How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  If either what your children eat or how you’re getting it on the table is a significant source of unhappiness or stress in your life, you probably already know why. Maybe you dread the nightly mania of arriving home and diving straight into the witching hour and dinner prep, or battling the triple threat of dinner, homework, and bedtime. You might have your own issues around food and cooking, or resentments about the way the workload is distributed.

  What would make your meals happier? Fewer panicked nights with no idea what to cook or last-minute runs through the drive-through? A faster system for getting food on the table when everyone gets home at the end of the day? Sharing the load more among family members, or cutting down on the complaints when everyone sits down to eat? Take some time to consider what would make the most difference for you, and then choose new strategies to support that change.

  Planning and Preparing

  Every day, for every meal, someone has to figure out what you’re eating, who’s making it, and where it’s going to come from. For a lot of us, that means planning. At a minimum, it means planning not to plan. If you’re like most families, breakfasts and lunches are more casual meals. Making those easier is mostly a matter of having simple things in the house that you feel good about offering or having your kids reach for. (If you’re a family that cooks up a big breakfast or lunch on a regular basis, I imagine that’s already something that makes you happy.) I’ll talk more about those choices in the shopping section.

  For most of us, dinner is different. This is the meal we expect to be cooked, to be balanced, to be eaten sitting around a table. It’s the big leagues. Here’s a little note from your future self—the one who, a few minutes or a few hours from now, will be watching the hands of the clock tick inexorably toward the evening meal:

  Dear Past Me,

  Help! It’s dinnertime again (did we not just do this yesterday?) and everyone keeps asking what’s for dinner, and I have no idea. I’ve been making decisions and behaving like a fully functional adult all day and I am toast—couldn’t you pick up the slack on this one? Make a plan, buy a bunch of things that could be dinner, and put a list of them somewhere for me, sign up for a meal service, not have ordered takeout last night and the night before so I could order it now because it was a long day? Anything? I know you probably don’t feel like thinking about this. But trust me, I feel like thinking about it even less. I just want someone to tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.

  Hopefully,

  Dinnertime Me

  I am a fanatical weekday meal planner, particularly during hockey season, when, with all four kids playing, afternoons and evenings become a cantata of pick-ups and drop-offs and precision timing. Every Sunday, I map out the week—who will be home for a sit-down dinner which nights? Which nights require a dinner that can be eaten in shifts? When will I be home to cook, when can I do some meal prep during the day, and when do we need a meal that can be ready within five minutes of my walking in the door or pulled together by a child? When will I just not want to cook? (Friday, every time.)

  I make it easy on myself. Some days, the plan involves nothing but putting a prepared meal from the grocery store into the oven and slicing up some bread, or dropping frozen meatballs into the slow cooker with a jar of sauce and pressing start before I walk out the door at seven a.m. I plan takeout nights. I plan to make a box of macaroni and cheese.

  Then I’m set. All I do at night is look at the list; I know the ingredients are there, I know whatever is planned will work for our timing, and the kids know what to expect for dinner, which they like. I get that little flash of worry during a work afternoon—Shoot, what am I doing for dinner?—and then I relax. Got it.

  I don’t always cook what I’ve planned. Things change. Someone is sick, and I move Thursday’s soup to Tuesday. We decide to get takeout because something ran late. That’s all fine. I rarely plan more than two weekly meals that “have” to be cooked or the ingredients will go bad, and I’m very willing to just stick stuff back in the freezer. It doesn’t really matter if we follow the plan. What matters is that I have the plan.

  Some people, though, really hate feeling as if they’re boxed in by those planned meals. If that’s you, happy non-planning parents recommend having ingredients for at least three go-to meals on hand and putting a list of meal ideas where you can find it easily, to avoid drawing a blank at the end of a long day. “I hated planning meals for a long time,” says Inga Carter, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “because I would plan a week’s worth of meals and then, invariably, by Thursday I wouldn’t want what I had planned or life would get in the way, and then the rest of the week would go to hell, meal-wise. Then it occurred to me that I didn’t have to assign days to meals. I could just plan a week’s worth of meals, maybe with an idea of this meal on that day, but leave it open and make whichever one I felt like. It’s been a couple years of that now and it’s still working great.”

