I love our rules, and they work. I’ve got research on my side: children who eat the same meals as adult members of the family eat healthier diets. Observing parents consuming nutritious foods like fruits and vegetables increases the likelihood that a child will also consume those foods. When a meal is shared, children and adults stay at the table longer, beginning and ending their meal together rather than wandering in and out—providing more opportunity for conversation. In cultures where a shared family meal means adults and children sitting together and eating the same foods, like in France and Italy, children develop a more positive attitude toward food and learn to prefer quality over quantity.
The middle two rules (it goes on your plate, but there’s no pressure) create room for kids to grow and change around food. They can taste it without a big drama. They don’t need to become cemented in their position that they like or dislike something, because if they leave it on the plate, no one will comment. Research shows that kids need to be exposed to a food multiple times before they try it or like it, but it’s tough to make that shift if all of those times have involved shrieking, making faces, and being forced to taste in order to get dessert or leave the table. People, including children—especially children—change . . . if we let them.
Our rule about not insulting the food or the cook may be my favorite. The cook can be very sensitive; it’s a lot of trouble to plan and make a dinner every night when she’s tired after a long day, and she’s not afraid to say so. And maybe throw things. I have, to be honest, served up some pretty dreadful mistakes in my time as family chef, and the only one to say “yuck” was me. That makes me very happy, or at least, it eliminates something that made me very unhappy. If I had it to do again I might make a rule that they thank the cook every night. Profusely. For making the meal, and for helping them learn how to eat it.
My way isn’t the only way to be happy about food and family. I’ll defend my “no insulting the food” rule to the death (if you take one thing and only one from this chapter, I’d make it that), but there are other approaches to things like trying new foods and feeling good about what your family is eating. Le Billon (French Kids Eat Everything is one of my favorite books about children, families, and food culture) swears by the French rule “You don’t have to like it, but you do have to taste it,” also known as the “no thank you” bite. She also practices “Dessert only if you eat dinner,” but not as a bribe. It’s what she considers a natural consequence. Meals are eaten in a certain sequence; if at any point you break the order, the meal is over. That’s a very different message than offering junk food as a reward for eating something healthy.
Rosenstrach is a passionate cook—but even more, she’s a passionate defender of the importance of everyone sitting peacefully around the dinner table together. She’s found that she’s happier if she does a little “short-order cooking” once in a while: “If you serve something and your kid doesn’t like it, make him or her a peanut butter sandwich and don’t beat yourself up over it,” she said.
The strategies that make you happier about food and family might not be the strategies that work for your brother, your best friend, or your boss. That’s fine. As much as the latest food trend might push the idea that there’s only one way to eat right, that’s simply wrong. There’s more than one way to enjoy cooking and eating, and you don’t have to find the way for everyone. You just have to find yours.
Cooking for Kids Who Won’t Eat
There’s a long list of things that can make our time eating together less pleasant, but children who don’t appreciate the food you’ve cooked are among the most challenging. “Selective” eaters (also known as picky) make it hard to create and enjoy a family meal, as do—for different reasons—family members with self-imposed eating restrictions on ingredients like meat or carbs. (This is different from the challenges of an allergic family member, which I’ll talk about in the next section.)
When we are overly solicitous of a child’s first responses to new foods, especially a very young child, we can inadvertently harden a mild resistance to trying new things into an ardent refusal to accept any but the easiest of flavors. With younger kids, it’s often possible to head off picky eating with simple strategies, like allowing a child to feel hunger, offering a healthy variety of foods at meals, and allowing her to make her choices. But what of the older child who has already become a decisive eater—or rather, a decisive refuser of many foods? How can you enjoy sitting down together when every meal is a battle over “just try one bite” or a minefield of guilt for you, the parent of a child who eats nothing but pasta with olive oil and parmesan, ever?
It starts with releasing both the battle and the minefield. Two statements of fact: no child ever decided she liked something after an hour-long argument over “just one bite.” And children in families with enough to eat rarely suffer physically from malnutrition. (We’ll talk obesity and weight concerns in the next section, and if you have concerns that your child is developing an eating disorder, which can begin as early as kindergarten, find a doctor who will listen and help.)
For most of us, the road to a happier table starts with a conversation—away from the table—with your picky child. Does she want to change? I was a picky eater, and it was a constant source of embarrassment for me. A teenaged athlete might really want to find some healthier choices she’s willing or able to eat; a younger child might be willing to have some fun doing “taste tests” and experimenting in the kitchen. If that’s the case, you can strategize together. Pick one meal a week to include a new food or recipe, or for her to help cook. It was easier for me, as a child, to get my head around the idea that I might like something new than to readjust my conception of something I’d already decided I did not like.
