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Lori
My 7-year-old son eats all the time. He’s not overweight, but he is in constant motion and I think he needs the calories, the problem I have is I don’t know what to give him! He’s a grazer and doesn’t eat a lot during meals (and I’m not a good cook so maybe that’s why), but he eats 2 snacks every hour between meals. I try and make sure there are healthy foods on hand, like yogurts, fruits, and popcorn, but I’m running out of ideas and when he eats his way through the healthy stuff he moves on to cereal, ice cream and cookies. I literally have to go grocery shopping every two days. Is this normal? I feel like all I ever do is feed him and clean the kitchen. If you can offer me suggestions about how to fill him up in a healthy way, I’d really appreciate it.
Comment by Sarah — June 23, 2011 at 9:22 am
I do have some suggestions. First of all, many kids are grazers and that is actually a healthier way to eat, but only if they are eating the right foods. I have found that many of my clients have found this helpful: Sit down with him and come up with a meal plan, allow him some input into the choices. Limit his choices to one treat every 2 days ( such as a candy or ice cream). Plan his meals to meet his grazing schedule to some extent. For example have 6 small meals a day. Atypical day might look like this
Breakfast Cereal with milk
Mid morning Snack Fruit and Yogurt
Lunch chicken fingers ( there are some healthier ones around)
Mid afternoon snack cheese and crackers
Supper pasta with some sort of protein
night time snack toast and milk
This will allow your son to eat at regular intervals, but it will also stop the constant grazing which can turn into a bigger problem later in life for him and a big problem for you right now because you don’t get to leave your kitchen. try to keep the snacks simple and creative. List all the foods he like that are healthy and divide them into snack foods and meals then have him choose some of the snack and meal foods he would like. Plan a week out with him and see how it goes.
let me know if this resolves your problem
Dr. Lori
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Comment by admin — July 10, 2011 at 4:22 pm
Hello Dr. Lori,
I was seeking some advice and found your website. In 2006-2007, we began noticing a change in our daughter from a girl who was a straight “A” student and was listed on the principle’s honor roll, taking orchestra and mastering the violen in middle school, and once a weekend handing her mother or father a check list, which she would make up for us to inspect her room after she finished cleaning it(our family was military) without us having to ask her.
In 2006-2007, we had to move from our home of three years to another duty station, and our kids loved the new place we moved to because it was very laid back. However, in the last part of her middle school years her attitude began to change drasticly. She had met a girl she knew from our previous duty station, which was nice because military kids moving to another place can be difficult on them, especially with school. At first, we thought she was picking up the bad attitude from this girl, but later found out this girl kept her out of a lot of trouble she was trying to get into.
Our daughter was a freshman in high school, but at 2 a.m. in the morning we would receive phone calls from this 18 year old boy who was infatuated with our daughter. He would not seem to take no for an answer until we got rather rude with him on the phone a couple of times and it finally dwindled out with him calling our house, and at that time we did not give our daughter a cell phone. However, we found out later that they did remain friends.
Our daughter then met another boy she began dating her Sophomore year, and this boy was attached to a group of other friends, which in my opinion were sort of skateboard/emo type. This boy apparently did not get along with his parents, therefore, he was always at our house, which was fine because we met his parents and liked them because one of the reasons he rebelled against them at times is because they were sort of old fashioned like we were, and we agreed about a lot of things in that they seemed a little to serious with one another and needed to slow down.
On the other hand, my daughter picked up some bad habits from this boy and his friends in that she lied to us and we later found out she had been cutting herself. We were mortified at this thought because this is something she had never done before.
Well, we got out of the military because we thought it was time and we relocated to our current home and have been here for three years. Our daughter kept in contact with her old friends as well. However, once again a new school. We had moved to this area because a friend of ours was a retired teacher from here and she recommended the school for our kids. Our kids were not impressed. It seemed like a nice school, the principle is on the ball, but as with all educational systems they cannot keep an eye on them all the time. Our daughter once again got into the wrong crowd. She began smoking and got in trouble for it at school because she was caught on the school campus doing it, and at the time she was only 16. My husband had to take a job overseas because he could not find one here right away, so any time our daughter got into trouble I had to leave my new job and deal with the situation, which did not make a good first impression.
