@Marian, I think your son’s reaction was on the extreme side. What a nightmare for you and him!
I also had a hard time finding things that S would eat in a packed school lunch. While he had broad tastes, he didn’t like sandwiches, he didn’t like whole apples, etc. Most of the time 3/4 of the sandwich and all but a few bites of the apple came back. I finally ended up having success with things like slices of red peppers in a bag, with a little container of hummus or dip. Eventually I gave up and just had him buy the school lunch. At least that way I didn’t have to see what he was wasting.
Oh my god the drama! This is not Ethiopia; your kid is not starving if he doesn’t like what’s put in front of him. Kids don’t need a constantly full stomach to function, for crying out loud.
I’m kind of amazed at all the wheedling and cajoling to get kids to eat going on in this thread. If they’re hungry, they’ll eat. If not, then they’re not going to die of starvation. Some nights my kids aren’t that hungry for dinner-they still sit at the table and talk with us (after I tell them to put their phones away, lol), but they won’t eat a lot, and that’s fine-my self worth as a parent isn’t tied to food or cooking.
It’s just food. I am a stickler for the quality of the food being good and varied because there’s no one food that meets all your nutritional needs, but it’s not like I’m the food kommandant-it’s going out the other end in 24-48 hours anyway, so as long as you’re putting some good fuel in your body, why the drama?
New foods-we have a one bite rule. Just try one bite, if you don’t like it, at least you can say you tried it and it was an adventure and a learning experience. Younger DD15 ended up being a big fan of duck confit when she tried some of mine at EPCOT, and now we’ll look for duck on menus.
Having had a toddler who gagged and threw up after taking one bite of an apple (he did warns us that he didn’t like apples), I am not a follower of the one bite rule. My philosophy was that they will eat a relatively balanced diet over several days if you present them with well balanced meals. Also, my kid liked to snack - so I made sure those were healthy - cheese, whole grain crackers, raw veggies, bananas.
In my experience, some kids cannot function if they don’t eat a meal and then have no access to food until the next mealtime.
I remember a usually well-behaved first-grade classmate of my daughter’s who came out of school at dismissal time one day crying hysterically and then proceeded to hit, scratch, and bite her mother, who was picking her up, while constantly repeating “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” The problem: Her mother had given her a yogurt and a container of applesauce for lunch and had forgotten to put in a spoon. Without a spoon, the child could not eat anything. By 3 p.m. dismissal, she was desperate and almost incoherent from hunger and completely unable to control her behavior.
Was this little girl starving? No. Neither was my son when the school advised that we should not allow him any afternoon snacks if he didn’t eat his lunch. But neither of the children was capable of functioning.
@Marian That little girl had bigger problems than just being hungry…most 6 year olds I know would have asked the cafeteria workers for a spoon. Teaching a child to ask for help is another important skill.
It was the first month of first grade, and the child didn’t understand the concept of hand-raising yet. (The school didn’t enforce that rule in kindergarten, although they made an attempt to start teaching children the skill.) After the incident, the mother investigated and found out that the cafeteria personnel would have provided a spoon if the child had asked for it using the correct hand-raising procedure but not if she had asked in any other way. (The mother was never able to determine whether her daughter failed to ask for a spoon or whether she had attempted to ask but had failed to do it properly.) So the mother kept in touch with the teacher to see how her daughter was doing in terms of learning the hand-raising procedure, and she didn’t give her daughter any food that required a spoon again until the teacher was confident that the child had mastered the skill. Problem solved. But the point about some hungry children being unable to function is still valid.
The example I responded to asked if a relative other than the parent has the authority to “set rules” such as telling a child what he has to eat, and how much, before he can have dessert. Just because a relative belongs to the “clean plate club,” or requires their children to eat whatever vegetables are served, or thinks the child’s eating habits are “weird,” it doesn’t mean they get to impose their rules on other people’s children.
I don’t think these disagreements are about food; they’re power struggles using food as a weapon. If you know a child likes raw carrots and broccoli, why serve him the steamed peas you know he despises and then insist that he eat them? It’s to show the child who’s boss, and the message is it’s not him or his parents.
As adults, we cook the dishes we like using the methods we prefer. Why wouldn’t we do the same for our children? Acknowledging children’s preferences doesn’t mean you’ll end up with children who only eat chicken tenders and french fries unless you make a habit of serving chicken tenders and french fries. We didn’t. We had a cupboard of healthy snacks and a drawer in the fridge filled with cut up vegetables and assorted fruit. Every plate had at least 3 different food groups on it and if they didn’t like one or more of what we served, they were welcome to replace it with another healthy choice. We didn’t make a habit of making meals they didn’t like either. My son didn’t like gravy, so we didn’t put it on his food. For many years he didn’t like pasta, so it would have been pointless to make dinners consisting of lasagna and salad. We’d make lasagna as a side to something we knew everyone would eat.
