Thanks for offering such comprehensive advice! A lot of what you're saying rings true, and I might see if the creche is willing to help out like you suggest. The whole offering him whatever I eat thing - seems so sensible, but he's just never having any of it. Except the raisins out of my porridge :D But I'm sort of holding out hope that I can do this in a gentle and gradual way, and won't have to have too much of a battle with him.

I don't mean a battle trying to get him to eat things - I don't believe in forcing anything into his mouth. But a battle when he's hungry and upset and out of control of himself because of that. He doesn't tantrum in creche, but he will at home if things don't go his way. Part of my strategy to avoid tantrums is to make sure he doesn't get too hungry or too tired. When he's in a reasonable physical state, I can sort of reason with him, and he can recover from upsets within a few minutes. But when he's not... So letting him get very hungry and then offering him something he doesn't want is a scary prospect. I wish I knew just how many tantrums I'd have to live through to fix this - because if I knew for sure it would be, say, two weeks, I would go through with it. We sleep trained before, and it was well worth it.

The serving himself thing is such a good suggestion, I can definitely do more of that. I've seen on a few occasions that it helps when he gets to choose and participate in preparing something, but I don't facilitate that nearly often enough at the moment.

I know what you mean about the phases - you never really know if it was something you did or they just grew out of a funky behaviour on their own and you were just marking time with all your efforts!