I have the world's slowest eater.. Advice please!

Well, where to start, where to start? I am having a bit of bad day here and need to get this out to see if anyone can help me.


DS is literally a very, very slow eater.. If left to his own devices he would take 3 hours to eat a meal. Not just dinner, but every meal. Evert day is a constant battle of "Are you eating? Come on hurry up!". He is not a fussy eater - he will generally try eveything on his plate so we are lucky there. But he eats super, super slowly. He can be distracted by anything or will get up and start playing. Mealtime with him are very frustrating and it is driving me a little nuts.

He is starting kinder next year and has gotten a place in 3 days a week starting at 8.30am. I shudder to think how we are going to get out of the house. Every night, he has dinner at 5.45pm - he is still sitting there at 7pm.

Sorry if this a bit jumbled but I am trying to think of how to explain myself properly!

We have tried the 'Times up! Get down and get ready for bed" and he goes to bed with no playing with daddy or bedtime story - doesn't bother him in the slightest so to me it seems like he is getting his own way, and DH is also missing out on the only time he gets to spend with DS during the week. We have also tried the 'You have x amount of time to eat" and set a timer but he doesn't really get that, and then he nearly choked to death when the time went off :rolleyes:. We don't eat dinner as a family but we do eat lunch and breakfast together. He has tea so early that either DH isn't home for work and we are both not hungry. One of us does sit with him but it gets very, very frustating to sit at the table for a hour and a half. We tried making his dinner time a bit later and eating together but it just didn't work - it was too late for him (6.30pm-ish) and he was past being hungry and too tired to eat.

I guess my questions are

- How long does it take your kids to eat meals?

- What is an acceptable length of time for a meal?

- If we set a amount of time that his meals need to be eaten in - how to we convey that to him? He is learning the time but he got distracted by the clock when we tried to use the "Dinner is over at 6.30pm"

- Am I being too harsh? I don't want to give him a bad relationship with food but I don't know how else to fix this!

(All his meals are currently eaten at a little table in the kitchen. He hates it - but we told him he can't sit at the kitchen table until he starts concentrating at meal times.)

I've just read this back and I sound like a really mean mum!:crying:I think I am just at my wits end

Try a booster seat so he is sitting with you at the table and can watch and learn from you. We have chair covers under the boosters so they can be chucked in the wash. My girls get distracted so it's a constant reminder to keep eating. Maybe just take the meal away once you want him to finish for a few days so he gets the idea?

Dd eats with us and will sit and eat for around five to ten minutes before getting up to potter around. She generally comes back and eats more sitting on my lap. Dinner is over when dh and I finish because then we clean up, so all up dinner can be half an hour to forty mins long depending on how much dh and I chat etc. We always tell dd it's her last chance to eat because it's clean up time and then she'll often have a few more mouthfuls. Breakfast can go on and on bevause dh gets up after me so she has two rounds. Lunch we eat together and is about fifteen minutes or so?

I would encourage the big table too and try and involve him in the ritual of a meal....so set up serve and then pack up so he knows it's not just about snacking.

Maybe he has a small tummy and needs lots of little bits?

Good luck. You're doing a great job!

My best friend was renowned as a slow eater for so long - she didn't grow out of it until she was well into her teens. It was so bad that her parents had a tea towel on hand to throw between her face and her food because it got to the point that she would actually fall asleep before she finished! But she's a bad case, and her folks never did anything about it. She had a cousin who was similar and her parents started to try and make it more fun or make a game out of it and had some success. They would have 'races' and there would be prizes involved - usually dessert - and she still ate slowly but she sped up to a semi-reasonable pace with the right motivation, and grew out of it with time. It depends if he's one of those easily motivated kids or not though - I never was and I'm still that way today, literally nothing short of police arrest motivates me to do things somedays!

It could just be a phase, has it been going on for long? You might find once the twins are older and are eating with the family he might even feel a kind of...peer pressure I guess, and start to make more of an effort. I agree with Arcadia - getting him to understand the ritual of a meal is a good idea, he probably just doesn't get it yet.

