Inside: As a dietitian-mom, I’ve learned a lot of important lessons after 20 years of feeding kids. Some of them the hard way.
When I started Real Mom Nutrition, our firstborn was 5.
Then I blinked, and he turned 20.
There’s something about that kind of milestone–a new, round number decade–that makes you pause and reflect. And dab away a few happy/sad tears.
Like all parents, I’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way. Like no, you will not always be terrified when your kid is behind the wheel of the car. And yes, children will eventually pee on the potty without the promise of an M&M.
I’ve also learned a lot about feeding kids–and learned some of those lessons the hard way.
1. The one-bite rule works…until it doesn’t
Our oldest kid willingly took a bite of every new food, and I thought I had it all figured out.
Until our second kid came along.
He didn’t want to take “just one bite”, and it would spiral into a battle of wills, leaving us all miserable and exhausted (and that one bite never taken).
The same goes for any kind of feeding strategy or advice–including on this blog: What works swimmingly with one kid may not work with another.
Even two kids raised in the same house with the same meals and routines can have wildly different preferences and habits. Case in point: While I was a picky eater, my brother ate nearly everything without complaint.
2. Don’t sweat the small stuff
You know those parenting moments where you wish you had a do-over, the ones that jolt you awake at 2am in a puddle of regret? (No? Just me?)
One of mine occurred at an Ohio State football game, where I had a meltdown over the kids wanting soda. Tempers flared, and I ruined what could’ve been a fun family day. Over sugar.
Back then, I was worried that every bite or sip was make-or-break, that somehow I was dooming my kids to a life of disease and sugar addiction if we didn’t order water.
Thankfully, I’ve lightened up a lot over the years and found a much healthier mindset around food and balance for my kids. And for myself.
Get More: How Intuitive Eating Can Help You Make Peace With Food
3. Serve salads early and often
I beat myself up over some things, but this is a move I’m happy I made: I started serving green salads early in my kids’ lives, and now both of them happily eat them and order them in restaurants.
I put a high value on this for a couple reasons:
- They saw salad nearly every night at dinner and learned that veggies, especially leafy greens, aren’t yucky.
- They learned to eat different kinds of foods mixed together when things like shredded carrots or diced peppers were added. Eating mixed dishes is a big deal for some kids, especially picky eaters.
Get More: How to Teach Your Kids to Love Salad
4. Making just one meal sets you free
As a former extremely picky eater who rarely ate what my dear mom cooked for dinner, I didn’t want to go down the buttered noodles road with my own kids.
So from the start, I just made one meal every night, deconstructing some mixed dishes (like the photo above), and allowing the kids to opt out of certain components of the meal, like a sauce or particular veggie, if they wanted to.
I made sure there was something on the table they liked, even if it was just rice, and decided to be okay if they occasionally ate only that rice for dinner.
In my mind, if I didn’t give my kids a get-out-of-dinner-free card in the form of a PBJ or chicken nuggets, they’d have more incentive to eat what I made. And generally, that was the case.
5. People’s food choices are their own business
I cringe when I read some of my early posts. I was judgmental and up in other people’s business, especially when it came to pee-wee sports sideline snacks.
I learned the hard way that food choices are emotional and personal, especially when it comes to what people feed their kids, and that I have no right telling other people what to do.
Sometimes those food choices impacted my own kids, like when cupcakes were brought to the soccer fields after practice.
But there are better ways to enact change that shaming or snark.
Do I still believe in healthy team snacks? Yes. Do I wish I had gone about it in a different way? Also yes.
Get More: How Parents Can Create A Healthy Team Snacks Plan for Kids Sports
6. The only constant is change
It’s the Murphy’s Law of parenting: Once you feel like you’ve finally mastered a phase or stage, everything changes.
But I’ve found that the opposite is true as well. Just when you’ve accepted that your kid is never going to enjoy piano lessons, remember to say thank you, or like green beans, they can surprise you.
That’s why you should never write off a food forever, even if your kid has refused it for years. Our youngest son didn’t eat cucumbers–until he plucked one from a restaurant salad I had one night and announced that he wanted to try them. Ditto for guacamole. Our older son refused pesto for years before deciding it was good.
