Hello, I could really use some help with dinner times at our place! My 3 yr old DD has always been a picky eater, and she takes a REALLY long time to eat her dinner. (She is okay at breakfast, although she doesn’t eat much.) Due to work schedules and our commute, we eat dinner every night at 6:15. I would prefer to do it earlier, but it just isn’t possible. Every night I offer her whatever it is that the family is eating, and I make sure that she has at least two things on her plate that I know she likes. The problem is getting her to settle down and eat it! She wants to hop out of her booster, dance, chase the cat, play with her fork, etc. It drives my husband crazy when she does this, and it concerns me because very little food ever makes it into her tummy. She is petite (only 30 lbs) and very slender already. We ask her if she is finished, she ignores us, and when we remove her plate she says “no, I want to eat my dinner!” So we say, ‘Alright then, hop up [into her chair] and eat.” Which she does for about 1 minute, and then she is off again. If I strap her into her booster, she finds other distractions to prevent her from eating. Then at bedtime (8pm) she is hungry and whining for crackers. We have just been offering her a glass of milk or water and telling her “If you are hungry, you should have eaten your dinner.” A side issue is getting her to keep her feet off the table. She knows she shouldn’t do it, and we try to push her chair in so she can’t, but she is so flexible that she can be two inches from the table and she just does the splits to get those little toes up on the edge. So, my questions are these:
- How to get her to eat her dinner within a 45 minute time frame (the max I think I can allow her so she can play a bit before bed)?
- At what point do I remove her plate?
- How to handle it when she is hungry and crying at bedtime? (I *think* she just uses it as a means to prolong her awake time, since if when we refuse she normally moves on to a different reason why she can’t possibly go to sleep yet; potty, needs to play, etc)
Thanks in advance!