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Parenting: Light at the End of the Tunnel for Picky Eaters

May 24, 2013 by Shen-Li Leave a Comment

To the parents of fussy eaters, I just wanted to say that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

When Aristotle started eating solids, we had a rough time feeding him. He didn’t like a lot of food and there was a lot of stress over his lack of enthusiasm for food. As I’ve said before, when you come from a Chinese family – a traditional at that – a child that exclaims, “I hate eating!” is like a child who has just cussed every expletive on the “no-no” list.

Even though I read that most picky eaters grow out of the picky eating phase by about 7-9 years, I confess that I feared this day would never come for us.

To highlight the extent of Aristotle’s pickiness, let me relate some of the feeding experiences we have had with him when he was little:

Aristotle liked a particular brand of instant noodles but only that brand. If you tried to substitute it with another brand (we ran out of the ones he liked one day), he wouldn’t eat. We’d cooked it up, used the same flavour – chicken – and served it on a nondescript plate, but he only had to take one mouthful to know it wasn’t his brand.
I tried to sneak bananas into a juice blend and he would not have any of it. The moment the cup reached his nose, he turned his head. Even though he was keen to try it only a moment before, his acute sense of smell told him it contained something he wouldn’t like.

There was really no way to hide anything from him because his senses were so discriminating. He could smell the rat from a mile away. This was not a boy where you could pull the wool over his eyes.

Now that Aristotle is 6, I have noticed a different pattern of food consumption. He has been more willing to try “new” things. He is also expanding his repertoire of “favourite” foods, eating foods like nasi lemak and curry chicken, prawns, meats with different preparations, and even some veggies, like broccoli. To increase his green count (veggie consumption), I started mixing fruit and veggie smoothies in the Vitamix and he has been drinking them by the cupful. Make no mistake, the fruit and veggie smoothie would never have worked a couple of years ago, even though there is not a hint of green in the taste.

I won’t go so far as to say he eats everything now but he does eat a heck of a lot more variety than he would have as a younger child. So if you have a fussy eater, too, it may just be a waiting game. In the mean time, if you’re up for it, you can try some of the tricks we did to boost our picky eater’s food consumption:

Health and Nutrition: Boosting the immunity of a picky eater
The Sneaky Chef and Deceptively Delicious didn’t really work for us but it’s worth a shot if you’re desperate
For parents of younger children starting solids and moving to finger foods, Annabel Karmel is one to try – her recipes didn’t work for us but other mothers have sworn by her
If the Sneaky Chef doesn’t work for you, you can try hiding veggies in your chocolate milkshake
Novelty sandwiches and other pretty food

We have also found two tactics that work fairly consistently:

eating in the company of other children
exercise or vigorous play before meal time is a great way to boost an appetite

Amazon.com Widgets

Filed Under: Aristotle, Feeding, health, Hercules, Parenting Tagged With: children, Feeding, fussy, Parenting

Creative Play with Lego

May 21, 2013 by Shen-Li Leave a Comment

Aristotle loves Lego. He started with Thomas Duplo which he would work on with Daddy. After that, Daddy decided to give him a bigger challenge and bought him a small Lego City kit. Aside from the manual dexterity problems (Lego is much harder to put together compared to Duplo), Daddy found that he could follow the instructions on his own so he continued to expand Aristotle’s Lego City collection. Then he got into dinosaurs so his uncle got him the Lego Dino Defense HQ (which he used as part of his background and props for his Jurassic Park movie) for one of his birthdays. Some months back, he got into Star Wars so he started collecting a few of the Lego Star Wars sets.

It has been difficult giving Aristotle time to work on his Lego projects because Hercules would inevitably want to take part – which is great, except for the fact that his idea of taking part is to grab his brother’s completed models and dash them onto the floor. Understandably Aristotle gets upset about that so I would try to distract Hercules in the play room. Unfortunately, sibling rivalry would come into play as Aristotle wonders what fun Hercules and Mummy are having in the play room without him and he wouldn’t want to work on his Lego any more. Then I tried to encourage Hercules to work on the old Thomas Duplo sets while Aristotle worked on his Lego but Hercules would feel he was missing out on the good stuff because he had the big, clumsy Duplo blocks while his big brother got the cool, cute Lego pieces.

Finally, I decided to get Hercules his own set of Lego bricks that he could build and tear down as many times as he liked without upsetting his brother. Hercules was so pleased, he invited Mickey to play Lego with him…

After a while, I noticed something else happening…

The mad scientist (Aristotle) started creating an army of robots to take over the world – from the underwater cities of Otoh Gunga…

Photo May 01, 9 18 00 AM

…to the volcanic planet of Mustafar…

Photo May 01, 9 18 12 AM

…to the ice planet of Hoth.