  Planning isn’t necessarily about cooking. You can plan to have pasta with a jar of sauce and a bagged salad or to serve the eggplant parmesan from the prepared food section. In a family with two adults or older children, planning could mean as little as deciding who’s on deck—who’s going to shop, who’s going to cook, and when. Lisa Woodruff, a mother of two in Cincinnati and the host of the Organize 365 podcast is (in spite of being a professional organizer) not someone who likes to plan meals. Instead, she and her husband plan days. If it’s his day, it’s his problem (and she doesn’t second-guess his choices). Preparing Monday’s dinner might matter less if you know your partner is shopping Tuesday and that your teen is making dinner Wednesday.

  You do you. Find the level of planning that makes you happier, and don’t worry about what anyone else is doing. Consider that future self, the one staring into the fridge hoping the elves have dropped off a casserole. What will you wish you’d done, once you’re standing in those shoes? That’s all you need to do to make a happiness deposit, guaranteed to deliver a later payoff.

  Shopping

  I either don’t like to grocery shop or, if I’m hungry, I like it too much. When my children were younger, my husband shopped on the weekends with my list. When they all entered full-time school, but we still needed after-school care, I decided to have our babysitter do the shopping. She gets more hours, which she needs, and I save money on all the impulse buys the kids or I would put in the cart if we were at the store. I only get the groceries I thought I needed at the moment when I made the list—the things I need to make the meals I planned, along with choices made by sensible me, who doesn’t want to be tempted by a pantry full of potato chips and who knows that if there are no snacks in the house other than apples and peanut butter, people will eat apples and peanut butter. Except late at night, when I am rummaging desperately through the house looking for a salty snack to ease my stress, I love sensible me.

  Because it makes me unhappy when I feel that my children are eating more convenience foods than real ones, I put things on the list that can be pulled out to eat almost as easily as a bag of chips: pre-shredded or sliced cheese, deli meat, bagels, tortillas, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, fruits, frozen fruits that make easy smoothies, cheese tortellini, smoked salmon. I ask the kids to make lists of what they want. Anything that doesn’t come in a box or a bag, I say. If those things are what we have, those are the things that get eaten.

  When I do the shopping, I make a game of leaving with only the things on my list. I remind myself, when I see the displays on the ends of the aisles, that those are designed to tempt me, to convince me that it would be very handy to have a case of canned tuna in the house or a gallon-sized bottle of soy sauce. It wouldn’t. The cans in the cabinet rarely get used, and the giant size of anything doesn’t fit in my kitchen. I have already decided what we need, and that choice belongs to me, not to the marketing department at Frito-Lay.

  That’s not to say there’s no junk food in the house—there is, and that’s fine. We hav
e plenty of treats and indulgences. But I’m happier when I decide what we need and buy it, and no more. There’s more room in my cabinets and less food getting thrown away when it’s past its sell-by date, or when some child conveniently chose to overlook the half-eaten bag of chips and opened a fresh one. The grocery store will be there. Even if there is a snowstorm or a hurricane, it will reopen, sooner than you think, fully stocked with more flavors of Oreos and Goldfish crackers than anyone could reasonably need.

  Getting Food on the Table

  I like to eat, which means I like to look forward to my dinner. It does not, however, necessarily mean I always want to cook that dinner. During one of the weeks when I was writing this chapter, I cooked exactly one thing—roasted brussels sprouts. We ate meals from the freezer, something prepared, or takeout every day. Sometimes I’m happier if I don’t cook, and that’s fine. Planning a week of easy nights might make you much happier than planning a lot of meals you won’t really have the time or inclination to cook.

