Thanks Lulu

I'm probably making those techniques sound a lot worse than they are- the primary focus, first and foremost, is on communicating with your child and helping them to developing an understanding of what you're asking them to do (through role playing with a doll and the like) so that you don't actually have to get to that point. The pinning them down to define what you're asking is not supposed to be a solution for every mealtime, and it really did work instantaneously for us at first.

That being said, while I was frustrated enough to try it in the first place, I'm uncomfortable continuing with it for more than a couple of instances for some of the same reasons you mention- primarily because I have my own awful relationship with food that comes from a power struggle with my parents when I was a kid. I've also seen my sister-in-law hospitalised with anorexia from a whole raft of different food issues, and there's no way I want to make mealtimes anything but fun for my daughter.

These kinds of ideas seem to come from the school of thought that toddlers should really behave just like little adults, when that's completely silly. They're toddlers! I know I'll have hugely different perspectives on just about everything when we eventually add some siblings to our family for DD