After a recent column imploring stay-at-home moms to give themselves a break, a reader e-mailed me to thank me. She had been exhausting herself trying to create the perfect home, complete with “irresistible” dinners for the family, and she was running out of steam.
Preparing “irresistible” dinners, though, is not really our problem. We all know how to do that: ketchup with hotdogs on the side followed by ice cream, ice cream, and more ice cream. For kids (especially mine), ketchup is its own food group. When my oldest daughter Rebecca was little, she would dip her french fries in it and lick it off, never actually consuming said fry until it was a slobbery mess, at which point she would graciously offer it to me.
Irresistible, then, isn’t hard. But preparing healthy food that kids actually want to eat is. The simple fact is that healthy isn’t fun, and there are so much more appealing foods readily available. When our first was born, we read all the baby books that told us there was no need to introduce sugar until they were two. But the book forgot to warn us about grandparents, and sure enough, our child had ice cream and chocolate galore long before her second birthday. Part of the joy of being a grandparent, after all, is making kids happy without having to be the responsible ones. I can hardly wait to have grandchildren myself, but in the meantime I’m stuck trying to convince my kids that broccoli can be just as appealing as ice cream.
Kids see right through this. One reader wrote me about a time she was trying to convince her son that this particular green vegetable would indeed tantalize the tastebuds. “Look, honey, Mommy and Daddy like our broccoli,” she said, as they both dutifully lifted their forks to their mouths. Their son peered at them suspiciously, “Yeah, but which of you wants seconds?”. Kids get smart way too early.
It’s not only that kids reject the healthy stuff. They turn their noses up at the way it’s served, too. My children, for instance, cannot eat anything if it is actually touching anything else. So if we have stew, and I want them to actually eat it, I have to separate out the meat and the carrots and the potatoes, so they don’t contaminate one another.
But even if you do everything right, kids still eye the food suspiciously. Very early in life they develop strategies for how to consume the least amount of “gross” food as possible. Rebecca refuses to eat anything that looks like it has a spice or an herb in it. So she’ll painstakingly remove all the green flecks of parsley off something, and eat the rest, consuming approximately 8.5% of any given item, and leaving the remainder in minuscule pieces all over her plate.
With all these strategies, how do we get kids to actually eat? Don’t give them a choice. I don’t make them actually eat (I remember too well eating stuff that I honestly thought was going to make me vomit), but I don’t give them anything else either. They just go hungry if they don’t eat their dinner. This means, of course, that snacks in the house must be kept to a minimum. If a kid knows that if they don’t eat their dinner, two hours later they can demolish a bag of chips in front of the TV, dinner will seem even less attractive. But if snacks consist of only fruit or vegetables, dinner suddenly may not seem so bad.
If that’s too drastic, you can try what some of my friends do: offer them a once weekly “out”. Let them know they can choose a hot dog and an apple for one meal—but only one—each week. If they hate Monday’s dinner, they have to figure out if there’s a possibility Thursday’s might be even worse.
Struggles over food are almost universal, yet miraculously most kids grow out of this picky stage. While they’re in it, just stick to your guns. The more you do, the more you’ll be able to drown out all the “EWWWWs!” and sit back and enjoy your meal. Even the broccoli.
