does my 4 yr old have ADHD

lula

he has been in a nursery at a school for a whole 2 years and he still wont try new things like the other kids. so i dont think he will in big school, otherwise he would have done it in the last two years when the toehr kids in nursery were drinking water

[honey5]

hello my son has adhd, ocd you name it

they wouldnt treat him with medication until he was 6yrs old, my home was trashed regularly, the amount of calls i received from school was horrendous

someone did suggest trying him with effalex, and within 6 weeks i had a changed boy
i did the no E thing too but to no avail either

unfortunately the behaviour as he grew older did worsen, he is now taking ritalin and risperidone, i have my boy back and its fantastic

good luck
honey x

[emmaf01]

My son is not a great one for trying new things- but he started school today with no major problems, I think due to him receiving proper help in school. He is still not toilet trained, will only eat certain foods (weetabix, muller rice, yoghurts, biscuits and chocolate of course) and won't try new things normally.

But due to proper help from psychologists, helpful nursery teachers, etc, he has made huge leaps in the past 12 months.

It is about getting the right help, though my little boy still has his issues, and sometimes you have to fight for it.

i struggle with meal times as he is a very fussy eater aswell. He will just blantently refuse to eat anything if you give him something he dont like the look of. ive tried just giving him only 3 meals a day and if he dont eat it then he goes without, beacuse thats what the health visitor said, she said he'll then try something just beacuse hes hungry. that never worked either. i just dont knwo what to do, cos i cant keep giving him the same foods all the time. ive started buying them birds eye chicken pieces that have got peas and sweetcorn hidden in them, which is great cos he just thinks they're nuggets and dont knwo about the veg in them. but he wont even eat things like spag bolognese and lasange, andything thats gooey. he will only eat things like, nuggets, chips, potatoes, sausages, and things like that. oh and he loves his fruit. but no veg.

[tiglet]

Does he like all of the food separate from eachother on his plate?

You mentioned he doesn't like spag bol/lasagne - how about stews?

[Bookworm]

Originally Posted by sharonsmith

i struggle with meal times as he is a very fussy eater aswell. He will just blantently refuse to eat anything if you give him something he dont like the look of. ive tried just giving him only 3 meals a day and if he dont eat it then he goes without, beacuse thats what the health visitor said, she said he'll then try something just beacuse hes hungry. that never worked either. i just dont knwo what to do, cos i cant keep giving him the same foods all the time. ive started buying them birds eye chicken pieces that have got peas and sweetcorn hidden in them, which is great cos he just thinks they're nuggets and dont knwo about the veg in them. but he wont even eat things like spag bolognese and lasange, andything thats gooey. he will only eat things like, nuggets, chips, potatoes, sausages, and things like that. oh and he loves his fruit. but no veg.

Your health visitor needs a good smack behind the head for coming up with that kind of rubbish.

Save yourself and him the heartache, the stress and the conflicts: let him tell you what he wants to eat. Yes, it's a pain to have to cook different meals for different people, but ultimately, compared to the battle of trying to force-feed him food he blatantly doesn't want or let him starve, thereby reinforcing the negative attitude towards food, you may well find that it is easier to let him tell you his needs.

Yes, it would be lovely if he was eating everything given to him without a fuss, but he obviously won't, so instead of torturing him by starvation or force feeding him stuff that make him so unhappy, accept that his difference means that you will no more be able force him to swallow stuff he won't touch than you can get him to stop his fidgeting.

In the grand scheme of things, what he eats or doesn't it is not that important. You have enough battles ahead, why make your life and his more difficult where unnecessary? Do you really believe that starve or force-feed are healthier options than letting him eat what he does like? Just be glad he likes fruit at least.

My little one has an extremely restricted diet too, he's now 11 and we have slowly expended the range from about 3 foodstuff to about, I don't know, 10 to 15? He doesn't touch veg or fruit, with the exception of the very occasional banana. But you know what? With all the stuff he has to deal with in his life, I am glad to say that battles at mealtime are one thing we don't have. The result is that policy is that instead of saying no to everything new, he will sometimes try something and even sometimes that will result in something new added to his diet permanently... In the meantime, I still have to make pasta bake for 2 weeks in a row, followed by sausage rolls for 2 weeks, then tomato soup and bread... That's just the way it is. He's less stressed because of it and I am less stressed because he is less stressed, and I think that's more important than whether he's getting enough fibre or vitamin C.

[emmaf01]

Bookworm, you took the words right out of my mouth- can we all smack that health visitor? Life is so much better since we stopped the meal time panics/hysterics (and that was just me not my son).

We tried the "only give him three healthy meals" garbage- and he didn't eat for nearly two weeks. And I thought "well this idea is not working" because he was tired, lacklustre and miserable- as were the rest of us.

My boy has never eaten what most people would see as a "proper" meal. But he gets in enough calories, has protein, carbohydrate and fat and we sneek in vitamins an minerals with fruit smoothies and fortified milk and cereal. He is a normal healthy weight and is rarely ill with colds and bugs.

Now he is doing well at tasting new food- we do a "normal" meal and he licks bits to taste them. It looks odd, but its expanding his taste buds. We thinks its progress (we think a lot of odd things in our house, but we're happy.)

