Please help with using Collaborative Problem Solving

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Unless it really is a picky eating thing?

If it is partly that, there are some good books out there, I read one that encouraged parents to work with children to identify preferred foods and establish a rotation where they can't have the same 2 days in a row. And gently expand their preferred choices, with them as part of the process.

Under stress sometimes people become more picky, I don't know if that might be part of it too. 8 is still quite young. Even adults can get very picky under stress.

All the restaurants we go to in town have cheese pizza on their children's menu. Even the Chinese place has it on the buffet. This is his #1 favorite food. He is not a pizza snob, unlike me, and will eat anything that is pizza as long as it is round. He will even eat pizza that people have microwaved instead of baking and is a gooey mess. (yes, that really happened) If it were not so convenient I actually wish he had better taste in pizza.

It is the summer where I am, and the least stressful time of the year, so I do not think it is stress. Normally that is the first thing I suspect. Also, he has been making a lot of good progress on eating new things. He even tried shrimp pretty recently, which is a really big deal.

I don't say it is impossible that it could be that he prefers the pizza at the Mexican place, but he doesn't show any signs of it. It would not hurt to further investigate it though. I am more likely to think he really likes the tortilla chips b/c he gets a big smile when it shows up on the table. I asked him if that is why he likes that restaurant and he said it was, but I do realize that might not be only the reason.

One must cross the event horizon periodically to maintain friendship. But I choose these moments carefully as they are costly.

just read the stuff about the tortilla chips and it reminded me of this podcast I recently heard:
http://freakonomics.com/2014/06/19/ther ... o-podcast/

it's all about the history of free bread, etc. at restaurants, and how people get really angry when restaurants try to do away with it. Just thought you may be interested.

Also re: pizza - I used to babysit a kid who was a picky eater but would eat "chinese pizza" which was essentially a scallion pancake. Sometimes just the words have power.

I agree. Also I think it helps if you distract yourself from the overall effect by thinking about a specific thing like pupillary contraction. Then you can check that datum and move back without getting lost or burned. Also irises are sort of amazing structurally--they can look a lot like Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities. But it's one of those things where you have to not think about it because giving it too much attention sort of turns up the gain on the signal.

If you don't think it's a power struggle and have the sense there is something specific the only other thing is just pretend you're a child and watch through that lens. You may see what makes the Mexican restaurant better. He may not know, and it may be hard. Could be the basket the chips come in, or the speed they get there, or that dipping in salsa is easier than buttering bread, or the waitstaff might take a different attitude. Adult attitudes can make a huge difference. Or maybe the juice comes without ice and other places have ice in it....could be anything. But you're looking for him to not just communicate but also identify what he feels a bit, that's a tough thing to do and may take time.

A third issue with eye contact, and perhaps the most important one: if you aren't looking at someone's face, you are missing a significant amount of nonverbal communication. This can be mitigated by looking around the eyes like you describe. DS often is looking the other way, or up and to the left, and misses all the information the other person is conveying about their feelings, and so frequently misconstrues things.

I'm going to offer another take on this situation entirely (and this goes along with my post in the other thread on this subject.) What if the preferred restaurants are simply more predictable for your son, and therefore he can't explain accurately to you why he wants to go there. As I mentioned before, restaurants are rife with unwritten rules and nonverbal communication - a new one could be a very scary place for a child who is a bit rigid and struggles with communication.

Would it be possible to go to one of the non-preferred restaurants just for appetizers or dessert, and then go to the preferred one for the main meal? If familiarization is the problem, that could get you a toe-hold into getting him used to the non-preferrred places. You could also try going to the non-preferred places for takeout, but have him go with you to pick up the takeout and ask him to help you with the interaction.

Your son's reaction strikes me as being a scared kid who is trying to control something to address his fear. I think the key is trying to suss out what he's afraid of...if I could venture a guess, I'd think he is scared he might "misbehave" (not meet expected behavior protocols) in a new place because he doesn't know if the expectations will change with different places (and they do - there's totally different behavior expected at a TGIFriday's than there is in a white tablecloth place.)

Sitting in a restaurant waiting for the inevitable moment where you screw up in public sounds like a very, very scary thing to do.

Freakonomics has some pretty cool stuff. They are totally right about them not being truly free. If they weren't part of the meal we would not order them, so my son would not get them. I should have worded it that way.

We have tried the word trick and sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. Word tricks will help when the issue is unfamiliarity on the margins, but nothing about the food is really objectionable. If it is too unfamilar, or there is something concretely objectionable, it still won't work.

Coincidentally, My son will eat scallion pancakes, I make, b/c I called it Chinese flatbread. He loves flatbread, which is in essence pizza without all the more challenging ingredients. He ate flatbread before pizza. He also likes onions for some reason, so I told him the scallions were like onions, b/c they are in the same family.

(He does say it would be better without the scallions, though. LOL

You are right about eye contact. My son is super bad about analyzing body language much less facial expressions. I really need to find a book expressly about those things with a colorful presentation. We have some resources scattered inside some of his emotion book, but it would be nice to have one thorough resource.

We are careful to take him to restaurants where he is set up for success. Any special occasion new places are done at lunch where the expectations are lower, and we go the minute the place opens so we are almost the only ones there. He doesn't feel that pressure, as he does not have that social awareness. But I do. They are also not "fancy" places. They are usually mom-pop places, so not chains, but not exactly fancy, or anything close, if you know what I mean. We always scope out the menu and make sure they have a kids menu or otherwise indicate family friendliness. He is 8 going on 9 and acts about as well as a relatively well-behaved preschooler, so we plan accordingly.

