Mom Discovers Why Her Toddler Hardly Ate Anything For Weeks, Warns Other Parents

Toddler behavior ranges from comical to downright incomprehensible, but a clever parent can don their best deerstalker and do their best Sherlock Holmes impression. Because, underneath the unusual shifts in behavior, there always is a reason.

One example of this is eating. Influencer, mom, and parenting blogger Ashley Stewart from Toddler Meal Ideas documented her experience with her toddler suddenly not having an appetite. After a bit of hands-on investigation, she found that the silicon plates she served him food on were to blame, so she decided to share the problem and some solutions with others online.
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While not nearly as classy as any alternative, save perhaps plastic and paper, silicone does have the advantage of being very, very heat resistant and non-toxic at the same time. It’s also not brittle, so it won’t shatter, when, for example, a toddler hurls a silicone plate across the room. Indeed, it’s such an effective insulator, that silicone oven mitts can be used to reach directly into boiling water. Despite all these magic benefits, as Ashley Stewart and many other young parents have discovered, silicone seems to “soak up” the flavors of all the things it comes into contact with, including the overpowering taste of dish soap.

Despite this pretty obvious flaw, many parents will still end up sticking to silicone tableware, at least up to a certain age. Toddlers, unlike babies, do have more fine motor skills and have started to learn how to impact the world around them. In the abstract, that sounds ok, but in practice, it can mean chaos. A baby might accidentally knock over a plate through clumsiness or while pushing it away in a fit, but a toddler has already grasped the evolutionary power of throwing. And, unfortunately, it’s an age with a lot of rage, "the terrible twos," as it’s sometimes called by parents who have gone through it.

This is a time when a young child has more energy and ability than a baby and often seems inexplicably filled with rage. Psychologists suggest that it’s not so much that they are more angry than an older child or even an adult, but that they have not yet developed any tools to manage it. The only outlet is their surroundings, as they will scream, shout and break things in an attempt to try and feel better. It’s also a time of discovery, where toddlers are slowly realizing that they can, in fact, affect their surroundings and even others' behavior. So they begin to test the limits of their parent's patience and the physical integrity of material items, for example, a plate or bowl. Remember, a baby really only knows how to cry when he or she is angry, sad, or stressed, while a toddler has begun to explore other communication techniques.

Child behavior specialists note that the “terrible twos” in many ways mirror the rebellion and anger so often found in adolescents, who are similarly discovering a lot about themselves and the world, often faster than they can handle it. The good news is that both of these periods are, generally, temporary, and the kid will grow out of it. But, just like children's clothes, it’s not really worth investing a lot of resources into a plate that might get broken. And pair of pants can only do so much damage, but, for example, a tossed, ceramic bowl is pretty dangerous. So soap or no soap, silicone might remain parents' best bet for now.