How others turned out

Tonight we had two friends over for dinner, both of whom are advanced ph.d students in English at Stanford. We had an early dinner so that Sava could eat with us. We are going to try, to the best of our abilities, the approach to feeding which failed us completely when he was less than a year old--namely, to offer him various foods, and allow him to choose what he wants to eat, without nagging him, bribing him, or making a big deal out of food; the idea is that over time he will figure out that it is up to him to eat, and will discover cues about hunger that will also guide him to the things he wants to eat. It is going to be a tremendous challenge, as tonight demonstrated, since at the end of the meal Sava had eaten about two dozen pieces of tomato, half a dozen pieces of cucumber, and, for dessert, he volunteered to eat some strawberries. That was it. The rest of us had a delicious vegetarian pasta with eggplant and tomatoes, which I spent two hours making; German pork sausage; bread; and salad. Sava did not touch any of these, which in turn prompted a long conversation with our friends about his personality, his quirks, the challenge it has been to parent him well without constantly doubting everything we do. It was comforting to hear that both of our guests had resembled Sava in childhood, especially E., who apparently cried her way through preschool, either threw up or refused to eat most things, had little interest in playing with other kids (because she found them "annoying" and "dumb"), and yet went on to grow up healthy, liked school once she started first grade and excelled in it, and now has a potentially good career ahead of her as a professor of English; because of her ill-adaptive personality, her mother had been advised to take her to a psychiatrist, which in the then Eastern European bloc would have meant almost certainly a life marked by stigma; her mother, most wisely, had ignored that advice.
True, both of our guests are awfully awkward social beings, have the best intentions that they do not know how to express, and probably find it hard in general to deal with the outside world, which is why they inhabit the halls of academe. But at least they have found an environment which rewards their gifts and gives them a reasonable sense of meaning, which is the most that I hope for Sava, and the most I would hope for any other child.