To this day, my mom still occasionally looks over at my plate and says, “You eat that now?”
Get more: Your Kid Hates Vegetables. Now What?
7. Hungry kids are easier to feed
When my kids were little, my handbag was full of boxes of raisins and containers of crackers. All it took was one hunger-induced meltdown in Target, and I never left the house without an arsenal of snacks for my kids. Just in case.
But I learned that children who are nibbling all day are never truly hungry for meals, which can make them seem a lot pickier than they really are.
Sure, snacks can be helpful. But it’s okay for kids to get hungry. It’s the natural order of things. So before you label your kid a picky eater, consider how hungry he is when he actually comes to the table.
8. Comparison is the thief of joy
Just because your friend’s kid loves quinoa doesn’t mean yours has to. And just because that child on Instagram takes sushi and cucumber salad in a bento box to school for lunch doesn’t make your kid’s brown bag PBJ inferior.
Comparing our kid to someone else’s is never helpful–whether it’s how soon they slept through the night to what college they were accepted to. Or what (and how much) they eat.
Get more: The Kind of Eaters I Want My Kids To Be and Why Boring Packed Lunches Might Be Best for Some Kids
9. Those two extra bites don’t matter
They may even make things worse.
How much time did I waste deciding how many more bites each kid needed to take of each food on their plate before they “could be done”? Way too much.
When I stopped micromanaging and started trusting my kids to eat what they needed, they actually did.
Yes, they sometimes jumped down from the table after a couple of bites and announced they were hungry again as soon as the dishes were cleared. But over time, they figured it out–and I could go back to focusing on my plate, not theirs.
Get More: Why Pressuring Kids To Eat Doesn’t Work (And What To Do Instead)
10. Family dinner gets better
“Family dinner” has a lovely ring to it, but it’s not always lovely. Family dinner can be especially hard when children are very young. They’re tired. You’re tired. Someone is spilling something. And someone is crying because their pizza slice is cut into pieces but they wanted it whole.
My husband and I slogged through some tough dinners with our kids. But we kept our eyes on the prize: Surely, kids can’t throw tantrums over the color of their cup forever and eventually, they would learn how to pour their own milk and sit in their seat for longer than two and a half minutes.
So we kept at it and made family dinner a priority. Over time, it got a whole lot better. My older kid even named family dinner his favorite family tradition on a college application (*sob!*).
Get More: The Truth About Family Dinner
11. Even cranky kids should learn to cook
I tried and tried to get my kids into the kitchen. I was embarrassed that I had a blog about feeding kids and wrote about the importance of teaching kids to cook–yet my two took no pleasure in helping make a meal.
There were brief periods of enthusiasm and moments they were seized with the desire to cook or bake. But overall, they resisted. And instead of pushing, I turned on good podcasts and savored the alone time in the kitchen.
Yet now my college kid is getting ready to live on his own, and I’m giving him a crash course in how to cook chicken breasts. I wish I had made cooking a non-negotiable. (Luckily, HelloFresh meal kits are helping me get my younger son into the kitchen more often.)
12. Serve foods you don’t like
Another misstep on our part. My husband and I are both recovering picky eaters and between us, have a handful of foods we still don’t like, like tomatoes and eggplant.
So I didn’t incorporate those foods into our meals. And as a result, our kids don’t eat those foods either. *Cue sad trombone*
I know there’s still time. It’s never too late to learn to like a new food. But it would’ve been easier if we’d done it from the start.
Get More: I Was A Picky Eater. Here’s What I Want You To Know.
13. A happy dinnertime is more important than everything else
It doesn’t matter how many bites of cauliflower they took or who had their elbows on the table (like my kid above!).
It matters whether your kids feel safe and accepted at the dinner table, not nagged and punished for what they eat–or, rather, don’t eat.
So as much as you can, keep dinner pleasant(ish). Ask silly questions. Play little games. Know it will get better.
Because time goes fast. And before you know it, you’ll miss having those little elbows on the table too.
Get more: Conversation Starters for Family Mealtime that Get Kids Talking