  Some stages in life really lend themselves to keeping things simple in the kitchen. Even Jenny Rosenstrach, who declares herself to be maybe even a touch pathological about family dinner (she’s kept a diary of everything she, and later her family, ate for dinner for more than nineteen years), says that sometimes you just need to “lower the bar.” “When I was working full-time and my kids were very young, I didn’t want dinnertime to be a fight. I just wanted it to be pleasant and to sit down together for as long as possible to lay the groundwork for the ritual,” she says. “If you want to sustain the practice of regular family dinners, you can’t expect every night to be osso buco.”

  What we really want is to feel good about what we’re eating, and to be able to get those meals together, especially at the end of a long day, without a lot of angst, madness, and misery. I feel like I cook a lot, and most of our meals are things I’ve prepared, one way or another, but I do relatively little actual standing over a stove at 5:30 p.m. I’ve got three strategies for making the path from fridge to table (or from someone else’s fridge to table) easier at the end of the day.

  OUTSOURCE

  In the past, pre-made meals usually meant a choice between cheap and unhealthy in most ways or pretty much what you might make at home, only at twice the price or more. But that’s changing. Particularly if you live in or near a large urban area, your options might include chefs who come to your home and prepare a week’s worth of meals, then leave them behind with cooking instructions, or who deliver prepared meals for your fridge or freezer. You might know a friend or neighbor or even a teenager who has started a small business doing something similar. Sharon Van Epps, a mother of three teenagers in Seattle, says the family gets a homemade pasta dinner delivery once a week from their old nanny. “Pasta cooks in three minutes, all I have to do is heat up the sauce. She varies it weekly and sends a little info about the Italian origins of that particular dish.”

  Kelli Avila, a mother of two toddlers in Boston, saw the need and started a similar business. Her Shoofly Pie Baking Company delivers small and large savory pies twice a week in just a few Boston neighborhoods. Lillie Marshall, a customer and the mother of two, says she and her husband rely on meals from Kelli and from a similar company four to five nights a week. “It’s saved us,” she says, “given that we have two kids under three and a half and both work more than full-time and hate to cook.” Both Van Epps and Marshall say the time savings is worth the added expense to them—they’re happier.

  You can also outsource the planning and shopping part of meals to one of the many ingredient-delivery services. Some allow you to take delivery for ingredients for just a meal or two of your choice when you want them, while others require a regular subscription (but take the deciding when or what out of your hands). Some send whole ingredients, others chop for you. In this case, you need to time to cook, but not to prep. I’ve found that these services tend to favor meals that require someone to spend thirty to forty-five minutes in the kitchen cooking right before dinner, whereas I still favor meals that I can get ready ahead of time, allowing for me to be somewhere else, or doing something else, until right before we eat. But I have friends who swear by them, often using the easy instructions and the promise of having all the ingredients to persuade a partner or a child to do the cooking.

  DON’T COOK, “ASSEMBLE”

  This is the pasta-with-a-jar-of-sauce meal, or the make-your-own-taco using precooked chicken warmed in the slow cooker, canned beans (I put those next to the meat in the slow cooker), pre-shredded cheese, and toppings picked up at the salad bar. You might spend a little more on pre-chopped or even pre-cooked ingredients (or you might do it yourself on the weekend), but again, it may be worth the expense. “Almost anything you’ve prepared at home using mostly fresh or minimally processed ingredients will probably be healthier than the takeouts you didn’t get,” says Maya Adam, a mother of three and a lecturer on food and nutrition at Stanford who developed a massive open online course called “Child Nutrition and Cooking.” “There are no inherently unhealthy foods. The question is always: what would I have been eating instead of this food? Homemade grilled cheese sandwiches may be less healthy than a quinoa and Persian cucumber salad with toasted pistachio nuts and shallot vinaigrette, but if the alternative is a fast-food hamburger and fries, go for the grilled cheese.” Prepared foods like sauces and salad dressings can speed dinner assembly. Adam suggests looking for those with fewer ingredients, although she notes that those are often the more expensive products. If buying a few mass-produced prepared ingredients helps you prepare some of the meal at home, she says, it’s still worth it.

