Here are some strange things parents often believe about children and food:
If I do not make my child eat/drink, they will starve/perish.
Children’s diets must be meticulously controlled or they will eat all the “wrong” things and too few of the “right” things.
Children are inherently picky and should be served separate “child-friendly” food.
A good way to incentivize bites of the “right” things is to make it a requirement before bites of the “wrong” thing.
My wife and I reject all four of these beliefs, and (n=2) our children are healthy, happy, and not at all picky. We always offer them the same things we eat. We never bring out “kid food”, though they can have as much of any item on the table as they want (e.g., if we happen to be serving cantalope and only cantaloupe sounds good to them, they can help themselves to that). We don’t always do dessert, but when we do, we serve it along with everything else. (Edit to clarify in the example that adults pick the meal and kids pick whatever they want to eat in the meal, which a comment below seems to misunderstand).
On the whole, their biology has done a great job of regulating their eating and drinking. My oldest (age 5) has recently gotten into spicy food to be like me—absolutely bonkers to my friend whose kid just recently accepted lettuce into his diet. My kids’ relationship with food has been happy for us, and we’ve avoided the intense stress I’ve seen some parents face with their kids and food.
The one downside with giving our kids delicious adult food is that they are now food snobs specifically with regard to the NYT vegan mac and cheese recipe over the $2 Kraft box, which is inconvenient when we visit friends. This is not to say they eat lots of fancy complex things. Most of our recipes are pretty simple.
When I hear anecdotes like this, I always wonder how much of it is your behavior and how much is genetics. If your kids were demanding nothing but mac and cheese would you be as happy about this setup? A friend of mine has a kid who gets vitamin deficiencies when allowed to select their own food (literally 100% Kraft mac and cheese).
You are wondering about the right things. I would say that there are a few more behavioral things we do that stack the deck in favor of vegetables for the kids choices: (1) we like to talk about the benefits of vegetables (“This will help you poop! There is an ongoing kid-constipation crisis.”), (2) a little branding (“check out these dinosaur leaves” / “I bet our pet mice would love these”), and (3) we learned how to make delicious vegetables. My guess right now is that #3 is an underrated skill and more people would stop associating “healthy” with “unappetizing” if they new how to do it.
As for what I would do if the kids demanded nothing but mac n cheese: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. On nights we are not having Mac n cheese (most nights), they would need to eat something else we are having or be hungry. The way our system works, we don’tgenerallytry not to make special exceptions in the moment. (Edited to this more accurate statement; I am not completely immune to the requests of my kids and sometimes they are reasonable requests that make me a jerk to refuse. For example, my oldest wanted his tuna salad served on bread last night instead of rice, and I decided I was being dumb insisting on rice).
I’m having trouble engaging fully with the hypo because some mix of genetics + behavior has given me non-picky kids. For the hypo to really bite, I would have to assume this isn’t the case and the behavioral interventions have basically failed, in which case I guess I wouldn’t endorse the system. Also, I won’t claim that my system is any good for helping kids who are already picky—I don’t know what strategies are best to help diversify already constrained diets.
I do not believe that if I get my children to eat, they will starve—I am confident that they will eat, eventually, well before the point of starvation. I do believe from experience that they will get very cranky if they don’t eat.
Before I had kids I assumed that if anything would be hardwired as a self-rewarding instinct, it would be hungry --> eat. I’m now convinced that “this kind of fatigue and stomach pain that is making me cranky is a specific experience called hunger” and “eating things cures hunger” are things humans have to learn the hard way (maybe members of less altricial species get these for free.) And because weaker time preferences are also something you have to get from experience (via short term thinking biting you in the butt enough times) I always care more about whether they are cranky in an hour than they are; I suspect pickiness comes at least partially from the leverage of knowing that your parent really wants you to be fed and you can refuse it, or at least hold out for a higher-ticket treat.
(One response to this is to never cave and I can reset to a more global equilibrium of them accepting whatever I offer. But I don’t think it’s good for them to feel like they have no leverage in this or other relationships, for many reasons.)
Fortunately offering fresh fruit every hour and eating it with dramatic gusto myself seems to be effective most of the time.
I have two kids. One of them is happy to eat a wide range of meals. The other would prefer to only eat pasta and sweets, that probably wouldn’t end well.
I have failed to make my approach clear. My kids don’t get to pick what’s on the table but they do get to pick what’s on their plate. I don’t eat pasta and sweets every night (I assume most adults don’t?), so neither would my kids.
I totally agree kids are different, and one of mine was more picky than the other. But through this process of choosing what to eat within our overall dinner choice, my picky eater has become not very picky, especially relative to other kids. She has had to learn to like other things, because we serve a variety of things for dinner and she has a natural incentive not to be hungry (no pressure from us required).
