When I first married my husband, my stepson only ate five foods. He’d eat chicken pot pies, chili, cheese pizza, spaghetti and chicken wraps with Caesar dressing. Sometimes he’d eat dry cereal. He ate at odd hours and he and his father almost never sat down and ate a meal together.

[ad#Adsense]This food situation was very stressful to me from the beginning. It just didn’t seem right. I would express my concern to my husband and he just said that he was tired of dealing with the situation. He’d given up. As many of you already know my stepson has Asperger’s syndrome which is an autistic spectrum disorder. People with autism like to do the same things over and over again. They are very rigid in there thinking and don’t deal with change well. This extends to food. I recently saw a video on You Tube where one woman with an autistic son expressed her concern because he’d only eat pancakes with jam. She solved the problem by making pancakes and jam out of different food. She’d put chicken and broccoli in a food processor and make the pancakes out of that. Her son didn’t notice the difference. That’s because the problem is not really whether or not they likes the taste. I think the problem is the perception.

The variety of foods my stepson ate were a lot more than what most autistic people willingly consume but it lacked vegetables. I felt like something had to be done. So I set some rules. He had to eat his meals with us. He had to eat some of what we were eating. If he didn’t eat a small portion of what we were eating he wasn’t allowed to have any snacks after the meal.

He was twelve at the time and prone to having loud tatrums that would last an hour or more. He still has these tatrums but they’re a lot less frequent now. We started out by giving him a few days warning about the new rules and discussed why they were necessary. Food was our main topic of conversation for about a week so that he could get used to the idea.

I started out by introducing foods to him that he was most likely to like. Of course, every new food was met with resistance. There were numerous mealtime tantrums and slamming of doors. Sobbing and even gagging and spitting food out at the table. Some people might think of this as cruel but I argue that it was necessary. He would have never started eating new foods if he was forced to. He had become stuck and didn’t care to unstick himself.

After much fighting and resistance he would eat his small portion of the new food. After having the same new food again and again, he’d often admit to liking it. He was able to discover he liked foods that he would’ve never considered eating before like curry, sushi, and pad thai.

We stuck to a schedule in the beginning. When we found a food he liked we’d serve that food every week usually on the same day. This satisfied his need for a routine. We referred to Sundays as Wildcard Sunday, because on that day I would always cook something completely new that he hadn’t tried before.

We kept doing this for two years. Now we no longer follow any type of schedule for our meals. We stopped because my stepson asked us to stop. “I don’t want to have chili every Monday anymore. I like eating different kinds of food,” he said one day at the dinner table and my husband and I almost passed out.

Dealing with picky eaters can be stressful, especially dealing with autistic picky eaters, but if you are persistence you can get children to change their picky eating habits. Some parents use strict rules, others trickery and still others use a combination of both. Whatever method you use, I assure you it can be done.

Photo by Arwen Abendstern