  COOK WHEN YOU HAVE TIME, NOT WHEN YOU DON’T

  Here’s Ellen Spirer Socol, a working mother in Westchester County, New York, describing her Saturday: “Between 7:30 and 10:30 this morning I made tomato sauce, béchamel sauce (for both lasagna and mac ’n’ cheese), lasagna, mac ’n’ cheese, and a batch of cookie dough. Sure, it would be nice to just sit and read a book or organize my office, but anything that gets another weeknight dinner done ahead of time is more important.” Batch-cooking on the weekends and cooking double of everything, she says, so you can freeze another meal is “key.” She spent three hours and got two meals for the fridge and four for the freezer (she froze some sauce separate from the lasagna), plus cookies, at a moment when she wasn’t in a rush.

  A friend and I do this for each other a couple of times a year—we each cook double of two or three freezable meals, then swap. We plan ahead, so that both families will like the food and we won’t end up with multiple meatloaves. Sometimes we make a day of it—we do the cooking together in one of our kitchens, and we both go home with four or six no-cooking nights in hand. It’s been a great way to expand both of our family palates—she favors Mexican food (enchiladas) and I cook a lot of Italian (meatballs)—as well as spend time together.

  At the Table

  As I said at the beginning of the chapter, food is one area where I give myself the happier parent gold star. I love food and cooking, and I’m passionate about the entire question of how we feed our families and how national policies as well as personal choices play into what shows up on our plates.

  But there’s what we buy and cook, and then there’s the meal. For some families, it isn’t planning, shopping, or cooking that’s making us less than happy, but what happens once we sit down to eat. A few years into our family life, as my children and my friends’ children began to express their opinions about food and eating (and after one memorable meal when a guest shook her head at what we’d prepared and asked if she could find her kid some cereal), I decided to set down our family rules about what happens at our table—and begin to work on how our kids should behave as they grew up and became guests themselves.

  Our kids were three, four, five, and eight. The rules weren’t new, but they’d been largely unspoken until then. Here they are:

  One family, one meal. We cook one meal fo
r the whole family every night, which includes at least one thing anyone will eat. There are no options, and there is no after-dinner snacking.

  You don’t have to eat it, but you do have to look at it. No one has to eat or taste anything, ever—but you do have to let it be on your plate.

  No insulting the food. At our table, you can say “No, thank you,” “I didn’t care for that,” and “That’s not my favorite.” Unless you’re asked for more details, that’s it. No attitude, no faces, no “yuck,” not ever.

  No pressure. They eat what they eat. We don’t worry about it and rarely comment. If you see something, don’t always say something. The most anyone might say (and it’s usually a sibling) is “That’s good. You should try it.”

  Food isn’t a reward for eating. If there’s dessert, and you didn’t really eat dinner, that’s fine. Here’s your ice cream.

  Seven years later, very little has changed about our “rules.” I’ve since found variations on the ones to do with eating and pressure everywhere, from the teachings of Ellyn Satter, nutritionist and author of How to Get Your Kid to Eat (But Not Too Much), to Karen Le Billon’s book French Kids Eat Everything, so they’re not unique to our family by any means. I relaxed the rule about after-dinner eating when my children got older, especially since a child might eat dinner before a sports practice and need to eat again after, or there just might not have been enough dinner for a teen on a particularly hungry day. By then, I knew no one was skipping a less-favorite meal in the hope of filling up on something else afterward, because that just wasn’t how they ate. I knew our way had worked for us when I expressed sympathy for my son as I served him meatloaf—not his favorite. “That’s okay,” he said. “I don’t have to love it to eat it.”