Delphine Brandt was born and raised in France. She met her husband, Doug, when he was there playing professional basketball. They got married and moved to the United States. When they had their first daughter, Leona, one of the biggest cultural differences she noticed with American parenting was, not surprisingly, the food.
Delphine: My mother-in-law came to visit one time when Leona was past a year old, and she made a peanut butter and jelly for lunch and I about lost it—not to my mother-in-law but to my husband. I think I grabbed him and brought him into our room and said, “Over my dead body, my children will not eat peanut butter. I thought it was the most disgusting fast food, and now I’m sending Uncrustables every day for lunch. You just change. But yes, there were some foods that in my French mind were absolutely unacceptable. They were snacks.
Today, we’re going to talk about a common parenting battleground—kids and food. Most of us haven’t been in a sitcom-style, hurl-mashed-potatoes-across-the-room kind of food fight, though I do have a friend who stages a family food fight in her backyard every year, but many of us engage in some sort of food-related skirmish on a daily basis.
There are so many potential conflicts here, from picky eating to table manners. The goal of this two part series is to help you at least to neutralize these battles, but preferably to go even further and actually make eating with your kids a positive experience—with a lot of great ideas from moms on the front lines.
We’re going to talk about four of the big food battles we have with kids, over the next two episodes. In this episode, part one, we’ll talk about two potential battles: picky eating and house rules about what types of food you eat. In part two, we’ll talk about battles over when kids eat—especially snacks—and how kids eat—how they act at the table.
Battle 1: Trying New Foods
Perhaps the biggest battle we have with our kids is getting them to eat what we make for them. It’s so frustrating to spend time cooking a meal and then have your kid utterly refuse to eat it or just push it around the plate. When this happens, there are lots of ways for you, the mom, to respond. On one end of the spectrum, you can make your kid sit at the table until he finishes everything on his plate, like many of our parents or grandparents did. One of the stories in my family lore is when my grandpa, who was ironically super picky himself, threatened to put a green bean up my aunt’s nose if she wouldn’t eat it. This is a surefire way to make your dinner table a battlefield.
The other end of the spectrum is becoming a short-order cook, catering to everyone’s preferences and cooking several different things each meal. This might be the most peaceful solution, but it’s an awful lot of work for the cook and is usually not very healthy for the kids either.
Luckily, many of the moms I talked to had great ideas for avoiding both of these extreme scenarios. As is usually the case, the first thing to do when dealing with a picky eater is to figure out what’s behind it. This gets into a tricky nature vs. nurture debate. Some people, especially in our parents’ generation believe that it’s mostly a nurture issue—that if we’d stop catering to their whims, our children wouldn’t be so picky and entitled. And perhaps there’s some truth to this. But there’s often a biological element at play too.
My friend Reba has two sons with sensory issues, so getting them to eat anything has been a major struggle. For years, she kept a list of the few foods they would actually eat—we’re talking 4-6 things total—and celebrated each time they added another thing to their lists. Food therapy and time have improved the situation, but it’s been very challenging.
For some kids, anxiety can play a role as well.
For others it’s a control issue. One of my kids definitely uses food as a manipulative tool. When he’s in a certain mood, he’ll just refuse to eat. He knows I want him to eat, so there’s no way he’s going to let me win. Once I learned not to make a big deal of his hunger strikes, and just let him be hungry if he so chooses, he dropped the act and started eating like a human being again.
You might even be able to blame it on your kid’s tongue. Apparently, about 25% of the population are considered supertasters, whose tongues are extra sensitive to bitter flavors. For many people in this category foods like broccoli and brussels sprouts are too unpleasant for them to handle. There’s also a subset of people for whom cilantro tastes distinctly like soap. Crazy!
Luckily, for most kids, pickiness is just a temporary stage.
The very first episode of one of my favorite podcasts, What Fresh Hell, was about picky eating, and it’s so great. Margaret Ables and Amy Wilson are both funny and wise—a great combination. They both have had kids who were extremely picky eaters, although the good news is that Amy’s son has grown out of it, as is usually the case. Listening to this episode is the first time I had heard this theory about why most toddlers go through a picky stage:
Margaret: Picky eating, from 18 months to three years becomes a biological imperative. When kids become mobile they become picky eaters because they need to be able to survive in the wild… In the wild if your child is an experimental eater they’re going to kill themselves eating berries and weird things. And so everyone says, “Oh, my kid ate everything until they were two.” But there’s a reason that happens, so everybody stop feeling bad about that…. And yes, annoying supermom who’s like, “That never happened to my kid,” fine. Your kid would have died in the wild.