Photo May 01, 10 25 34 AM

Looks like in spite of all the new creations in Lego branding, the good ol’ fashioned, open-ended play opportunities with plain Lego bricks are still the best…

While we’re on the topic of Lego, did you ever hear the full story about Lego? If you haven’t, it’s a beautiful one and truly inspiring.

Watch it here.

It’s a great story to share with the kids to teach them about the value of persistence, determination, and thinking outside the box.

If you want to do more with Lego, check out the following Lego Educational Resources:

Filed Under: Activities, Aristotle, Hercules, Play Tagged With: creative play, Lego

How to Train Your Brain to Think Faster

May 20, 2013 by Shen-Li Leave a Comment

After our recent experience with the coin, I have been thinking about a new skill that would be great to have – the ability to think quickly on your feet. Actually, to be honest, the real inspiration for this has existed for far longer but it was the recent event that finally prompted me to sit down and write about it.

After the incident with Hercules, I went back to search what the proper method for handling an emergency in the event of a swallowed object. Even armed with the knowledge of what to do, I can’t help but wonder if I would have been able to handle the situation if the coin had lodged in a position that made it hard for Hercules to breathe. I did an first aid course many years ago as part of my training and I remember the broad strokes for DRABC – danger, response, airway, breathing and circulation. I remember the rules of how to do EAR (expired air resuscitation) and ECC (external cardiac compressions), but if I had to do it all in an emergency situation, would I be able to? I don’t know.

It’s easy to think clearly when you’re not under pressure. It is easy to run through all the things you were taught and to apply it when it doesn’t count. The question is whether we can apply our knowledge and think clearly if the life of a loved one depended upon it. Sometimes we freeze from the shock of it all. Sometimes we react with the wrong responses because we panic. Sometimes we forget to think and proceed logically because we’re clouded by emotions.

I find that whenever I am looking back in retrospect, it is easy to see how I should have responded but what I think after the fact is usually quite different to how I actually responded at the time. It would be great if I could respond to emergency situations with the ability to think clearly and quickly. I’m sure such a skill would come in handy to my boys as well.

Have you ever seen the movie “Flight” starring Denzel Washingston? Just in case you haven’t, let me give you the overview: in the movie, Denzel Washington plays an airline pilot, Captain Whip Whitaker, who successfully navigates a malfunctioning passenger plane to a “safe” landing, saving 96 out of the 100 passengers aboard. There were a lot of other issues being explored in this movie but the point I want to bring up was Whip’s ability to think creatively and respond quickly during an emergency that would otherwise have resulted in the death of everyone aboard the aircraft. At one point of the movie, they highlight that fact:

“The FAA and the NTSB took 10 pilots, placed them in simulators, recreated the events that led to this plane falling out of the sky. Do you know how many of them were able to safely land the planes? Not one. Every pilot crashed the aircraft, killed everybody on board. You were the only one who could do it!”

So we’re not just talking about the ability to think quickly, but the ability to think well under pressure. Some people are naturally better at this than others but if we wanted to, could it be a skill that we can develop? If we could develop it, how is it done?

It is obvious that practice and experience counts for something. The experts in any field would be better at thinking quickly and responding well in situations related to their expertise. For instance, you would expect ER doctors to be able to respond more quickly and with greater proficiency to medical emergencies compared to an individual who has simply been through a first aid course. But what if you didn’t have the practice an experience? Is there a general way to train your thinking so that you can think faster and better no matter what the situation required?

According to Posit Science, there is. In fact, Posit Science has several exercises that are specifically designed to speed up the brain to think faster and more efficiently in any situation. Here they are:

And you can try them for free if you sign up for a free account with Brain HQ by Posit Science.

What other exercises and games can you play to help speed up your reaction time?

While I was searching for ways to train thinking speed for children, I stumbled upon The BrainFit Studio. Unfortunately, it’s only available in Singapore so I cannot comment beyond their website. Maybe the parents who have been to see the center and have sent their children there can comment.

Brain-Speed

If you would like to get your child interested in this subject as a means for motivating him to train his brain to think faster, check out the project suggestions at Science Buddies:

In summary, even though some people are born with the genetic disposition to think faster and some are not, it’s good to know that we are not limited to what we were born with. The brain is like a muscle – exercise it.