Hello everyone,
This is the first time I post on here, but I have 'lurked' for a while.
I just need to vent regarding the situation we are currently going through with our son, hoping that someone who is or has gone through the same could help me figure out what to do. My son is nearly 4 years old, and was diagnosed with ASD just before he turned 3. He has several issues regarding eating and suffers with chronic constipation for which he is on daily laxatives. His speech has improved immensely in the past few months and we are now able to have simple conversations with him, however, he is still not able to tell us how he feels. What I mean by this is that his language consists mainly on describing things that are happening, asking questions, but he can never explain himself and just resorts to screaming and crying when there are conflicts between what we ask him to do and what he wants to do.
The main issue I wanted to vent about is his eating. He used to be such a good eater as a baby! However, this is gradually getting worse and worse. He started by showing preference for dryer foods, no sauces, so we catered for this. The food could not touch on the plate, so we made sure it never did. Then he started to refuse trying foods he hadn't had before and slowly his diet became limited to just breaded stuff (e.g. nuggets), rice, pasta, mince, cheese, milk, grapes, peas, cherry tomatoes and obviously sweets and crisps. At this time it wasn't too bad, because we would get some veg, fruit, carbs and meat. He would never eat massively, but enought to cause no worry on us. Although, this has now changed. Currently, he will probably touch meat not even once a week, even the meat he supposedly likes! He now likes bread but we may get a day when he eats a whole sandwich by himself, next day he refuses it. Every few days he will get some form of veg and fruit in from the ones I mentioned. We offer him cereal for breakfast (chocolate hoops), which he doesn't eat. Since he drinks his milk well from a cup, I tried separating the cereal from the milk, but he still doesn't look too keen. He does drink milk and could drink several cups a day, however, I have limited this fearing he would simply feed off of milk and start refusing all types of foods. He seems to like things one day, but then he goes off it. However, he does like sweets and crisps. We have also started to limit this, and he will only have one treat per day (e.g. kinder egg). When he asks us for sweets, we offer cheese, fruit, crackers instead. He doesn't always take it, sometimes does. Bare in mind that none of what he eats is currently sufficient enough though! He has always been a skinny child, and on the 9th centile from birth. However, we are noticing he is looking skinnier, and we can see his ribs more now. I have decided to calculate his BMI and was shocked to see he is underweight! In the past, doctors have simply advised us to encourage him to try new foods, to do messy play with food to get him to experiment the textures. However, he simply will not touch food he doesn't like and if it is on his plate, he pushes it away and calls it 'yacky'. We are also now trying to serve him whatever the rest of the family is having, hoping that if he sees us eating it he will try it (it hasn't worked). We have tried forcing a spoonful in, explaining to him that if he tries it he will see he will like it but this just ends up in a fit.
I have tried to figure out what has changed to understand why he is now underweight since he was always picky buy always kept along the original centile and have realised that we are offering him way less junk now. We were hoping that by doing so he would get hungry and therefore would start eating more healthier choices. However, he seems to simply prefer going hungry than eating what we offer him. I would point out thay we do offer him those chewable gummy like vitamins which he doesn't mind. I am now feeling so lost...I do not know what to do. We have never forced him to eat because I dont want him to associate mealtimes with a bad experience. I have booked an appointment with the GP thought to discuss these concerns anyway.
Would please someone just share with me anything they have done which has worked with these problems?
(I apologise in advance for the extremely long post!)
