Your child does not eat chicken.
Your child has not eaten chicken since March. Your child checks the date on the milk, and on things that do not have dates. Your child does not go to Ellie's house. Your child has never stayed overnight anywhere. Your child will not say the word, cannot be in a room where the word is said, and has an elaborate set of alternatives for it, and so, by now, do you.
Your child asks you, perhaps thirty or forty times a day, in various forms, one question.
None of that is about food. All of it is one thing, and it has a name, and in all likelihood nobody has ever said the name to you.
An extreme fear of vomiting is one of the most common phobias of childhood.
By some estimates it affects as many as one person in ten. It is far less recognized than fear of the dark or spiders or flying, and it does more damage to a child's life than any of them. And it is almost never identified correctly.
The doctor sees weight loss and thinks about eating disorders. The school sees anxiety. Mental health services see compulsions and treat those. Everybody is looking at the symptom and nobody is looking at the cause, and families spend years in the wrong service.
And here is the question you have not asked anybody.
No. Nobody is going to make your child throw up. Not you, not a therapist, not at any stage, not ever. The treatment with the strongest evidence for this phobia does not work that way, and this book says so three times, because every parent thinks it and almost nobody asks.
Inside:
The net. This fear is not a fear, it is a net that spreads. Foods, places, people, words, clothes, sounds. Draw it on one sheet of paper and count the strands. Most parents reach forty or fifty and have never seen them together.
The fear makes the symptom. The symptom proves the fear. Anxiety produces real nausea. So your child is frightened, the fright makes them feel sick, and feeling sick proves the fright was right. This is the only phobia that manufactures its own evidence.
Two hundred times a day. Why answering the question is the single thing keeping this going, why you answer anyway, and how to stop over three weeks without a catastrophe.
The bowl by the bed. Every accommodation your household has made, what each one teaches, and why reducing them can produce results comparable to treating your child directly.
The ladder, built backwards. You do not start with food. You start with a word, because it is free, it is available tonight, and it manufactures the evidence your child will need later.
When someone actually is sick. The stomach bug arrives at two in the morning. What most families do that night, why it is the largest therapeutic opportunity of the year, and what to do instead.
When it is something else. The real clinical line between this and an avoidant eating disorder, and the physical causes of chronic nausea in children that get missed, starting with the one nobody checks.
What this book will not do.
It will not tell you this is a phase. It is not, and it does not generally pass on its own, and a great many of the adults who have it are people who had it at nine and were told it was silly.
What it will do is take the net down, strand by strand, starting with the cheapest one, at a speed your child has a say in.
It gets louder before it gets quieter. That is not the method failing. That is the method.
