resenting them/their upbringing, and trying to force your friends to eat things they don't like is a dick move. If you want to fix the problem, try talking to them about it to understand why they don't like things and/or how they feel about it. That might help you find new things they can enjoy exploring, or it might give you a basis to encourage them to seek therapy for a disorder, or it might just give you a better understanding of what their boundaries are so you can respect them and avoid putting them in circumstances where they aren't going to be comfortable. Whatever the outcome, that's a whole lot more beneficial then "just eat the food you baby."