My son just turned 17 and I'm starting to get very worried about a bad habit he has developed When he was a baby, my husband and I had a very hard time weaning him. He refused to eat almost all solid foods and would cry until we gave him a bottle of baby formula or milk.
By the age of one, he would begrudgingly eat plain things like pasta, but he refused vegetables and almost anything with too much flavor. Fast forward to today and my son is an extremely fussy eater. He eats cereal for breakfast and chicken nuggets and fries for every other meal, every single day. His fussiness has always bothered me, but it's not until recently that it has really started to become a worry. His best friend's mother reached out to me last week with some shocking information.
My son had called her cooking 'disgusting' when she'd asked him to stay for dinner. On another occasion, she told me, he ordered the most expensive thing on the menu when they took him out for a meal because he was 'annoyed' that the restaurant they chose didn't have anything he wanted. My son's behavior is so rude and I'm extremely embarrassed. If he is acting like this around his best friend's family, I dread to think how he behaves at school and in other social settings.
Dear Jane: I thought something I did to my son as a baby made me a good parent. Now I'm terrified it'll ruin his adult life. I feel like a terrible parent. I'm so annoyed with myself for allowing him to be so picky in his childhood. I'm also concerned that his unwillingness to eat anything out of his narrow comfort zone will prevent him from dating girls, going to dinners with friends and traveling to other countries with different cuisines.
How can I encourage him to expand his diet and tell him to stop being so rude when I fear it is all my fault in the first place. International best-selling author Jane Green offers sage advice on readers' most burning issues in her agony aunt column. We often don't realize the mistakes we have made until it's too late. And every parent myself included has regrets.
