I'm so tired of the meal-eating problem we have in our house. No matter what meal it is, there is usually one child that doesn't like it and won't eat it. Well, I say won't but they usually do eventually because hunger is a great motivator. Today for breakfast I made bagels with butter because we are out of cream cheese. Two of us had guacamole bagels and two of us had just plain butter--I put kimchi on my guacamole bagel, it was delicious. Anyway, one of my children turned up his nose at the bagel. Yesterday it was a different child who didn't like pancakes, of all things.
I will say that the reactions we have around food are so much better then they were 3-4 years ago when there were tears and not just angst at the dinner table. So maybe I should be grateful and not frazzled.
I'm trying to teach my children that we eat for our bodies, not for entertainment. It is a hard lesson even for me to learn. This morning everyone seems to have eaten their breakfast bagel...at least I don't see any sitting around.
We have a rule in our house where you are allowed to say once "Mom (or dad) I really don't like _______ and I request it not be added to a weekly rotation." And that's it. I don't want to hear it's yucky, I don't want to hear how much you don't like it and how disappointed you are or how tired you are or how you wish you were eating _______. And definitely no crying over food.
My rule is if you don't like it, you don't have to eat it, and that's the end of it. My children are welcome to skip meals if they wish, I simply don't want to hear a rant about how unhappy they are over broccoli or meat sauce or crispy apples for thirty minutes while I try to enjoy my food.
This rule is great but when people are tired or generally overstimulated they forget and suddenly I'm listening to a deluge of whines as if I didn't just cook and clean for the last 45 minutes.
I also want to teach the idea that food and themselves are not at odds. It's not a battle. Eating is a choice and eating nourishes your body. One of my children was quite picky (see the previous last 3-4 years of my life) and just now has blossomed into a child who will eat almost everything as long as they aren't in a bad mood or emotionally distressed, for the most part. This was a very slow uphill revelation that I have prayed about for many years. I'm glad that all my children now can eat healthy food and I hope they grow up to teach their children how to nourish and love their bodies with broccoli and noodles and olive oil and occasional ice cream.
As for how this transformation took place it has been a slow alpine climb of introducing trigger foods and regulating my own stress so as not to negatively react (which causes said child to react with strong opposition) and it's half of just letting them be and also mirroring a healthy attachment to foods myself. I have hopefully shown all my children how to enjoy all the food groups. We have also read two health books together. One is How To Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor and the other is Journey Back to Health. We also in the first 18 months of this journey did allow this child to make a substitution for their meal if they really hated it. Then we slowly eased this out. We started gently encouraging them to eat what they liked out of the meal--for example, all the carrots in curry or all the potatoes from the soup.
We did not do any punishments or incentives to get them to eat. In the beginning I did try this and it backfired drastically, making mommy or daddy the bad guy who wouldn't let a movie be watched or ice cream be had because a meal wasn't eaten. Everyone gets ice cream when we choose to have it no matter how much, or how little, has been consumed.
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| so little....this was years ago! |
Anyway, I am not sure how much I actually did that helped and how much has just been growth, but here we are with children that eat almost everything but still have ideas about what they would like to be eating. It's a struggle.
As for me, I have been beside myself to find interesting breakfasts. I could literally eat the same thing for breakfast every day. A bagel with something (hummus? guacamole? avocado? eggs?) on top with either sauerkraut or kimchi. The kids are not interested in conveyer belt breakfast. I also really want to add veggies to our mornings but I can't figure out how. American breakfasts are often devoid of vegetables. I know in my head it's perfectly fine to eat salad or leftovers or whatever for any meal of the day but my habits recoil at lunch for a morning meal. It just feels weird.
I need to reinvent breakfast at my house and next week I plan to do just that. I'm thinking of adding in yogurt bowls with fruit (and maybe granola) and trying a rice bowl with beans for those who can have them and roasted veggies for all. Salsa and sour cream? I also want to try to create a quiche that everyone will eat. I feel like I really could "hide" veggies in that.
What are some other easy/fun breakfasts? I need ideas.
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