For a child with no interest in changing (right now) or if your relationship around her eating is just too fraught to even suggest it, Sally Sampson, founder of ChopChop, a nonprofit kids’ cooking magazine, and coauthor (with Natalie Digate Muth) of The Picky Eater Project, suggests shifting the focus away from the picky child and what she eats entirely. Make meals that accommodate her or can be customized and then do nothing more. Do require that the picky child join you at the table if she’s out of that habit, but “don’t focus on the food or what your child is or isn’t eating—not a peep,” she says. “Instead, ask them about their day, tell them about yours. Treat your child with the same courtesy you would an adult: don’t make them eat anything they don’t want and don’t make a scene about their choices. How one child is eating should not be the topic of conversation when you’re eating. If you need to have a conversation about it, have it anywhere else than your kitchen or dining room table.”
Other parents do tend to expect us to nudge and push our kids to eat more or differently. Susan D’Entremont, a mother of two in Albany, says her pediatrician told her not to worry about her son’s “tan diet.” The more attention we pay to it, the worse the problem might get, he told her. “But even if we don’t pay attention to it, others do. The most common comment is ‘We would never allow that in our household.’ I’m not sure what that means. You would pin your kid to the floor and force food down his throat?”
Her relaxed approach is gradually paying off. Now that her son is a teen, she says, “he will actually try a bite of something he hasn’t before, so maybe someday . . .” For most kids, that day does come. “My daughter, who ate white food for years, is now thirty-five and eats everything,” said a friend. “It gets better.” My mother could say the same.
It does. And even if it doesn’t, you can feel better about your child’s eating and eating with your child if you can embrace the idea that you choose what’s available to eat, and she chooses what to eat, and really live it. What goes into her mouth isn’t the only important part of a meal together. In fact, it’s arguably the least. You’re talking, you’re laughing, you’re together, you’re modeling a good relationship with food and family. You can get iron f
rom supplements and vitamin D from sunshine. You can’t get a happy family meal together anywhere else.
Keeping It Simple When Things Get Complicated
If it’s tough to be happy in the kitchen with a picky eater, it’s even more difficult when the challenges are health related. If one of your children has food allergies, is putting on weight in a way that worries your pediatrician, or if you or your partner have your own food challenges, it can be hard to feel good about gathering the whole family around the same meal.
In some cases, like life-threatening food allergies and weight issues, keeping a child healthy means adjusting the way the entire family eats. In many food-allergic families, nearly everything is cooked at home to prevent contamination. It’s a real commitment, but one that many parents of food-allergic kids say means the whole family eats less processed food, snacks less, and is more likely to come together around the table than if the temptations of prepared foods and frozen single-serving meals were more available—a silver lining.
If you’re beginning to worry that your child is heavier than he should be—or if he’s noticing—pause before you panic (and consult your pediatrician). It’s important to remember that preteens often go through a stocky stage. They “grow outward before they grow upward,” as Maya Adam puts it. But it can worry some children, and in some cases, it can be a sign of a problem. Either way, it’s not a bad moment to take stock of family eating habits and see if some changes are necessary. That’s what Adam did when one of her children started getting a little self-conscious about weight.
“Without making any conscious decisions to change our diet, I found myself doing things a little differently. I held back a little on the oil or butter in the pan. I cut back on the meat in our weekly meals and added a few more vegetables to everyone’s plates. I made an extra effort to turn out some pretty-darn-good-tasting veggie dishes and I served them first (pretending the other food wasn’t ready yet), to try and catch their hunger and make it work in my favor.”
She didn’t put an end to snack food, but made more things like cookies herself, from more healthful recipes. On nights when takeout was tempting, she pushed herself to make a different choice.
“As I made these subtle changes (which, by the way, the children hardly noticed) I realized something that has since become the key to my philosophy on food preparation: when the hand that prepares the food has a vested interest in the long-term health of the people consuming that food, the food will almost always end up being higher quality, healthier, and, as you get better at it, probably more delicious.”
When you’re trying to make subtle shifts for a child’s health, you need to change your meals overall. But when the challenges allow for more flexibility (a vegan family member; an adult who wants to cut back on carbs or meat without changing children’s diets), many parents swear by the deconstructed meal—a technique that works in families with picky eaters as well.
Jenny Rosenstrach calls this “Venn diagram eating”—enough crossover that everyone is eating the same meal, but enough room to allow the mushroom-haters to have a pasta that’s fungi-free. “You take a normally composed dish, like Cobb salad, and deconstruct it into separate parts. So one kid is having chicken, avocado, and tomatoes for dinner, and one is having hard-boiled eggs, bacon, and lettuce, but it’s still the same dinner.”
One of Melissa Ford’s twelve-year-old twins has food allergies and “food and eating are just really stressful for him” (which is common in food-allergic children). “The other twin is a real foodie and loves to try new foods.” The Washington, DC, mom makes a meal with sauce on the side and leaves some portions unseasoned. They make restaurants a “try new things” adventure for one child while letting the other stay within his comfort zone.
If you, as a parent, are the one with some challenges around food—you might yourself be a picky eater, or in recovery from an eating disorder or following a careful diet of your choice—then you need to give yourself the same grace and respect I’ve encouraged you to give your children, and ask of yourself the same flexibility. Put the foods you don’t like on your plate, let your own choices go by without comment or excuse, and know that your children are watching you.