I have to wonder how people who believe grandparents and other relatives should be able to set the rules in their homes would respond to relatives who think it’s perfectly all right for the children to eat a plate full of cookies before dinner. Would “house rules” still apply?
At three my oldest ate everything, after that he ate less and less. Weirdly enough though chicken vindaloo is one of his favorites and he’ll eat most sorts of bread except rye.
I’m okay with two and three year olds walking on couches without shoes, but at some point they do get too big.
My goodness, I don’t equate “starving a child into submission” with not caving into a child’s food whims and setting yourself up as a short order cook on call 24-7. Surely most children are not going to “starve” if offered appropriate palatable food several times a day. If your kid doesn’t like school lunches (mine didn’t), pack a lunch. By the the time a kid is 5 or 6, he shouldn’t require all kinds of special foods at weird times unless there is an actual illness or allergy involved.
@NJSue, you’re the one who’s familiar with the writings of Penelope Leach.
What would Leach tell parents to do if a child doesn’t eat a meal? The example I cited was my son as a first grader who would not eat his lunch because he was frightened of the school cafeteria.
Would Leach advise allowing the child unscheduled food after school in this situation? Or would she advise sticking to a food schedule and not offering the child any food until dinnertime?
Another boy threatened my son in the cafeteria on the first day of first grade. This was observed by school personnel, who prevented it from ever happening again, and my son’s teacher repeatedly reassured him that it would not happen again. In fact, within a few weeks, he and the boy who had threatened him became friends. I really don’t see anything more that the school could have done that they did not do. Nevertheless, my son could not choke down any food in the cafeteria until fourth grade.
I would have lost my mind if I had had to cope with a desperately hungry child between school dismissal and dinnertime every school day for three years. I came pretty close to losing it when I did it for three weeks.
What she advised is basically offering the child the food the family eats at the times the family eats, in order to cultivate regular and unpicky eating habits. She advised that healthy children under normal circumstances should be allowed to skip meals if they feel like it (it’s offensive to a child’s dignity to be forced to eat). but they should not be trained to expect to eat until the next scheduled meal or snack (which in any case would never be more than a few hours). Her advice assumes that parental anxiety about children’s eating translates into children’s anxiety about eating and sets food up as a grounds for power struggles in the toddler and preschool stage. The book was called “Your Baby and Child.” I don’t recall that she addressed the situation you’re describing, because that book centered on preschool ages.
I knew a guy whose six year old daughter was afraid of the gym teacher. So he volunteered as the gym teacher’s assistant during her gym classes for the entire school year. Which is neither here nor there but kind of cool. I would never have withheld food as an incentive or a punishment or anything else and anyone who suggested it would lose credibility.
Actually, I think that Leach’s concepts do address the problem I was talking about because apparently, she allowed scheduled snacks. I think she would have approved of offering a child like my son an after-school snack as long as other children in the family were also offered a snack at that time (i.e., it would be a “time when the family eats”), rather than making him wait until 6 p.m. to eat when he had not eaten since 7 a.m. However, we can’t be sure since she was writing about a younger age group.
And I know kids like this in the extended family. They expect to be catered to like royalty and to be the center of everyone’s attention and sympathies and they grow up expecting it. Maybe they are royalty who will have peons at their constant service.
There was a period where my oldest made himself a bean burrito if he didn’t like dinner. I wasn’t the short order cook. He was. He’s my somewhat Aspergery kid and still eats very little. My other kid was somewhat picky as a child, but eats most everything now and after a year in Jordan has definitely learned how to pretend he likes things he doesn’t really care for. The list of things he absolutely won’t eat is quite small.
Interestingly, research on “supertasters” (which most picky eaters are) indicates that it can take ten or more times tasting something before it’s considered edible. I didn’t require a full bite from either child for any food, but I did tell them about the research and did ask that they attempt to taste anything that made them suspicious. (I did pay my son a dollar to try chocolate when he was five. That was fun.) Meals often included two or three options that were reasonable, and the kids were always welcome to fill up on bread and butter and an apple. (I made the bread and it had whole wheat, with eggs and milk in it, so it wasn’t empty calories.)
Because I grew up with food issues around my mother’s severe food restrictions (she ate nothing but steak and salad for many years and wouldn’t allow cookies or sugars in the house), I was very careful about creating food issues in my kids. They were never forced to eat nor restricting from eating when they were hungry, even if it was “just before dinner”. In the “just before dinner” window, I always started by cutting up carrots and apples and would continue to a slice of bread and butter if necessary. (I still start dinner by slicing up carrots, only now I nibble on them while I’m cooking, instead of feeding them to the kids.) I knew I was succeeding when my daughter handed me half a cookie and asked me to save it for later because she wasn’t that hungry–she was five. She asked for the second half two days later.
Both my kids (now 29 and 30) are far more adventurous about food than I am at this point. My daughter keeps telling me I should “just try that, you might like it.”