Here are some strange things parents often believe about children and food:
If I do not make my child eat/drink, they will starve/perish.
Children’s diets must be meticulously controlled or they will eat all the “wrong” things and too few of the “right” things.
Children are inherently picky and should be served separate “child-friendly” food.
A good way to incentivize bites of the “right” things is to make it a requirement before bites of the “wrong” thing.
My wife and I reject all four of these beliefs, and (n=2) our children are healthy, happy, and not at all picky. We always offer them the same things we eat. We never bring out “kid food”, though they can have as much of any item on the table as they want (e.g., if we happen to be serving cantalope and only cantaloupe sounds good to them, they can help themselves to that). We don’t always do dessert, but when we do, we serve it along with everything else. (Edit to clarify in the example that adults pick the meal and kids pick whatever they want to eat in the meal, which a comment below seems to misunderstand).
On the whole, their biology has done a great job of regulating their eating and drinking. My oldest (age 5) has recently gotten into spicy food to be like me—absolutely bonkers to my friend whose kid just recently accepted lettuce into his diet. My kids’ relationship with food has been happy for us, and we’ve avoided the intense stress I’ve seen some parents face with their kids and food.
The one downside with giving our kids delicious adult food is that they are now food snobs specifically with regard to the NYT vegan mac and cheese recipe over the $2 Kraft box, which is inconvenient when we visit friends. This is not to say they eat lots of fancy complex things. Most of our recipes are pretty simple.
When I hear anecdotes like this, I always wonder how much of it is your behavior and how much is genetics. If your kids were demanding nothing but mac and cheese would you be as happy about this setup? A friend of mine has a kid who gets vitamin deficiencies when allowed to select their own food (literally 100% Kraft mac and cheese).
You are wondering about the right things. I would say that there are a few more behavioral things we do that stack the deck in favor of vegetables for the kids choices: (1) we like to talk about the benefits of vegetables (“This will help you poop! There is an ongoing kid-constipation crisis.”), (2) a little branding (“check out these dinosaur leaves” / “I bet our pet mice would love these”), and (3) we learned how to make delicious vegetables. My guess right now is that #3 is an underrated skill and more people would stop associating “healthy” with “unappetizing” if they new how to do it.
As for what I would do if the kids demanded nothing but mac n cheese: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. On nights we are not having Mac n cheese (most nights), they would need to eat something else we are having or be hungry. The way our system works, we
don’tgenerally try not to make special exceptionsin the moment. (Edited to this more accurate statement; I am not completely immune to the requests of my kids and sometimes they are reasonable requests that make me a jerk to refuse. For example, my oldest wanted his tuna salad served on bread last night instead of rice, and I decided I was being dumb insisting on rice).I’m having trouble engaging fully with the hypo because some mix of genetics + behavior has given me non-picky kids. For the hypo to really bite, I would have to assume this isn’t the case and the behavioral interventions have basically failed, in which case I guess I wouldn’t endorse the system. Also, I won’t claim that my system is any good for helping kids who are already picky—I don’t know what strategies are best to help diversify already constrained diets.
I do not believe that if I get my children to eat, they will starve—I am confident that they will eat, eventually, well before the point of starvation. I do believe from experience that they will get very cranky if they don’t eat.
Before I had kids I assumed that if anything would be hardwired as a self-rewarding instinct, it would be hungry --> eat. I’m now convinced that “this kind of fatigue and stomach pain that is making me cranky is a specific experience called hunger” and “eating things cures hunger” are things humans have to learn the hard way (maybe members of less altricial species get these for free.) And because weaker time preferences are also something you have to get from experience (via short term thinking biting you in the butt enough times) I always care more about whether they are cranky in an hour than they are; I suspect pickiness comes at least partially from the leverage of knowing that your parent really wants you to be fed and you can refuse it, or at least hold out for a higher-ticket treat.
(One response to this is to never cave and I can reset to a more global equilibrium of them accepting whatever I offer. But I don’t think it’s good for them to feel like they have no leverage in this or other relationships, for many reasons.)
Fortunately offering fresh fruit every hour and eating it with dramatic gusto myself seems to be effective most of the time.
I have two kids. One of them is happy to eat a wide range of meals. The other would prefer to only eat pasta and sweets, that probably wouldn’t end well.
I have failed to make my approach clear. My kids don’t get to pick what’s on the table but they do get to pick what’s on their plate. I don’t eat pasta and sweets every night (I assume most adults don’t?), so neither would my kids.
I totally agree kids are different, and one of mine was more picky than the other. But through this process of choosing what to eat within our overall dinner choice, my picky eater has become not very picky, especially relative to other kids. She has had to learn to like other things, because we serve a variety of things for dinner and she has a natural incentive not to be hungry (no pressure from us required).