AITA for asking my husband to stop being a picky eater in front of our son?
Husband has always been a picky eater. It has been a huge source of contention between us because I LOVE food. He has the palete of a 5 year old. He won’t eat vegetables or anything with “weird” textures. He sticks to pizza, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, etc.
While dating, this was a huge issue, however we were able to reach a compromise. Now that we have a kid, however, its becoming an issue again. I brought up this issue before we had kids. I wanted to teach our kids good eating habits and I was concerned over his pickiness rubbing off on the kids. He agrees that his habits are unhealthy and he does not want our kids to learn his eating habits.
For awhile I’ve been cooking food that “hides” healthy stuff (i.e. broccoli pesto, finely chopped veggies in fried rice etc.) which my husband will eat (kinda, he picks out the veggies). But I want to actively encourage my kid to enjoy healthy food. My kid loves purple, so I decided to make a purple dinner last night. I had some sautéed eggplant and purple carrots and peppers on top of some purple pasta. Kid was excited to try it and seemed like he was actually enjoying it.
Then husband comes home, looks at the food and makes a face, goes and microwaves a pizza before joining us. Kid notices the pizza and asks for that too. And he says “this is daddies food, eat your food”. And kid starts throwing a tantrum about wanting pizza. I get frustrated and say “can you eat that in the other room?”, husband looks annoyed but complies. Then I calm down our son and get him to finish his meal.
Laster we get into a huge fight. He says he should allowed to eat dinner with the family in our dining room and shouldn’t be shooed away. I am frustrated because I worked really hard on making my kid a healthy meal and he’s ruining my efforts by eating all this junk food in front of him. He’s annoyed and basically says that we’re the adults and he should do as we say not as we do and yada yada. But I feel that at some point the kid is going to see that his dad is allowed to eat as much unhealthy stuff as he wants and he isn’t and is going to feel some type of way about that.
AITA for asking my husband to hide his picky eating from our son while we are trying to teach him good eating habits?
edit: since it keeps coming up. I want to make it clear here. I DO NOT expect my husband to eat vegetables. That ship has sailed. All I expect is that he does not eat his junk dinner in front of our kid for the sake of promoting healthy eating habits in our child.
edit 2: A lot of people have suggested looking into r/ARFID and I will probably send that to him when we're both calmer. However, this has been a source of contention for years and I've asked him to ask his doctors & therapists about his eating habits before. His perspective is that he's an adult and he should be allowed to eat what he wants. Plus he is "healthy" (in terms of BMI, heart rate, blood pressure, etc.) according to his general practitioner's charts. There's only so much I can do here. At the end of the day, I cannot force a grown adult to change his eating habits. I just ask that he does not influence our children's eating habits. And honestly, I'm really tired of these armchair therapists on here. You do not know for certain he has an eating disorder, that's for him and his doctors to figure out. And no he is not autistic. No he’s not fat, we both work out and he runs.
edit 3: Damn some of y'all are out for blood huh? My husband is not a terrible person. Our marriage is not in danger of falling apart, this is just ONE issue that we have in our TEN YEARS of being in a happy and healthy relationship. I'm all about "accepting your judgement", but I'm an asshole for marrying a man I love who happens to be picky? Really? So picky eaters just shouldn't get married? I AM NOT DIVORCING MY HUSBAND. If that makes me an asshole so be it.
Posted Jan 29, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC · edited