Eating Dinner

We are having some major issues with Josh and eating dinner at the moment. Over the past 3 weeks he has eaten our family dinner twice. We eat a varity of food so its not like it is the same thing night after night.

Apart from living on a dinner of hot chips I don't know what to do. He eats his breakfast and lunch (both at DC) all up with no issues. Doesn't eat after 3pm (so he will eat his dinner), but still won't eat even if he is hungry. And then this leads to sleep problems as he hungry.

Any ideas???

I had this issue with Michaela for awhile too, even now she's not a big dinner eater but she does eat heaps during the day so I'm not concerned. 

When she went through the worst phase early last year I would give her complan in her evening milk to ensure she would sleep through (I tried not to do this too often though as I didn't want her to rely on a meal replacement instead of eating dinner iykwim).

Like Kaz I adjusted her dinner time (to 5:30pm) so she was eating before she got overtired.

I tried to make as many foods as she would eat.  For instance she'd only eat raw vegetables so we would often have meat with potatos and raw veges (luckily it was summer) and then I slowly introduced other things until she was eating a huge variety.

I also get her to help me make dinner.  I find the dinners where she has the most input are the ones that she eats the most of.  Eg. on Tuesday night she helped me make schnitzel.  She measured out the ingrediants for the marinade, seasoned the bread crumbs and mixed them, beat the egg, held my wrist while I chopped the potatos and then seasoned those too and chose the vegetables to go with dinner.  She ate everything on her plate, I couldn't beleive it!  I'm pretty sure that's the first time since she was weaned that she's eaten everything from her dinner plate.

She will often come and nick food (veges, cheese etc) off the chopping board while I'm preparing it.  I pretend to discourage it and chase her but TBH as long as she's eating it I don't really care whether it's with dinner or before.

Good luck.  I hope it gets sorted soon.

Bizzy wrote: if you dont want dinner thats fine you still sit there and you dont get anything else either tho

I have the same rule.  DH however becomes a short order chef at meal times if M doesn't eat what's on offer (luckily he isn't home for dinner 5 nights per week so we don't have an issue).

I feed ours at 4.30, we tried the whole eat as a family thing, lasted about a week...just wasn't worth the hassle. Leah doesn't sleep during the day and they both are in bed at 6.15 so bathtime is 5.30.