DCB Won't Eat Unless Prompted
 

Dcb 1.5 (I post about him a lot) came back from vacation unable to eat unless I tell him to. He will sit and look at his food until I say "take a bite" which then he will spoon up the food himself and take a bite. Same with drinks. Sometimes he even needs to me to physically touch his elbow to prompt him to scoop his food. It's at every meal. If I tell him to take a bite each time, he will clean his plate. If I ask him if he's all done even after one bite he will nod yes even though I know he's still hungry and he will get down and clean up without protesting. I don't think it's a matter of not liking the food as pre vacation he would eat every meal fine and I'm not serving anything out of the ordinary. I feel like it's becoming a habit now. I suspect he's low on the asd scale or something and he also has trouble interacting with others and very little speech. Have any of you ever experienced this and have ideas how I could work through this? My instinct is to let him down when he's not eating without prompts to see if he would eventually understand he needs to eat on his own but I really think he would just go along with it and just not eat and that's so long without food. I don't want him to be hungry but it's really hard to have to prompt him through every meal to eat.

If he ate fine before vacation, then I suspect that over the course of the vacation, he probably had mom/dad spoon feeding him.

He'll go back to feeding himself. I wouldn't even address it. Just serve the food. He eats or he doesn't. Don't feel like you have to prompt him.
Just let mom/dad know that he chose to not eat much.

The only way to break this habit is to stop doing it in my opinion. We learned to never encourage kids to eat, serve the food and that is it.

I am in the other camp.Help him ,I would give him the encouragement.Sometimes I think we forget to look at the child.He is only 17 months old .Vacation is different parents probally did feed him.If you just have to give prompts ,why not.I bet very soon he'll be back on track.

I was having a similar issue with dcg, 3, when we go to restaurants. She would just stare at her plate. Eventually she would point at the food but not trying to eat it.

I asked her mom about it and she told me that she feeds her off her plate when they go out.

Now I hand her the fork and tell her to eat.

I would just say, in general "ok, it's lunchtime. let's eat!" and that's it. if they are hungry, they will eat, but i wish parents didn't feed their perfectly-able children... drives me batty.

Would it help to feed the dck his favorite foods for a while to get him back into a habit of the meal routine? Then transition him back to more normal food.

I'm just brainstorming.