A while back, I posted an article about what to do when little kids ruin their food. My children are older now, and that means a whole new set of food challenges. They don't destroy their food anymore. Gone are the days of chucking food on the floor or dumping a cup of milk on their plates. Thank goodness. However, they've also gotten smarter, and sneakier. Now they can talk me out of eating their food. I'm still the one who dishes up their plates, so I won't make them eat everything I give them because I don't know how much they want. That wouldn't be fair. For the most part, though, I've figured out when they are actually "full" and when they just want to leave the table. If they've eaten half their plates and tell me out of the blue that they're done, I always believe them. They don't get a snack between dinner and bedtime, so they have no incentive to lie. If they've eaten all of their pasta without touching their vegetables and tell me they're full, sorry. That's not going to fly. If they're eating just fine and then something more interesting comes up, it means they aren't full. We've had to stop telling them, "Finish eating and then we can (insert fun thing here," because they will inevitably be "done." We've had to deal with new kinds of tantrums, too. My youngest will shout and cry for thirty minutes if she doesn't want to eat her food, but she's a fierce child prone to taking stands, so I stay firm.
Once after she had been screaming for a good while, she suddenly grew silent. She skipped as happy as could be into the living room where I had been hiding from the noise. This was suspicious, so I went into the kitchen to investigate. She had taken her plate of food and dumped it in the kitchen sink. I was mad. We marched her back into the kitchen, I heated up leftovers, put the new plate in front of her, and refused to leave. She ate her food without complaint. My oldest wouldn't eat the crusts on her sandwiches at school. Since I'm not at school with her, I can't force her to eat them, so I would cut the crust off her sandwiches every morning and put them in a bag in the freezer. After a few months, I had enough to make bread pudding. I felt pretty clever, but I also couldn't keep doing it forever. It was a pain, and one can only eat so much bread pudding. Finally when we were eating sandwiches at home, I talked to her about it. I used every argument I could think of. It hurts my feelings when you take off your crust, bread costs money, it's good for you, big girls eat their crusts, hungry children would like to have that. None of it registered with my four-and-a-half-year-old. Finally, I told her the truth: Eating the crust of her bread is important to me. I explained that I didn't like wasting food, and that it was hard for me to use the crust when she didn't eat it. Children always know when you're being sincere. Now she eats her crust with no complaints, even at school. For a few months she would excitedly say, "I ate my crust like a big girl!" After a while, though, she started taking it for granted. In the end, each of us have to deal with our own parenting challenges in whatever way works for us. All I can say is be persistent. If not wasting food is important to you, you're children will see it.
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I will never waste food againI've been tired of throwing out food for years - not to mention tired of our huge grocery bill! I decided to make a change and vowed never to waste food again. In this blog, I'll show you how I do it. RECIPESArchives
January 2020
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