However, picky eating can also be influenced by culture. When Delphine’s first daughter was young, they would spend two months at a time in France visiting family. Here’s Delphine.
Leona tried everything, ate everything. She would actually gain weight in France. She ate so much. She loved everything. Then we’d come back to the U.S. and she became this picky eater. It was difficult. I would have to say that in France there’s a culture of food that is really easy to not make your kids picky eaters and not snackers because everybody is on board. Whether you take them to day care or preschool and school and they eat their lunch there, everybody has the same idea of what a very well-balanced meal is in general. So it’s not like you have to fight with the teachers, like, “No, they shouldn’t have Goldfish for snack, how about you give them a sliced apple.” The teacher is already thinking that way.
So I can see how it’s a much easier task for a French mom to stick with a good diet. We don’t tell our kids not to eat sugar because we feed them fruit and sugar in fruit are a good sugar to have. There’s just a general approach to food in France. Everyone around your kid is not going to let them snack, and snacks are incorporated in a normal meal plan.
I first clued in to the French method of food education after reading the book Bringing Up Bebe, by Pamela Druckerman, an American mom who wrote about what she learned about French parenting while raising a baby in France. The section about food was so fascinating, I had to learn more. So I found the book French Kids Eat Everything, by Karen Le Billon, a Canadian mom who married a French guy and lived in France for a couple of years when their kids were young.
This book has revolutionized the way I think about feeding kids. In the first place I never thought about the idea of actually teaching kids how to eat. But in France it’s not only something parents think about but it’s even a part of their formal education. Starting in nursery school, kids eat surprisingly varied and delicious meals at school, with several courses, including an entre, a main course, a salad, a cheese and a dessert, which is often a fruit. They don’t bring their own lunches, and they don’t choose between several different foods. They all eat the same delicious food together.
She says, “Many North American parents believe that kids don’t like vegetables. We assume that kids don’t like spicy foods, flavorful foods, colorful foods, textured foods, strange-looking foods, or new foods. Basically, we believe that kids don’t like real food. And we also take it for granted that what kids do like is restricted to an extremely short list, topped by things like pasta, chips, and crackers.
But what if we were to believe the opposite? French parents believe that their children will grow up to eat like they do: to enjoy tasting new foods, to choose a balanced diet, to eat their vegetables uncomplainingly, and to enjoy food—all food—in moderation. French parents and teachers encourage children every step of the way, believing that their children will turn out to be healthy eaters.”
When Karen moved to France, her oldest was definitely a picky eater, and she did not think eating at preschool would ever work for her. Beet salad? Yeah right! But soon enough she was eating quiche with the rest of the kids. Here are some of Karen’s tips for picky eaters:
1. “Children shouldn’t be forced to eat (or even worse, to clean their plates) but simply to taste the things that are served.”
2. ‘Taste this, you’ll like it’ works better than ‘Eat this, it’s good for you.’
3. If your children don’t like something, encourage them to believe that they eventually will. “Oh, you don’t like it?’ I’ll say to my children. ‘That’s okay. You just haven’t tasted it enough times yet. You’ll like it when you grow up.’
4. Try an indirect, low-pressure way of offering a new food. Place a little plate with a small portion of the new food on the table, near but not directly in front of your child. Taste a piece or two, with clear enjoyment. Then leave it. Chances are, your child will pick up a piece and try it.
5. Try simple textures. We often introduce new foods in purees or soups, even for our older daughter. Children get used to the taste and can then move on to the “real” texture of the food.
Over and over, Karen reiterates that the biggest reason French kids are less picky is that eating together is an enjoyable experience—far from a battlefield.
Two pieces of advice that I’ve heard over and over while researching this topic, and that can sometimes be at odds with each other is 1. That parents should be in charge of providing the food and kids should be in charge of deciding what to eat, and 2. That kids often need to try a food at least 12 times before they like it.
