Eating, Appetite and the Daily Food Battles
This guide is for parents who've started to dread mealtimes. You make the dinner and put it down, and something tightens in you before your child has even looked at the plate, because you already have a sense of how it might go. Perhaps the list of foods your child will eat has been shrinking for months, and the things that used to be safe are quietly dropping off it. Perhaps you've watched your child go from absorbed and happy to furious and falling apart in the space of ten minutes, and only worked out afterwards that the last thing they ate was breakfast. Perhaps the tablets that help so much in other ways have taken their appetite with them, so that you spend every evening trying to get a day's worth of food into a child who then becomes hungry at nine at night. You may be refilling plates, negotiating, moving the biscuits out of reach, and quietly doing the maths on what's gone in today, and you're tired of all of it.
If any of that's familiar, it doesn't mean you've failed at the simplest job there is, because feeding a neurodivergent child isn't the simplest job there is. It sits right on top of regulation, sensory processing, attention, anxiety and, for many families, medication, all at once, three times a day, every day, and usually with an audience. If it exhausts you, that isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. It's a hard job, and you can see for yourself how hard it is.