She was still cutting because I was called into the school on this as well because her counselor had saw some marks on her arms. We had been hoping this was only a phase with the last crowd she hung out with, but it was not. So, we got our daughter a medical counselor. We then found out she was hanging with this girl who had past experiences in cutting and had been placed in an institution because of her behaviors. We expressed our concern with our daughter several times over this friendship of hers with this girl, but of course the more we expressed the more she dug in. So, we stopped and never would mention the girl’s name to her anymore and how we wished she would stop hanging out with her.
It is just not the one girl, but this same girl has a twin sister that adds to the situation, and their mother, we found out, smokes pot thinking it helps a blood disease she currently has. Nonetheless, our daughter had came home from work (the job she got was by one of the negative influences she was hanging around with and at times when she went over thier houses she would lose money because it would be stolen out of her purse, but refused our help in trying to have her place her earnings in a savings account because she says she is adult enought to handle her own affairs) with a bad attitude one night, we got into a fight with her and she was pushing me to kick her out of the house, or rather she wanted me to say those words to her, but I never would. Well, then she said she was running away and began walking down the highway. I told her brother to go get her and all he did was try to talk to her and hold her to keep her from running away. All of a sudden, she turned around and punched her brother in the face and turned into someone we no longer recognized. I did not know what to do because my husband was overseas, so I called the police and they came and took her to juvenile detention. While she was at juvenile detention they tested her for drugs and she came up positive for marijuana. Our family was floored because we are a Christian family and she was not raised to be like this.
The probation officer gave me three choices 1. it can go in front of the judge. 2. she could be placed on probation for 6 months. 3. I could take care of the situation. I chose option number 2, and boy, did she hate me for it, and pushed the limits of her probation by coming home drunk twice and not obeying household rules, but she did obey curfew.
Her probation officer made her quit her job because of who all was associated with it and she had her go through her facebook page with her to get rid of friends who were listed as offenders of the law, and had to give me her password to her facebook page, which I had never had before.
But, I could tell that someone was coaching her on what to do with the probation officer, and I believe it was the girl she had been hanging out with, but her probation officer could never find anything on her to say “you can’t hang with her because she is a known law violater, which violates your probation.”
Nonetheless, months went by and she seemed to be doing ok, except for school and her grades and absences. I made her start attending the meetings we have to attend here in our state for them being absent from school because the parents can be arrested here with thier kids not attending school as they should, and that helped some. She kept wanting us to place her in this intermediate school where this friend of hers was attending because this girl had failed some courses and had to retake them there, but we were not about to send our daughter there because this is a school for kids that are known law violaters and have several psychiatric problems, therefore, we continued our daughter going to counseling and kept her in the same school she was in and worked with facualty there to keep her in it away from this other girl who seemed to be controlling our daughter, or so we were thinking.
Well, then this lovely friend of hers introduces our daughter to her current boyfriend/fiance (or so they are saying). We had not known he was introduced by this girl, or we would have said something a long time ago. But anyways, he took our daughter to prom and he seemed to come from a nice family, but after prom, myself, my daughter, and him got into an argument because we have certain rules in our household and they were going against them.
My daughter blew up at me as I asked him to leave our house. He acted like he wasn’t leaving, and I told him if he didn’t leave I was calling the police and have him escorted out. Well, he shuffled his way slowly to our door and I had to get by him and grab out dog as he was leaving and I said excuse me, but he told our daughter I pushed him, which I did not do!
Well, then he left his cell in our house and our daughter said if he is leaving so is she and that she was moving out (she was 17). He told her she wasn’t coming with him and they got into a fight, which made her hate me more. Well, the argument between me and her lasted well into the night and she cut herself because I told her he was no longer allowed in our house because to get his cell phone they were banging on my doors and windows and I told him to leave and he said give me my cell phone and I said no and shut the door. My son is to kind hearted and let him in to get his phone, but before that he said to me “well i should call the cops on you then because you won’t give me my phone back.” I just shut the door in his face.
But, nonetheless, our argument went on into the night and she ended up cutting herself and me having to call the police and ambulance. They took her to the pediatric e.r. and I was warned by one of the police officers that she could refuse my visitation right at the hospital and he was telling me so I would be prepared once we got to the hospital, and sure enough that is exactly what had happened. She banned me from going in her room at the hospital and was on the phone calling the boyfriend/fiance. I had spoke to a social services counselor and she indicated to me that at 2 a.m. in the morning he was in her room with her and according to the law here there was nothing I could do about it.