My boys can both take ages but DS2 especially he is on a booster at table (was not eating in high chair and wanted out to sit on my knee and would then eat, so we got booster) will push him self away from table then want pushed back in (happens many times every meal) and if we try and say no dinner over he cracks it big time!! He is very slow at times and some times dinner takes 45mins with him stopping and starting, refuses to be fed must do it himself very frustrating!! At CC he eats good amounts but no idea how they get him to conform to there rules of how long lunch is (he also sleeps in a cot there no issues at all so they win there too).
I was told 20 mins was all it should take for them to eat there dinner and if not finished in that time to take it away and they wil learn to eat faster or they loose it, BUT I cant do this as I feel mean and worry they will be hungry!

My DD used to be a slow eater b/c she would get distracted. It is a rule that she must eat all/most of her meal before leaving the table & we sometimes turn the TV off so she doesn't get distracted. We eat altogether at 6pm and are usually finished easily by 6.30pm. I have no answer to your question b/c you don't want meal times to become negative or forced IMO.

Does he graze a lot throughout the day? DD was generally a pain in the butt to get to finish a meal within a reasonable timeframe until we started restricting the near-constant between meal snacking and milk drinking as by the time mealtime rolled around she was already full and not interested in eating any more. So for about an hour and a half to two hours before dinnertime it's a rule of nothing but water. Not an excessively long period of time really, but enough to let their tummy settle and register a feeling of hunger before mealtime.

I'd also second the suggestion of sitting up at the table as a family for mealtimes without distractions (no TV on, pets out of the room etc), with mealtime being over when mum (and dad if he's there) are finished, everything gets packed away and that's it. The rate at which you eat then becomes a visual cue of "oh, mum's nearly finished, better get a wriggle on or miss out". It feels mean to draw that line the first couple of times, but by being consistent they soon work out where the boundary is and that they DO have a choice - eat at mealtimes or wait, even if that means getting hungry.

I'd hold him off with some healthy snacks around 5-5.30pm (piece of fruit, some vegie sticks, or similar), do some of the bath time stuff or other chores before DH gets home, and then sit down with him together to eat your meals. It's no wonder he gets distracted - he's the only one eating, there's heaps more fun things to do and you're probably there to keep him company more than enjoy the meal with him atm.

It's a tricky thing to juggle when they're hungry with family meal times, but four should be old enough to try to meet somewhere in the middle.

Thanks so much for all your replies girls! I was having a serious bad day here and it all just got on top of me.

So tonight I took a little bit of everyone's advice - cut off time for any "Mum I'm hungry" chants was 4pm so no random snacking, but then I gave him a bowl of carrot sticks at about 5pm and had all the kids bathed and dressed, and the girls settled in their rockers by 6.15pm so we could sit down for tea together. We all sat at the table with him on his booster chair again. He had about 40 minutes to eat in the end and he ate everything. At the 25 minute mark, we gave him a 5 minute warning to finish and he had a couple of mouthfuls to go. When DH told him that time was up, he said "But I want a treat!" (icecream and fruit like I eating, having finished my dinner and got bored sitting there) and he finished off the last bit fairly quickly (for him anyway).

I think we lost our way with meal times when the twins came along, and I didn't know how to get it back so thankyou so much for your advice! I blame myself partly for his slowwwwww ways as I loving sat and spoon fed him for far too long. So not doing that with the twins - just ordered the book on Baby lead solids lol.

See, I love this forum for this exact reason! Great advice that works. Yay! And double yay for the Baby led solids book. Come join the thread, we're all super nice - hee hee.

Will come and check it out! Thanks x

Oh well done, hun! Sounds like you had a much better night and you're setting things up for some fun family meal times. Good on you for making a change work!

Oh God, I have no advice but I totally sympathise.

Glad you had some improvement tonight!

Woohoo, yay for you and your fam!!

oh good!
DS is veeeery slow usually. But I have found that it is worst if he is not that hungry and/or overly tired.

do we have the same 4 yr old lol

Not helpful but my brother is 19 in november and can still take an hour+ to eat dinner but only about 30minutes for lunch. When he was little it was 3-4hours at dinner 2hours for lunch and about 45minutes-1hour for a bowl of cereal.