You’re going to have to feel your own kids out on where to stand on these two rules. Margaret from What Fresh Hell has a good perspective on this:
Margaret: In the rulebooks you’re never supposed to tell your kid what to eat.
Amy: But if you didn’t he would eat only crescent rolls for dinner…
Margaret: He would eat six crescent rolls every single night and nothing else.
Amy: And you can’t let that happen. I’ve learned that from my own parenting an anxious child.
So here’s one great way Margaret has helped expand her son’s food repertoire:
We started something last year, again around anxious eater, where every Wednesday we try a new food. And it’s funny, because even my super anxious scared kid who doesn’t like to try things, if I try something normal on Wednesday, he’s like, “But it’s new food Wednesday, why aren’t we trying a new food?” Because he just got excited about the idea of new food Wednesday. And then I’ll serve lasagna and he’ll be miserable the entire time, occasionally in tears and then he’ll go to school and say, “We tried lasagna last night for new food Wednesday, it was great.” It’s so bizarre.
Molly Liggett’s kids live by the rule, “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.” They eat whatever is for dinner. They don’t have to finish it, but they don’t eat anything else after dinner so if they don’t eat, they’re hungry until breakfast. If they want seconds of something they have to eat their veggies and protein. This works for them, because the kids rarely if ever actually go to bed hungry, especially since they’re always allowed to eat fruits and veggies. I know from experience that both Molly and her husband are great cooks and dinner is generally a pretty pleasant experience at their house. But Molly has six kids, and certainly can’t cater to all of their preferences.
Sarah Engebretson always tries to have at least one “safe” food that everyone likes, like rice or quinoa, so that even if kids refuse some things, they have something to eat.
My neighbor, Van Oberly, asks her kids to take a thank-you bite—a taste to show that they appreciate whoever made the food.
My husband and I really enjoy trying new foods and being adventurous eaters, so it’s a culture we’ve encouraged at home. We often repeat the motto “Archibalds try new things,” and we try to make it seem like a cool thing to do. When they were little, we’d encourage them to try a new food by putting it on their fork and chanting dominate, dominate, until they put it in their mouth and we’d all cheer. Then we’d heap lots of praise on them for being adventurous, even if they didn’t like it.
Another way I used to get little ones to eat their food was inspired by the show Yo Gabba Gabba. There’s a sketch where all the little cartoon food goes to a party in the characters’ tummies. I’d pretend the food was talking and wanted to go to the party in their tummies, and I’d make sounds of glee as the food slid down the slide to the party. It was sometimes a bit exhausting, I’m not going to lie, but usually when they ask for the “tiny voice” I give in and play along. It was very motivating for them.
There are also some great picture books out there to help create a culture of more adventurous eating. The most obvious one is Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr. Seuss, which I’m just going to assume you’re all familiar with. Another one my kids love is called Little Pea, by Amy Rosenthal—in which a little anthropomorphic pea must eat all his candy before he can each spinach for dessert. Yes, this reinforces the whole “clean your plate” strategy, but in a funny way. The next one, one of my favorites is Bread and Jam for Frances, by Russell and Lillian Hoban. I love the Frances books—that mother badger is just so wise, and Frances makes up the most delightful little songs. In this one, Frances refuses to eat anything but bread and jam, so her mom stops offering anything else—eliminating the battle. Soon she starts feeling left out of all the delicious meals, and starts branching out. I’m sure there are several more, but the last one I’ll mention is “I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato,” by Lauren Child. You have to say tomato like that, because it’s a Charlie and Lola book, and that’s how they say it. We love Charlie and Lola at our house, partly because it’s both witty and sweet, but also because when my kids watch it, they start talking in a British accent all the time and everything they say just sounds so much more polite. Anyway, in the book Charlie convinces Lola to eat her veggies with a fun game of pretend. Who hasn’t cajoled kids into eating broccoli trees? I’ll include this list of books in my show notes, and also in this week’s email.
Now that they’re older, one of our favorite ways to encourage them to try new foods is an idea I got from Anna McFarlane from @kidsaretheworst. She makes a charcuterie board after church each Sunday and calls it churchuterie. We started doing this, and the kids love it. Our twist is that we try to have something new for the kids to try on the board each week, and we again heap the praise on those who are brave enough to try them. Now that they’re getting more adventurous, we try to include kind of weird foods, like sardines, spicy pickles and peppers and strong cheeses. But we’ve definitely worked up to it.
