Do Your Kids Eat It?

To his credit, he'd just eaten a barf-flavored jelly
bean, but this was not the first time I've seen
that face. ;)

Is there a more loaded subject than what your children eat? It's like the third rail of parenting, and it starts from the very beginning... 

But not here, today. I'm going to focus on what my 9, 7, 4, and 1-year-old kids eat. Or at least, how we've approached food with them. Because now that we have a few years and a few different palettes in our nest, I feel like there are some things I would've liked to know...8 years ago. 

The point here is not to make anyone feel bad. If what you're doing works for your family, carry on! Bravo! My goal here is really to speak to the many parents who honestly don't know how to teach their kids to eat well and are looking for help. I was one of them. It's not something we get any training for. And we're generally thrown into it when we're most fatigued and vulnerable (parenting babies & toddlers).

If dinnertime is a nightmare for you, I want this post to be an encouragement that it does not have to be that way. Instituting a new approach can be painful and make life harder for a season, but it is possible (not guaranteed, but possible) to reap years of benefits once you've trained your kids to eat a wide variety of foods and dinnertime is not full of critiques or complaints.

And despite the sensitivity on this subject, I'm going to mostly stick with a few broad generalizations to keep it simple. Tired parents ain't got no time for essays...

...Unless they're desperate or looking for serious change, in which case a book can be helpful. If you're looking for a great AND FUN read that inspired much of our approach, I highly recommend Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman (a memoir about raising her babies in Paris). A good companion would be Parenting with Love and Logic by Foster Cline. Or for a little more info on what we're eating at dinner, visit My Home Cookin'. 

Finally, I posted our mealtime approach 6 years ago when we were still in the throws of creating one. I'd say it is still all true. I cannot say this would work for everyone; I can only say it has worked for us. But I'll add that it has gotten easier over time, because once the older kids were trained, the younger ones tend to follow their lead and need fewer reminders (tho still enough to drive us slightly crazy). But back to the bullet points...

I'm pretty sure the baby was already done and hanging
under the table at this point, but the rest of us were
having fun eating a very Americanized British afternoon
tea and discussing our future meals with royalty.

Basic Tenets for Dinnertime

• Yes, my kids generally eat the dinners I make. Years of sitting down at the table together with only one option in front of them will do that.

• I only make one dinner. I might make half without nuts or one salad without raisins if I know of a particular aversion, but I don't make any guarantees, and I don't make separate meals for different people. One is hard enough.

• The kitchen is closed after dinner. If they didn't eat dinner, or didn't get enough, they will really enjoy breakfast! Toddlers are famous for eating nothing at some meals and their weight at others. They will not starve. Unless they have some rare illness, the body's instinct is to fuel itself. They are getting the calories somewhere in their week. You don't have to cater to their tastes to get them enough calories. And it won't take them very long to learn that they're hungry at night if they don't eat dinner.

• We have 4 meals a day. They can eat at breakfast, lunch, snack and dinnertime. That's it. I cannot handle constant requests for food in between, and I know it's not healthy for them to fill up on snacks or expect to graze all day. Plus I want them hungry for meals so they will eat them. If snacktime starts infringing on dinner, either we eat dinner at snacktime or skip snack.

• Breakfast and lunch are usually "kid-friendly" cereal, sandwiches, etc. They can stretch their palettes at dinner.

• Each dinner consists of at least 2, usually 3-4 items. They have to try everything (1-2 bites) in order to get more of anything. But they don't have to finish anything.

• Whoever is home for dinner sits down at the table to eat together. This is when we ask about each person's day, discuss a movie or book or current event that caught their interest, pull out a conversation card, or read a story and discuss it (when I can't handle any more silliness). This means it's generally a good time, not a battlefield. Note: I used to worry that it didn't feel like "family dinner" when I just had toddlers and my hubs traveled or worked late. That concern has gone away as my kids have gotten older and more conversational, so we do this whether Daddy is home or not. I also should note it's still pretty chaotic: up/down getting food for the baby, cleaning up spills, refilling drinks, etc but that's all getting better as the kids get older. Finally, I have found that if you can put new foods in a context--especially a fun context--the success rate goes up. My son loves marmalade because we read Paddington while eating it. My kids liked Indian food because it was made by our sweet Indian friends. They had fun with (decaf) tea and cucumber sandwiches because we ate it on china and talked about "afternoon tea" with the Queen. Most days are not this fun, and most foods don't have such an easy story to go with them, but it sure helps when you can find one.

• We only have dessert with company or on special occasions. But when we do, they have to eat a healthy portion of the healthy parts (i.e. meat & veges) in order to get dessert. They still don't HAVE to eat any of it IF they're ok skipping dessert.

• They don't need to tell me if they don't like something. In fact, that's rude. They can say, "___ wasn't my favorite" so the chef can take that into consideration for future meals, but the chef does not need a review. Whining/complaining means they have to sit in the dining room for a period of time.

We've finally reached the stage where they get excited about
going out to eat. It helps when there's Nutella involved...

• It's important to us that they enjoy all kinds of food. For 3 reasons: 1) We love to travel, to eat out, and to explore the world, and that means we want our kids to do so as well. 2) We want them to be appreciative or gracious guests. 3) We want them to have a well-rounded diet with plenty of options to match changes in location, budget, health, etc.

That said, every family has different values/culture. And for good reason. I'm not suggesting everyone has to follow ours - just sharing what has worked for us.

A Few Big Tips for How We Got Here

• For at least a year, maybe 2-3, and still sometimes today, I would serve only the vegetable first. Each person had to eat half (of their very small serving) in order to get the "next course" (usually the protein, sometimes with the starch). It worked wonders. Now I serve it all at once, but they still tend to start with the vege, and no one gags on it. #brainwashed

My oldest really wanted to
eat a raw onion one day when
he was helping me in the kitchen.
THAT didn't last long... ;)

• Now that my kids are older, they either pack their own lunches or eat the school lunch -- which means they eat school lunches almost every day. They get to pick from among a variety of foods (often ones I don't make), but they don't get to put in an order. I think this has actually helped expand their palettes.

• The more the kids help in the kitchen, the more likely they'll eat what they've made. They can dump a bagged salad in a bowl, put fish on a cookie sheet, rinse the grape tomatoes, set the table, and get the drinks. The possibilities just increase as they age.

• Research shows that tasting something multiple times can convert a person from disliking to liking a food. My kids could all tell you this fact, as I've drilled it into them. Just because you don't love it today, doesn't mean you won't tomorrow! This is why I don't automatically remove items from our rotation that they haven't liked before.

• Consistency. Like ALL OF PARENTING it seems (sigh), sticking to the rules you've created for your household is the fastest way to long-lasting peace. The learning curve can seem like FOREVER, but they will eventually stop asking for something they never get. And they're likely to enjoy -- or at least get used to -- something that always happens. No one does this perfectly, and I have to remind myself that God made me their mother with full knowledge of my flaws, but it's a good place to start. 

Well, that's all I can think of for now. I hope some of it is useful to someone! And if you ever want to get a laugh, just come eat dinner with us sometime. You'll see just how much grace we have to sprinkle over all of the above. ;)