Children need to take in calories to grow- tell your health visitor to speak to a specialist regarding child eating problems, not just shrink what little knowledge she has to fit a complex scenario.

[tiglet]

Absolutely you two - I've stopped caring if my boy can't use a knife and fork (he's nine) and just cut up the bits he wants us to now.

I don't make him anything with the textures he hates in (mushroom, courgettes, salmon - anything which he says is "slimy") and if I cook something like spag bol for the rest of us, I do something different form him or put the sauce and pasta on two separate plates, which sometimes works.

At the end of the day, your child's happiness is much more important than "rules" about what/how they should eat. You'll both feel better when you're more relaxed about it. As long as he will eat, and gets his fruit, what's the problem?

[emmaf01]

If you stop focussing on what people say you "should" do, and just try working around what they will eat. Then see if you can fit some nutritional value into what they will eat. Blow the rest.

And your son will eat chicken nuggets- that is great. Protien, trace minerals, some carbohydrate in the coating. Its a winner.

i started making my own ones with real chikcen breasts and batter, but then he went off them. but im gonna start making them myself again i think. at least i know whats in them ones, and not all the crap that you see when jamie oliver shows you them all blended up!!! lol

thing is now, ive gone back to work full time and now my partner is a stay at home dad. he is very strict and believes that they should be forced to sit down and eat what is given to them. so now ive got to try and persuade him to sort it out. it causes alot of rows between us cos he says that i dont back him up and i let them get away with things. but sometimes i think hes too harsh on them and i dont really agree with it. cos they can behave alot better soemtimes when you ask them properly

[Bookworm]

I remember when I used to be a strict mum.


It nearly ended with me throwing myself and child over a bridge.


Then I realised that since HE couldn't change the way he was, *I* had to change the way I was bringing him up. It didn't go down too well with the siblings who thought - still do - that I was "letting him get away with everything", but I wasn't: I was adapting our lifestyle to his disability.

If your child didn't have arms, would your husband still insist he uses a knife and fork? Sounds absurd, doesn't it? Forcing a child with sensory issues (which is what it is) to eat what he doesn't/can't eat is just as nonsensical.

You don't back your husband up on this? Well, good for you. I'm happy to see that at least one person in the household is putting their child's needs ahead of social convention.

As long as your husband thinks he can sort out your child's issues by forcing him that way, things won't get better, I guarantee you. You can no more force a child with sensory problems to eat what he has issues with than you can make a child blind from birth describe a rainbow.

[emmaf01]

I have had a lot of useless talk and pressure from my wider family- "you need to get him out of nappies", "just give him proper food, he'll eat when he's hungry", the usual rubbish.

Either your husband will come round to the right way of thinking or he'll be found in a twitching heap when his "strict dad" technique gets him no where. Has he accepted your boy has difficulties, or is he trying to tell himself there is nothing wrong? Sometimes this can be the problem, but as soon as her learns that getting a child fed so he can grow is more important than how or what he eats.

When I met the assessor (or inclusion consultant- she had a laugh about that) for my son's SEN funding, she said that they didn't want to change my son, he was fine as he was. They needed to find out how the school needed to change to fit in with him. And early results (day 3) look good.

It's like that with everything else- we have to find a way to fit in with my boy and give him what he needs. Though if someone can tell me why he keeps pulling his curtain rail out of the wall? I'd get blinds again, though he pulled them down before the curtains.

[Bookworm]

Or to put it in an even simpler way: Convention says socks should be identical colour. My son says: "they'll keep me warn even if they're different colours."

And he's absolutely right.

[SharpmanTF1]

reference alternative drinks.

Our son was forever getting ear infections/chest infections etc several times a year. he used to drink a lot of juice from all the reputable companys.

read up on the additives and sweeteners that are in some of these so called fruit juces.

There aren't many out there that don't have them in. I found a couple that don't. Vimto original, some of the 50% Fruit High Juice (not all flavours are sweetener free.)

They're a couple that my son now only drinks - since then his problems have virtualy dissapeared.

All these kids drinks like fruit shoot are riddled with the stuff.

You need to look for any think that doesn't have 'contains Phenylalanine' on the lable. this is an indicator that it has artificial sweeteners in it.

hope this helps

Sharpman

[honey5]

Originally Posted by Bookworm

Or to put it in an even simpler way: Convention says socks should be identical colour. My son says: "they'll keep me warn even if they're different colours."

And he's absolutely right.

mine once went with 6 clean socks on one foot and 1 dirty sock on the other, i have no idea to this day how he got his shoe on that foot with the 6 socks on, but THAT foot was cold apparently

so....... so be it

honey x

i spoke to my husband the weekend abotu giving my son what he wants and not trying to force him to eat things. It caused the biggest row ever and he lost his temper. He still says that im just letting him get away with things. so now my biggest battle is my other half.

but my son just seems to have a phobia about foods such as soups, stews, lasagne, pasta, bolognese and anything thats not a whole food like chips which he can pick up. My partner reckons its only cos thats what he was given as a baby. but he has always been a fussy eater from a baby.

he was such a hungry baby that he was being fed eery single hour and a half all day and all night. he