When is picky eating more than just a phase?

Weight loss. Lethargic behavior. Slow development. When a baby or toddler suddenly refuses to eat — or was never very interested in the first place — it’s stressful, draining, and damaging to a baby’s development. What’s a parent to do?

Eliana was losing her mind. Meir was eight months old, but he only wanted to nurse — and it was no longer enough to supply him with his nutritional needs. He refused every bottle. He spat out his baby food, to the accompaniment of horrified grimaces. “I tried everything — different types of bottles, adding oil to his baby food to up the calories — but Meir didn’t eat, and he kept losing weight. And he screamed all the time. We were both miserable,” Eliana remembers.

Shulamis’s seven-month-old Yossi followed an eerily similar pattern: No bottles. No food. A desperate battle to preserve his weight, and the losing fight to put something — anything — into his mouth. Irritability.

Then there were his delayed milestones. “Yossi would just lie on the carpet while his peers were crawling around and exploring,” Shulamis says.

“Other mothers told me about their ‘picky’ kids and said Meir was just going through a phase,” Eliana says. “Pickiness is normal — Meir wasn’t.”

Eliana and Shulamis needed answers. Their babies needed food.

Why weren’t their babies eating?

A Failure to Feed

Eating is such an intricately miraculous process — for example, six cranial nerves and over 30 muscles coordinate every single swallow, so our food ends up in our stomach and not in our lungs. The number of things that can go awry between the first bite and final breakdown is astounding.

Yet eating is also completely, blessedly, natural.

“Children are hardwired to eat,” explains Chaya Rosmarin, ClinScD-SLP, a feeding therapist specializing in pediatrics for over 20 years. Working in Lakewood’s SCHI (School for Children with Hidden Intelligence) and maintaining a private practice, Chaya has seen countless children with feeding issues. “If a baby or young toddler refuses nourishment, there’s a reason.”

Because feeding involves so many moving parts (literally and figuratively), the reason can be difficult to pinpoint.

By the time he was nine months old, Eliana’s Meir was unable to cruise around or show any interest in his siblings or his parents. Eliana’s brain space was consumed with how many spoonfuls of mushed carrots Meir ate, and how many ounces of formula he choked down. Her life was falling apart, and without the meals and babysitting her family nearby provided, she doesn’t think she would have survived.

When Eliana’s mother was determined to implement the old-school dictum of “Starve the baby and he’ll learn to eat,” a frustrating, foodless few days convinced Eliana that Meir needed more serious help.