How to get a 17 month old to eat her dinner?

[~Hestia~]

Yep, my little guy is much the same and has been for a couple of months. It's frustrating but I try not to make an issue of it which sometimes works. I try to give him things that I know he loves and it still ends up on the floor! He has gone from eating more than I do to seemingly living on air, I think he's simply too busy to eat

[Miss.September]

We've been through this a few times. The first time, she came good after a few days. The most recent though, we really struggled for a while. In the end, we started to give her the things we knew she loved. Chicken nuggets, pasta, fish fingers. We got her back into the habit of eating dinner. Now she does eat something on her plate each night, sometimes not a lot, but she does eat.

[SammyRo]

I'd go with what Santosha suggested, and give her a bigger meal at lunch and don't worry too much about dinner. What time is she having her dinner? I found at this age, that DD ate better if she ate at 5pm, so rather than cook early to suit her, I would just save her a portion from our dinner for the next night itms. Try not to stress too much, as this will affect your LO. We always used to offer DD a yoghurt or fruit regardless of how much dinner she had eaten - I found that because we did it everynight and not as a special treat or bribe, she didn't hold out and not eat any dinner just to get it, as it was just part of the meal iykwim. Dietitians will take a week's view of their eating, not a single meal, so as long as you other meals and snacks are good, then it doesn't matter too much if she doesn't eat much at dinner. And remember, no child in the western world has starved between 5pm and 6am!

For what its worth, DD is 2.9 years and we still have nights where she doesn't eat a thing, or will pick out just the pasta, or on occasion just has chips at the pub, but I know that at other times I can give her strips of capsicum and she will pretty much eat a whole one! so we just go with the flow

[courts&munchkins]

We have trouble with my ds2 (17 months as well) to get him to eat anything really. He goes through stages, at the moment he is cutting eye teeth and is barely eating anything except for fruit. I just keep offering and every now and then he surprises me. Last night he ate a whole plate of corn meat, peas and carrots. I don't stress about it too much. He'll eat when he's hungry, he's certainly not suffering. I just make sure his other meals are balanced and we get by with that.