There’s also the tactic of peer pressure. I love it when my kids see friends or cousins heartily enjoying a food they’ve decided they don’t like. Especially if I don’t make a big deal about it, they’re more likely to give something a try if they see someone they really like eating it. Several people mentioned the benefits of sleepaway camp for using peer pressure to expand their kids’ food repertoire.
All of these tactics have worked great for our family, but I still have one who won’t eat eggs and yogurt, one who won’t drink milk, and one who doesn’t like pasta. At least for now.
It’s also good to remember that you don’t have to have the same rules in every situation. Kristin Steele has decided that she really doesn’t care what her kids eat or don’t eat away from home. She says, “I want to enjoy my meals when we are guests in someone else’s home or when we are traveling or eating in a restaurant so I just let it go when we aren’t eating at home.”
I have the opposite problem. In fact, I wouldn’t fault my in-laws if they called child protective services on me. Every time we eat there, my kids scarf down the food and say things like, “I never get full unless I’m at your house.” They act like I’ve never fed them before. Sigh.
Valeria Miller’s advice is just to stop stressing out about it so much. Her pediatrician gave her great advice when her two girls were babies—to think of their “food balance/variety” in terms of a full week and not try to make sure every meal is perfectly balanced.
Above all, it’s so important that we don’t label our kids as picky eaters and make that part of their identity. Amy Wilson of the What Fresh Hell podcast has experience with that.
Either people decided ahead of time that he wouldn’t eat something because he doesn’t eat things like that, or they’d say “You don’t want to be a picky eater like your older brother, your cousin.” And I think we can’t allow the larger world to reinforce the narrative that that’s who your kid is.
I’m going to take a little break to remind you that I’ll be offering my meal-planning workshop free until the end of may, and then it will cost $25 again. I’m hoping that the workshop will bring some fresh ideas to family dinner while we’re all still cooking so much at home during this pandemic. In the workshop, I present several different approaches to meal planning, from several different moms, so you can find a system that works for you—even if you’re usually not big on systems. You can sign up for the course at howshemoms.com. I’m also busy working on a workshop about laundry, so stay tuned for that.
Battle 2: What to Feed Them
Another common fight we often have with our kids is about what they are and are not allowed to eat at any given time. This is such a tricky line to walk. We want them to learn healthy habits, but we don’t want to be too restrictive or controlling. I, for one, seem like I’m always going back and forth about how many treats they should get, or how strict to be about eating their vegetables. So right at the beginning of this section I want to set you at ease with this perspective from my good friend Jen Brewer, a dietitian and mom of seven:
I feel like as moms a lot of times we’re too hard on ourselves, because things will even out through life spans. Sometimes I feel like I’m giving the worst habits to my kids in whatever realm of life. “They’re going to be thatroommate.”
One example is I had a mom who her mom was incredibly controlling of everything they ate. Like no sugar in their house whatsoever, and that was before it was even a cool fad. Nothing. And my house was the opposite, so she would always come to my house and just go crazy. She’s grown up, she’s a mom, and she’s ok… she has healthy habits, has great kids. As much as we feel like we’re messing our kids up, nah, they’re going to be ok.
Guilt and pressure about what to feed our kids starts right at the beginning, with choices about breast over bottle. I’m not going to go into that here, because that’s an episode in and of itself. But then we start solid foods. And it gets confusing right away. And the rules keep changing. When my first son was a baby, we were supposed to wait until he was a year old to try peanut butter. Now we’re supposed to introduce it around six months of age, with a “wide variety of other healthy foods.” When you go back farther in history, it’s even more confusing.
I’ll defer to my friends Diane Aragona and Jen Tierney over at the podcast Our Parents Did What? to give us a little history lesson:
Prior to the 1880s, they really just fed babies either wheat gruel or beef broth. Basically what they thought were iron-rich foods that they thought would fortify you, that would make you strong, they thought, so nothing really nutritional. They didn’t actually want to give their babies vegetables and fruits at all, because they didn’t know so much about vitamins yet but also because it’s a natural laxative, and they were actually worried about that. They were like, “No, no, no, we don’t actually want our babies to be pooping a lot, so we’re not give them fruits and vegetables, we’re only going to give them wheat gruel.
