When my oldest son was a toddler (17 months or possibly a bit younger), I noticed he really liked eating cold hot dogs. It's safe to eat cold hot dogs because they are already thoroughly cooked.
This kind of grossed me out. As an adult, I rarely eat hot dogs at all. The idea of eating them cold straight out of the package -- yuck.
But he liked them and I could remember eating cold Vienna sausage out of the package when I was four years old and thinking "This is the best food EVER!" People have a want center that drives their sense of taste and small children actually need more fat for their developing brains and bodies, so I decided it was fine for him to eat cold hot dogs.
So I began buying hot dogs, removing the paper to split the package into two separate plastic packages, pre-opening one half to break the seal on it and storing that one in the lowest shelf of the door where he could reach it. The unopened half got put in the top shelf of the door until the first half was gone.
He couldn't open the package if it had never been opened before, but once it had been opened once, he could handle it. Doing that and placing it in the lowest shelf of the door in specific made this accessible for him, in spite of his small size.
He couldn't really get stuff out of the other shelves very well yet. His arms were too short and he would have had to lean all over the cold shelving to reach stuff, thereby sucking the heat out of his little body, which would have been very uncomfortable for him and potentially a real threat to his health and even life as we were living in Germany at the time.
He liked getting his own food independently. This empowered him to go grab a hot dog instead of asking me all the time to feed him and he really loved being able to do that.
I later learned that he sometimes even managed to get himself a slice of bread to go with it. At the time, I didn't know he ever did that because his dad had a bad habit of not properly closing up the sliced sandwich bread, so if I found the bread laying open I just thought his dad had been in it.
This was one of the earliest examples of me doing all in my power to empower him to feed himself and give him some degree of food independence.
He's never been formally diagnosed as ASD but he reads as extremely Aspie. He also has a serious medical condition that wasn't diagnosed until he was fourteen which also impacts his relationship to food.
Either one of these conditions can land a child in a residential therapy program -- in other words hospitalized for some weeks -- to teach them to take food orally. He's never had a big issue in that regard.
Making sure he could eat in spite of his many issues was a fairly big part of our lives. I've never known how to incorporate that into this blog or how much to say about it, which is one of many reasons this blog tends to languish.
I am currently putting together a food blog called Nutrient Dense and tips for fostering food independence in children are ending up there in posts with the label Kid Power. So while I may yet tell more of those stories here, you might also be interested in checking out that blog.
This kind of grossed me out. As an adult, I rarely eat hot dogs at all. The idea of eating them cold straight out of the package -- yuck.
But he liked them and I could remember eating cold Vienna sausage out of the package when I was four years old and thinking "This is the best food EVER!" People have a want center that drives their sense of taste and small children actually need more fat for their developing brains and bodies, so I decided it was fine for him to eat cold hot dogs.
So I began buying hot dogs, removing the paper to split the package into two separate plastic packages, pre-opening one half to break the seal on it and storing that one in the lowest shelf of the door where he could reach it. The unopened half got put in the top shelf of the door until the first half was gone.
He couldn't open the package if it had never been opened before, but once it had been opened once, he could handle it. Doing that and placing it in the lowest shelf of the door in specific made this accessible for him, in spite of his small size.
He couldn't really get stuff out of the other shelves very well yet. His arms were too short and he would have had to lean all over the cold shelving to reach stuff, thereby sucking the heat out of his little body, which would have been very uncomfortable for him and potentially a real threat to his health and even life as we were living in Germany at the time.
He liked getting his own food independently. This empowered him to go grab a hot dog instead of asking me all the time to feed him and he really loved being able to do that.
I later learned that he sometimes even managed to get himself a slice of bread to go with it. At the time, I didn't know he ever did that because his dad had a bad habit of not properly closing up the sliced sandwich bread, so if I found the bread laying open I just thought his dad had been in it.
This was one of the earliest examples of me doing all in my power to empower him to feed himself and give him some degree of food independence.
He's never been formally diagnosed as ASD but he reads as extremely Aspie. He also has a serious medical condition that wasn't diagnosed until he was fourteen which also impacts his relationship to food.
Either one of these conditions can land a child in a residential therapy program -- in other words hospitalized for some weeks -- to teach them to take food orally. He's never had a big issue in that regard.
Making sure he could eat in spite of his many issues was a fairly big part of our lives. I've never known how to incorporate that into this blog or how much to say about it, which is one of many reasons this blog tends to languish.
I am currently putting together a food blog called Nutrient Dense and tips for fostering food independence in children are ending up there in posts with the label Kid Power. So while I may yet tell more of those stories here, you might also be interested in checking out that blog.