Jake only eats ice cream.

If your child ate only ice cream would you let your child eat ice cream? Or would you ban your child from eating ice cream and have the doctor install a gastric tube into his stomach so that you could pump formula into your child's stomach?

I've asked this question to people and don't get a straight answer. The question is just too hard. People don't want their child only eating ice cream and they don't want their child fed with a g-tube. So I get lots of advice about how to get Jake to eat, but not an answer to the question.

Jake's in an "ice cream only" phase. He'll sit down and take a few bites of food and then sign "ice cream". If we don't give him ice cream, he cries and stops eating and drinking. We need to g-tube feed him.

With an average kid we'd just say, "Oh well you don't get to eat today." But Jake is very underweight and needs as many calories as possible. Not pumping him with milk would mean no energy for his next meal. That would mean no eating or drinking, indefinitely.

In other words Jake can go on a hunger strike to get what he wants. And we pretty much have to give in because he could do real damage to himself and his body. We've tried twice to starve him. Both times we had to end the experiment because he went 2 to 3 days without eating or drinking.

He doesn't care if he's starving or dehydrated. He hasn't properly learned to eat and associate food with satiation. And the doctors we've seen just don't have the expertise in this area.

So we hired a behaviourist who has had some success getting kids with autism to eat. Let's see how she does with Jake and his parents.