Then in the early 1900s, Harold Clapp made a vegetable broth for his sick son, one thing led to another, and baby food was born.
By World War II, the baby food craze got a bit out of hand. Breastfeeding went out of fashion for a while, including with my own grandmother, who claimed she had nervous milk.
Mothers started to really feed their babies baby food instead to show their wealth and to show their status and to get away from breastmilk…. So they were recommending that you start giving your baby baby food and not necessarily cut out formula, but not really give as much as that, really start giving your baby fruits and vegetables at six weeks old.
The rest of the episode traces the history of baby food to the present day and is clearly a really fun and fascinating listen. I’ll link to it, of course.
Another great podcast I found while researching for this episode is called Didn’t I Just Feed You. The hosts, Stacie Billis and Meghan Splawn are both food professionals and moms, and it’s such a down-to-earth, non-judgmental podcast about feeding families. In their first season, they did a fabulous three-part series about sugar, which I highly recommend. The first of those, hyperbolically called “The Beast Hiding in Your Pantry,” took a really balanced view of how to approach treats with kids. Here’s Meghan:
My kids are really young, and I don’t want them to think that any food is good or bad. Food is food. Let’s take labels off of it, and let’s talk about how different foods make you feel if you eat too much of them. You can get a bellyache by eating too much broccoli… So I am pretty lenient when it comes to sugar in our house.
What I do pay attention to…is added sugar in things. We do applesauce packets because my kids can get them themselves, but you have to be really careful because those pouches can be loaded with added sugar or sweetened with fruit juice that is just added sugar.
Stacie and Meghan also mention snack crackers and cereal and even lunch meat as other products with unnecessary added sugar.
Jen Brewer has a good perspective on this as well:
No food is off the table. We don’t have Oreos at 8:00 in the morning. But there’s no food that is strictly a bad food. We talk a lot about which foods are healthy and which foods are treats. I even go so far as to say, “This food helps your eyes. This food helps your muscles. This food helps your blood,” because of the vitamins and minerals in them. And with cookies, “this is a treat food.” So it’s not that it’s bad, and you can’t have it, it’s that you want the healthy stuff, and then you can fit in the treat stuff.
The idea that there are no bad foods is generally true—except when it’s not. Kids with allergies and other dietary restrictions are a different story. I myself have celiac disease, and I’ve been gluten free since I was about 11, so I understand food restrictions. It was especially difficult 30 years ago, when there were few gluten free products around besides rice cakes. My kids are all gluten free as well. But I often tell my kids that our dietary restrictions are a great training ground for self-control with even the foods we can eat. I often tell my kids that if they can say no to a doughnut, it will be easy to say no to drugs.
One of the most frustrating things about deciding what to feed your kids is that we don’t always know what’s best for them—it’s always changing. Here’s Meghan again, from the same episode of Didn’t I Just Feed You:
I used to chug orange juice like it was nothing, because then it was ok. Now the American Pediatric Association says, “No juice is terrible, give your kids water only.” This stuff changes all the time. It’s like skim milk. Now it’s like “Skim milk is just sugar water without any of the good fat, vitamins, and minerals.” “Coconut oil—it’s a wonder food. Wait, are you kidding, no, you’re going to die early if you eat too much coconut oil.” It’s always changing.
Things like eggs, butter and red meat seem to constantly go in and out of fashion. How are we supposed to know what to feed our kids? Of course, we can always rely on fruits and vegetables as healthy choices, but even those are subject to fads. It seems like there’s always an “it” vegetable, from kale to celery to cauliflower. And some fruits are higher in sugar or fiber than others. Nutrition is a tricky science!
Here are a few more tips for encouraging kids to eat their fruits and vegetables:
Molly Liggett tries to serve veggies first while she finishes cooking. The kids are always hungry at that point, so they are more likely to eat the veggies while they wait for dinner than during dinner.
Jen Brewer likes to associate vegetables with specific foods that the kids already like. For example, she always serves carrots on pizza night. On the rare occasion that she doesn’t have carrots on pizza night, the kids ask, “Where are the carrots?”
