Our son is 26 months old and he doesn’t eat solid food. As in, he gets all his calories from milk mixed with toddler protein shakes and the only solid food he eats every day is about 5-6 chocolate yogurt covered raisins. He has gradually regressed to only eating the raisins over the last year. He used to eat toast, orange, strawberries, crackers, chips, cookies, grilled cheese… now it’s just the handful of chocolate covered raisins. He drinks about a half gallon of milk a day. I offer him a myriad of foods at every meal and he won’t touch anything.

Tonight I put a small, flat, approximately 1/2” piece of grilled chicken into his mouth and he instantly started gagging, even though it was a really tiny piece of chicken. My husband yelled at me “STOP!!” and fished the food out of his mouth. He thought I was trying to choke our son. I told him, “fine, go ahead and just feed him purées until he is a teenager.”

I am so frustrated and so fed up. This isn’t normal. We have a 5 month old daughter and I don’t want her going down this same path, but I also think my husband has an irrational fear of choking to the point that he hasn’t allowed our son to develop normal eating habits. He constantly would chop up the bits of food I offered into even smaller pieces.

I don’t know what I’m even asking or saying. Just wondering if this is normal. I know toddlers are picky eaters, but to the point where they only eat a handful of chocolate covered raisins a week? Is that normal? Is it normal for your husband to yell and act like an asshole when you just try to introduce some kind of normal food to a child who should be old enough to chew and swallow small bits of solid food?