The funny thing about the restaurants he has moved down to his second tier is that they are more familiar to him than the new preferred one. The new preferred on was one he had boycotted since the first time we there, and all of a sudden it was OK. I will have to think about social expectations. One of the restaurants he downgraded is a buffet. Behavioral expectations there are super low b/c it is a Chinese buffet. he only needs to order his drink. We had been encouraging him to get his own food. and that could be an issue. I offered to go back to getting it for him, but that did not change his opinion. I could try more reassurance on that score. The other place he downgraded is an Italian place that is basically a pizzeria with some other options. We go the minute it opens for dinner and it is usually dead.

I am also rethinking the lighting. The buffet is on the dark side. I could have sworn the Mexican place had darker lighting even then that, but my husband says it isn't.

With a kid who can't communicate, you just have to keep plugging away at the variables until you figure out which one it is. It's a long road, but eventually you'll get there.

Restaurants have changed their food drastically in the last year or so. MSG and chemical additives, some that are neurostimulators, have flooded our food supply, especially at restaurants. He is most likely suffering the same reaction I have. I eat out at one of three places, less than once a month. I still get GI distress but it is manageable.

If you felt this pain, pressure, discomfort, nausea, headache that takes over much or all of your body, you'd never force him to eat anything he didn't want to. If you feed him this food, it will cause him to develop ulcers and he will have worse problems. It is the same with physical education. Running with a stomach ache means your stomach lining is raw and irritated. It isn't a muscle that needs to be worked out. Now I can thank our phys ed system for ulcers made by ignoring what I felt in my body.

I feel a major difference in my health, mind, aspieness if I get better nutrition. When forced to go to a restaurant that I can't eat at, I socialize. The point of going to a restaurant is not food only. He should understand that he can make choices. He can have input reasonably. Everyone gets a turn to pick the restaurant. He can choose to eat at home or the restaurant but he should still socialize. Keep in mind that restaurants are a horrible stim nightmare and we can't always put our finger on what it is that we don't like about a food or a place, but we know it hurts our body and we don't like it. How about a little empathy from the NT's?

Also, your NT's will get very uncomfortable if someone in the group doesn't eat, but they can get over it pretty easily compared to a stim nightmare or food poisoning.

?????

I am not NT, and my son does not have digestive distress from eating out. We are very aware of what foods give him issues (primarily excessive lactose, which I also have issues with) and I would never make him go somewhere that made him ill.

I have been meaning to post an update on this, anyway. We did get him go to a different Asian buffet place in another town. Normally he prefers to stay as local as possible, but he said that the old place had too much"diminishing marginal utility." He was not enthusiastic, but he went. Baby steps.

So I do think he really is sick of the other places.

(I barely can parse out what that means, and I've been hyperverbal my whole life. God I love the wordy Aspies!)

No one else other than people on this forum would see how cute that is.

I love this place.

Edited to add a disclosure: We did discuss diminishing marginal utility in our econ unit, but he remembered it and used it correctly and spontaneously.

This post about "pretending you're a child" reminded of something interesting. Long time ago, I read about an eclectic restaurant somewhere in Russia (maybe Moscow or St. Petersburg? but memory eludes me). In the restaurant, all furniture, dishes, and decorations were enormous from an adult perspective, but just the size regular things look to a 5-year-old child. For example, tables were up to people's shoulders, chairs were up to people's chests, plates were 30 inches in diameter, cups were big enough to be held with both hands, and silverware were 1 foot long and over 1 inch wide. Portions were very large by Russian standards (but probably average for Americans), meant to look the way regular portions look to a young child. Adult visitors described the place as "eerie", "intimidating", and "tension-inducing". (The article didn't mention how kids reacted to the place, if they went at all.) The business was great at first, then no one came, the place went bankrupt within three months, and closed forever. I don't blame the adults for feeling uncomfortable there.

Food for thought, perhaps? (no pun intended)

Anything with the word buffet is going to be heavily dosed with MSG.

That is a neurostimulator. That is a drug that affects the brain which can result in GI distress as well as a huge host of other symptoms, many of which are entirely hidden to observers and difficult to decipher to the sufferer. Lighting can also be affecting him yet it isn't obvious. I would lean towards there being an actual issue. It could just be a preference thing like ice cubes at this place but not the other but I don't think so. Being uncomfortable about a person is a possibility but not likely if he's being fussy about more than one place.

If high functioning self aware adults can't always figure it out for themselves, I think a realistic expectation is that he can't tell you what it is at this time hence you have to go with a workaround that meets the goal of fast food (pack something healthy and take it from home) or social time (go somewhere he is physically comfortable and he can choose to eat or not, he gets a turn to chose the place).

Dkids love to choose their own lunchbox foods when we allow then to get creative and learn about foreign or gourmet food. Every grocery trip they can pick one thing or a recipe. They prefer the unusual fruits and sometimes fortune cookies. They like to help cook the thing they picked out more than if they were just asked to help in the kitchen.

My animals would not eat leftovers from those places after they had been on an organic diet for a while. I'll take that as validation to be concerned about processed food.