Valeria Miller serves a bowl of fruit with every dinner, because she knows it’s something healthy at least one of her daughters will eat. She’s still working on introducing more vegetables. She says, “As a kid, I think I only ate potatoes and tomatoes and that’s about it. Now I eat lots of veggies and enjoy them. So I don’t stress too much about it. Just keep offering what I make, and once in a while, I force them to have a few bites of it.”
One French trick is to pass fruit off as a dessert. Delphine has tried to do this in her own family, serving fruit or yogurt after dinner to end with a satisfying sweet taste, without having ice cream every night right before bed.
Of course, different kids have different issues. My kids all love treats, but I’ve never had one so obsessed as my youngest. If I have any treats in the house he sniffs them out and begs mercilessly for them. He can’t think of anything else. Because of this, I’ve started just buying or making treats the day we’re going to consume them.
When I asked Jen Brewer for her advice on this, she told me that most kids grow out of this phase. But for those who don’t, she suggests letting them know clearly when they will be able to eat the treat they want, and then following through to show them that they will get it, just not all at once. Once you’ve established this pattern, they’ll be less likely to hoard treats or feel the need to eat a crazy amount of sugar in one sitting.
Jen and I also talked about how much we should feed our kids—a complicated issue. Here’s what she had to say:
One thing we can teach our kids to do is to stay in tune with their hunger cues and label their appetite cues. In studies they’ve done with American children, small children are amazing at turning their mouths off when their stomachs are full. The problem comes when we as parents force that beyond their natural control. It starts as early as making them drink the last two ounces of a bottle or finishing two more bites.
Karen Le Billon talks about this in her book too. She decided to try out the French custom of serving only one snack a day, which we’ll talk about more in the next section about when kids eat. Her husband added two lines to her new rule: “In between meals, it’s okay to feel hungry. At meals, eat until you’re satisfied rather than full.”
She explains, “This is likely to seem the cruelest rule to non-French readers. It certainly seemed cruel to me. Not feeding your children when they’re hungry? Really? My first impulse was to cross out this rule and cancel the snack-scheduling experiment. But I decided to hear him out.
‘Of course I don’t believe that children should be hungry,’ he started. ‘And nobody else in France does either! I’m saying it’s okay to feel hungry,’ he added. ‘That way, kids get used to the feeling of an empty stomach, which is normal and healthy.’
Linda Crawford takes a very freewheeling approach to food. On the How She Moms Facebook Group, which you should totally join, by the way, she wrote, “I have sensory issues where food is concerned, and so do at least one of my kids. I was raised by a dad who ‘had’ to eat everything put in front of him, and who did me the immense favor of abandoning that policy when it was his turn to parent. Food should not be a battle. Food is a pleasure and a necessity; it shouldn’t be a tool, or a source of esteem. If it is, it’s usually at the parent’s instigation, and it’s usually just a control issue, not a health issue. Not always, but usually. At one point, all 4 of my kids were athletes, so we constantly had the talk about demanding so much from your body at the expense of refueling. My overarching mom goal is to help them be critical thinkers and decision-makers; I’ve never had a locked pantry, told them they couldn’t eat at certain times of day, eat in certain rooms, wait for me to choose what they ate and when. Those choices have always been theirs. And when they have a rough swim meet, or a bad day of practice, they experience in a way they can understand the consequences of a day where all they consumed was lemonade and Doritos. They feel bad, they perform badly, they treat others badly. They have to learn over and over again, but don’t we all? When they’re feeling contentious and short-tempered, they either realize it themselves or are promptly told by their siblings: ‘you need some protein and carbs. Now.’
The question of how much to feed our kids gets even more complicated when body image issues come into play, especially as kids get older.
Jen has had experience with children who showed tendencies to eat to little and a tendency to overeat. In both cases, she advises parents to be very open with kids. Ask them how they feel about their bodies. Make sure they know that keeping their body healthy is the top priority.
Obviously, if you suspect your child is entering into eating disorder territory, it’s best to consult with your pediatrician and other experts.
Food is complicated. We can follow general rules as we teach and model healthy habits, like teaching our kids about moderation and balance, teaching them how to follow satiety cues, talking about food in terms of health and not body image, and avoiding emotional eating. But most important is to create a positive culture about food. Less stress, more joy.
