DEALING WITH PICKY EATERS

My 5-year-old has had eating issues since he was an infant. When I introduced solid food at six months, he began rejecting most vegetables.

His feeding problems have worsened since then to the point, today, where he will eat only breaded chicken strips, Tater Tots, and vanilla ice cream (but only a certain brand). We worked with a feeding therapist for about six months but made no appreciable progress.

She said he has a form of sensory integration disorder, which she explained as his brain is wired such that foods don’t taste to him the way they taste to most people. So, even certain sweet foods taste bitter to him, for example, and he will gag and even throw up at the mere sight of them.

In addition, he reacts negatively to certain textures. My mom says I was a picky eater, so he apparently inherited a tendency in this direction from me. I’m grasping at straws here, but do you have any suggestions?

A: First, you need to know that there is zero conirmable evidence with which to back up the claims made by the occupational therapist. She cannot prove her contention that the “wiring” between your son’s taste buds and his brain is abnormal, nor can she can’t prove he inherited some “tendency” from you (contrary to popular belief, no one has proven that “tendencies” are inherited).

What the OT told you is typical of the pseudo-scientiic babble dispensed by professionals who can’t see outside the boundaries of the medical model they were taught in graduate school.

My very simple belief is that most if not all childhood behaviour “disorders” are nothing more than long-standing bad habits. In some cases, it’s relatively easy to igure out how these habits developed while in other cases, it’s anyone’s best guess.

At some point in the development of a certain bad habit, the child in question intuits (i.e. he cannot explain his thought process) that the behaviour in question — in this case, refusing to eat certain foods — is a means by which he can control other people, cause them to treat him as a special case.

Over the course of my career, I’ve been consulted by dozens of parents about “feeding issues.” When parents cooperate and follow through as prescribed, my approach has never failed. It’s based on the common sense notion that children will do what is to their advantage and, conversely, stop doing what is no longer to their advantage.

For example,

I once had parents tell