I know it\'s stressful and can be very difficult when baby is not eating. First is to find out if there are reasons why - is it because of feeling ill, teething, or not liking the food, stress, or distraction?
You might have to find out by taking a close look at your baby and trial and error of different food types.
This is what I feel personally about using toys, TV, iPad, snacks to distract or attract children to food - No. You are using another bad habit to treat another bad habit, and later leads to more problems to take care of. You need to help your child to develop a good eating habit in the long term.
First, I would suggest you try to stop punishing your child for not eating. Simple reason - Imagine if you were eating, and someone next to you is shouting and hitting you, will you still feel like eating? You will lose interest in eating, and for a child she feels that eating is punishment, negotiation and not pleasure.
My girl didn\'t eat very well and very much when she started on solids at 6 months, here are things that I tried:
- Cook in small amount and different taste, different textures so to find out what he likes. If he doesn\'t like it, don\'t force it and try it again the next time. It may take many tries before they learn to accept the new food. Don\'t expect they will finish all their food every time.
- make eating more enjoyable - eat with family and don\'t fight or punish too much. I don\'t mean using iPad or iPhone.
- set some limits - if your child likes to explore food by using hands or hold their own spoon, don\'t worry about the mess just let them try. But I make it very clear that it is not ok to throw food etc.
No tv or iPad. I am not too strict or stressed with the half hour rule (now she\'s 20m). If she is taking time to learn to chew or use the spoon, I will just let her eat until she\'s full and stops. She used to take 1 hr, now average is 1/2 hour.
Oh and one more thing that I did -
The only toy that I allow her to eat with is her favourite stuff toy. It is not for her to play, but I out it on the table and tell her stories:
\"Your friend is eating with you!\"
\"You don\'t like your food? Ok I will let your friend try (pretend feeding toy), she says it\'s good!\"
We play feeding game - she feeds her toy, and then herself. Sometimes she even tries to give us food.
I tell her stories about eating, borrow these sort of books from library, and buy food toys and teach her about different types of food, let her see how we cook food in kitchen. These have helped too.