So long story short. Our 10 y/o nephew lives with us M-F and sees his parents on the weekend. They are also not together. He’s SOOO PICKY with food. I’ve known him for the last 2 years and that first year I kinda sat back letting uncle discipline since I wasn’t anything but a stranger to him. But I’m always cooking homemade meals, 95% of the time it’s healthy food besides when I’m exhausted from work and home very late. Tonight I made a Caesar Salad with homemade croutons and cheddar potato soup. The salad itself took an hour to prepare. He declined the salad before it was made. I told him he has to have SOME. I made him a small plate of salad and he moaned and whined about having to eat it. We told him we have a new kind of popsicle after dinner if he eats his salad. Nope. Ate the croutons out. Then played with the rest with his fork. Like my parents, I told him if he wants a snack later it’s salad, and breakfast will also be salad till that little bit is gone. Also reminded him it’ll taste worse the longer he waits. I’ve tried making dinner with him, he gets bored and leaves, we take him grocery shopping and he hates that, we remind him that eating healthy will help him in sports and grow tall. At his parents, he eats pizza or boxed snacks, never real meals. It just seems like every meal is a fight unless it’s pizza 😑 below is my plate. His was half of that. Food is just too expensive to throw out, and I think he needs to understand what happens to people who eat nothing but garbage all of the time, and why we eat these things. They say it’s only what you bring in your home, but that doesn’t work when he goes by dad/mom on weekends or if he doesn’t like our house rules he calls his dad to come get him without our knowledge. We don’t have any custody agreement, he just lives here, we do the parent teacher conferences, we take him and sign him up for sports, my s/o thinks if we’re too mean we’ll never see him and he’ll just go by dad where there’s no rules. But if his parents can’t care for him on a regular basis I don’t think that would ever happen.