When Nicki Gilbert’s then eight-year-old daughter asked, “Mom, when do grown-ups stop eating breakfast?” the California mother of four realized that she needed to make some changes. As a recovering anorexic, she kept very tight control over her eating. “I needed to learn that I could take care of myself with food instead of by denying myself,” she says. Instead of keeping foods in the house that she had to resist, she made healthier purchases. “I focused on wanting to fill all of our bodies with good and healthy food,” she says. “I try and encourage all of them to listen to their body, to ask themselves, ‘Are you really hungry?’ I don’t think that I knew that.”
Although she still follows a narrow diet herself, she makes meals that allow the whole family to sit down together. “I used to hate being in the kitchen because mealtimes were such a minefield for me, but now I have this different approach,” she says. “I think I’m good at making meals that we all enjoy so there’s always something for everyone, even me.
“The best thing about our meals is being together.”
Pass On Your Family Food Values—and Your Respect for Others
The choices we make around eating tend to be very personal. We often make them a part of our identity: “I’m a healthy eater/an omnivore/an ice-cream lover/gluten-free.” Typically, they involve both embracing one way of eating and rejecting, or at least setting aside, another—you can’t eat everything. There are a lot of politics around those choices. Whether it’s eating in a way that reflects your ethnic heritage, adopting a particular style (local, organic, fresh), or refusing to follow a fad or trend, how you eat can be seen by others as a judgment no matter how you intend it.
It is a judgment. You’ve made the choice you think is best for you and your family. If you didn’t think yours was the right choice, you’d make a different one. The tough part, then, is the part where your choice interacts and overlaps with others: when it’s your turn to provide preschool snack; when you have a child’s friend over for lunch; when your family and another go out together to share a meal.
Those situations can amplify our choices—and so can our kids, who talk to one another about the food they’re eating at a very young age. This can get confusing. Why does Lana say Oreos are delicious while Jonas says they’re poison? You may not be walking around denouncing other people’s food choices, but it’s natural for children to compare themselves and their lunches, to look for similarities and differences, and to feel a need to defend even when no one was attacking. They may identify more closely with your family food choices than you ever meant for them to. When Lisa Saunders’s daughter was young, the family “used to disparage McDonald’s pretty regularly at home. Then one day a mom very kindly offered to take a bunch of kids there after an event, and my daughter announced, ‘Oh no, my parents won’t let me eat there. They think it’s garbage!’” If you ever walk home, as Julie Zimmerman has, with a group of third graders after a school party and overhear one of them “badmouthing the birthday cupcakes in class that day because they were store bought,” know that you are hearing her parents’ words in her mouth—and that your children are repeating you in that same know-it-all tone.
Try to give your children the words they need to eat their way (which is to say, your way) without hurting or being hurt by others, and prepare them for differences. Some of our very closest family friends eat vegan, which means I’ve been talking with my children about why we eat eggs, dairy, and animals since they were very young. At the same time, I know that on the other side, our friends were doing much the same—offering the reasoning for their choices, while trying to teach their children not to force that reasoning on others.
We really don’t all have to eat the same way to be happy, or to be healthy or m
oral or responsible. We don’t even have to eat the same way all the time. We just have to be content with the way we’re eating and sharing our meals now, and leave room for other ways to find happiness around food later on.
Make the Choices That Make You Happy
Just because you’re cooking for your family when you cook doesn’t mean you’re not also cooking for yourself. Why not make your favorite meal regardless of whether you expect anyone else in the family to really like it? One of the prime reasons I enjoy most of our meals is that I choose most of our meals, and that means I almost always put my own tastes first, or at least on par with everyone else. That’s consistent with my research, both the surveyed and the anecdotal—parents who make choices around meals (and vacations) while taking everyone’s preferences into account are happier overall than those who cook with primarily the kids’ tastes in mind. You probably make some meals that are designed to please your kids. Make some that are special for you, too.
If you’re generally okay with things around cooking and eating, but you’re just not getting much pleasure out of it, try something to shake things up in a way that fits in with your life right now. If you don’t cook with your children much, invite them to get involved in a meal or even take over once in a while. If, on the other hand, you have little helpers always nearby, give yourself a break and cook solo. Indulge in a recipe/ingredient delivery service, serve breakfast for dinner, declare pizza Fridays. Find a way to find your joy.
These meals are your time together. They’ll almost certainly reflect the entirety of your life: some will be good, some pretty awful. Sometimes the conversation will be lovely and deep, sometimes goofy, sometimes angry, sometimes little but grunts. Some meals will be delicious, some serviceable, some laughably bad. You’ll settle into your ways and your places, and the way you are together at the table will reflect the way you are together out in the world. So if it isn’t what you want, if it isn’t generally happy, it’s right to want to change it. But you have time. You don’t need a ten-point plan to make family dinners happier by next Tuesday. You have years to get this right.
How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute Page 24