However, once she was discharged and because she was 17 I did have the right to make her come home with me. So, my son and I had a security guard waiting when they came out the door and I told her in front of the guard she was coming home with me. She tried to be nice and ask if she could ride home with him, but I told her no. She waited until we got outside away from the guard and screamed at me to get away while she talked to her boyfriend. The boyfriend tailgated me all the way to the highway where we got off to go to our house. I was told I should have called the cops then so they could have gotten him for harassment, but by the end of the evening my nerves were shot and I knew it would only cause another argument while I was driving that late at night. This is when she told me she hated me and they were engaged and she didn’t want me at her wedding.
My husband got a job back in the U.S. where we live and I was hoping things would change with him coming home, but it didn’t. She got into trouble by coming home drunk again. My husband had to go pick her up from the police because she had violated a city ordinance by swimming in a marked area where they should have been, and she was with the boyfriend when this happened. Then we get another call from her to pick her up from the police station because the boyfriend had been pulled over for a DUI (drug influenced, not alcohol) and was being placed under arrest.
Now, here is what has happened more recently. He was arrested for the DUI and had to go to court. Well, his parents found ways of trying to make their son look good before he went to court by having him take the ASVAB test and he went into rehab for two weeks. The boy’s mother does not acknowledge that her son does wrong. We were even told by an officer (because we had to call him out for harassing phone calls we were receiving by the boyfriend and we already told him not to come on our property, but he would call our daughter and find out if we were home or not and when we weren’t he would come our porch, however, our son would tell him he was not supposed to be on our property etc.) that this kid even tried to pawn his mother’s jewelery off for drug money because he is addicted to RX drugs we have recently discovered. Our daughter kept hounding us that she didn’t want a counselor but a psychologist and we found her one, then she gets this doctor to prescribe her klodopine, which we find out later that this is one of the drugs her boyfriend sought after from friends in order to get high along with oxycontin and a few other RX drugs. I had found a phone he gave our daughter, because she “supposedly” accidently dropped her last new phone in some liquid, and she wanted it turned on as her new cell phone, so I was charging it up and found it didn’t have a passcode on it so I looked through this phone and found out not only was he addicted to RX drugs, but he was selling them as well! I also found some unsightly pics of our daughter and him having oral sex!
Nonetheless, I know it is our daughter’s ultimate responsibility to say yes or no to certain situations, but these two people are controlling her in some form or way.
Our last argument we had was over our daughter’s room because our family cleaned it while she was gone for three days with this boy’s family on a family reunion. We had previously found make shift bongs in her room, and her room, after us telling her several times to get it clean, looked like something from one of those shows about horders. But, when she came home she destroyed what we had done to her room, broke picture frames, etc. We didn’t get rid of anything but clothes we thought were to small for her. All the posters that we felt were connected to drugs (Bob Marley smoking a joint) we rolled them up and put them in a plastic bin and told her once she got her own place she could put them up on her wall there. For three nights we fought over this room until 3 a.m. in the morning. My husband had had enough and sought legal advice of what he could do because here one cannot kick out an 18 year old it is against the law.
Anyways, our daughter, after another argument she instigated, and I have this one recorded, got the cops called on her by her Dad and she found out we could evict her through the courts if needed (I told her trying to get her to stop what she was doing) left after the police talked to her and she went to the friend’s house whose mother smokes pot and has been there since the beginning of October. She comes over to visit from time to time, but it is either to get more clothes out of her room, or she asks if she can clean our house for money, which we think is crazy because she hasn’t lived here since October, it is all about the money and that is what caused the last argument as well because a poster of hers ended up missing and she said the “boyfriend” wants his money back because he got her the poster for her birthday. I told her I would buy another one to replace it, but she isn’t getting the money, which she didn’t want and she exploded into this rage, which caused her dad to call the police.
Now, since she has left (she says she is just taking a break and hasn’t moved out etc.) I found out from my mother (who has stage IV lung cancer) that every Monday she calls to see how she is doing, but once again, their conversation ends up them talking about money etc. and she told my mother today (her grandmother asks her to come to visit so they can talk, or for her to move back in because our daughter she says sounds stressed out) that she wasn’t coming over unless the boyfriend was allowed to come over. Now, my husband and I have told her we would take baby steps when it comes to the boyfriend and letting him back in our home, and this usually means only when he is invited, for example, we took her and him out to lunch one Sunday and have invited him to Thanksgiving dinner. But, he cannot come over unless he is invited by us, which is her parents. My mother told her she only wished to talk to her and he had nothing to do with that, and she said, but he is my future and he does have something to do with it because they are engaged. But, my mother told her that engagements break up, and she only wished to talk to her. What our hearts trully want is for them to break up because as one can tell he is not good for her, we would like for her to stop smoking, and if she is doing anymore drugs to stop those as well. She is a bright and beautiful girl who has a lot of potential, but until she gets rid of the negative influences in her life that are holding her back we feel there is no hope.
