I started this post a little over a year ago but felt at the time that I really didn’t have enough experience (you’ll see why in a minute) to write a post about it yet. So, I tucked it away in a folder on my desktop until I stumbled across it today. Now, I feel much more confident and even a little excited to share this journey of dinnertimes in our family!
As you may have guessed from previous posts, I had two slightly picky eaters. I always attributed this partly to their ages (they are currently 7 and 9 years old) but put most of the blame and on my husband and me. From early on, we understood the concept that if a child it not introduced to new foods, how can they be expected to develop their palate and like these foods? But, more often than not, my husband and I would just assume the kids wouldn’t eat the Indian dish or the Thai entree that we had cooked that night and would make them something we knew that they would eat.
As more time went on, I simply got in the habit of fixing two dinners- one that my husband and I could enjoy and one that the kids would eat. I think a part of this was fear that if I didn’t make them something that they liked, they might not eat enough to grow (even though I knew the research doesn’t support this belief!). This came to a head when we visited my parents a while back and my kids complained that my mom hadn’t fixed the same kind of mac and cheese that we serve at home! Shortly after that, my husband and I agreed to try something new- one dinner. “Eat it or not, this is dinner.”
Don’t get me wrong, I was well-versed in Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility concept when it comes to feeding our kids and even preached it with a lot of the families that I worked with, but was just not practicing it at home.
We started changing things up slowly with the kids. I first started purchasing different brands of everything they were accustomed to eating. If they liked the yellow box mac and cheese, I bought the blue box made homemade. There were some grumbles but it went over surprisingly well. Next, we started with 2-3 dinners a week where we all ate the same dinner. Our stance became, “This is dinner.” End of questions. They could eat it or not. That was their choice.
Let’s just say it was a rough couple months but we got through them. We have one child who really doesn’t like change and initially, simply on principle, would refuse to eat and sometimes went to bed with just a glass of milk in his belly. Our other child was more open to trying new things and would at least give everything a few bites. It took probably 3 months to transition all our dinners but here we are, a year later and grateful we did the hard work. Both our kids’ tastes have expanded, and it has made dinner prep much easier. It even made our daughter’s transition off the kid’s menus at restaurants quicker since she was tired of chicken nuggets and burgers and ready for the wider variety!