We look at pictures of her from the past and she could be a model, but since she has left she is sick, frail, pale, and just does not look good at all. A girl who used to be concerned about her dress is wearing the other girls makeshift second hand clothing with holes in it at times or stained. She isn’t caring for her complextion anymore and has bumps on her face, and has a smoker’s cough, but the boyfriend tells her “i love you.” If he trully loved our daughter he would respect her parent’s and her before he turned her into what she is today. I know you aren’t supposed to hate people, and I am a Christian, but I do hate him with all my heart and soul, and I hate his family because she never spends time with her own family because of them, and with her grandmother having stage IV lung cancer the time is just slipping away and she acts like she doesn’t care. My dad passed away in 2008, and what I wouldn’t give to have had more time with him before he left this earth! I don’t know what to do, and I hope you can offer some advice.
Comment by d — November 7, 2011 at 2:20 pm
Hello Dave and Deb,
You certainly have your hands full with your daughter. It sounds like your hearts are breaking and that isn’t a healthy place for you to be. if you were to take a step back, and pretend this was happening to your best friends what advise would you offer them? When we are in the middle of the storm it is difficult to see any solutions. First of all, it is late in the game to find out why this is going on with your daughter, but I do want to offer you some solutions. Before I do that I want to let you and other readers know my experience with adolescents who cut themselves more than once ( once can be exploring it because friends do it), they are attempting to bring their emotional pain out because it is too unbearable for them emotionally, cutting often provides temporary relief for the emotional pain they are unable to cope with. Do you have any idea why she started cutting herself? That is where this story begins to take a series of unfortunate turns for your daughter. If you can figure out why she started you may be able to reach her by acknowledging the emotional trauma she went through.Often people cut themselves because something happened that they are unable to cope with. If you do not have a clue then leave it alone, your daughter is not in a place where she will want to open up and tell you.
I know you want to help your daughter, but sometimes tough love is the only way to help. It sounds like you have tried to keep her safe and be as understanding as possible. My advise if you don’t know what started this issue is to enforce some tough love. Tell her probably in a letter so she can’t run away in the middle, that you love her and will always be there for her, but not under these circumstances. Right now she has all the power and that isn’t healthy for you or her. You do not have to embrace her drug dealing boyfriend. If she choose to follow him there is nothing you can do to stop it. Hopefully she will come to her senses and eventually come home. Allowing her to call the shots and say she will not come unless her boyfriend comes with her is not ok. She has no respect for your boundaries and is emotionally blackmailing you. Do you think this is a better solutions than putting down some firm rules? I would tell her to make a choice either move out completely or come back home, there is no taking a break at 17 years of age from your family. She may find out life isn’t so wonderful with her boyfriend if you are not there as a reason for them to stay together and rebel against your rules. Once she decided she going to live with him the you need to let her go through with it for now. I hope she will come around but whether she does or not has no bearing on if you are accepting her boyfriend. Accepting her boyfriend is giving her permission to be with him, you are saying it is ok with you even if you don’t like it.This has to do with her making choices and she is past the age where you can force her. Let her know if she needs you or want sot talk you will be there, but by your rules not hers.
The only other solution is to have her committed or arrested. This means waiting for her to steal something when she comes home. Or speaking to a doctor and seeing if they will commit her based upon her cutting and drug use- but it is a long shot. Depending what state you are in, usually by 18 you no longer can do this as her parents.
Let me know how things turn out. This is going to be a difficult one to do, but if you rely on each other you will be a strong united front and at the very least your marriage and your son can begin to find some peace of mind in your house no longer being turned upside down by your daughter’s behavior. If you would like some further support I do offer a 1/2 hour free session. Go to my website and fill out the form http://www.drlorikay.com.
keep me posted,
Dr. Lori
Comment by admin — November 7, 2011 at 8:45 pm