“Ugh, I have the pickiest eater for a kid—he [or she] won’t eat anything.” I can’t tell you how many times I have heard this from parents. Parents who are at the end of their rope with frustration because they are cooking two or three meals a night for a kid who only likes pasta, or French fries or chicken nuggets or… Before I had kids and I heard these laments I thought “OK, but your eight year old doesn’t do the grocery shopping, and I’m pretty sure your three year old isn’t cooking yet, so…” And don’t get me wrong, I still think there is a lot of truth to that line of thinking, but I get it. It is really really scary when your kid won’t eat. And there is not a parent out there who sets out thinking “you know what? I’m only going to serve beige foods—that will be great for my kid and make my life so much easier.” But, I get how it happens. You start out with baby’s first foods, organic puree this and “oh my goodness, my nine month old eats everything!” that, and you think you have cracked the code and you have the best baby-eater ever. But if you are a parent, you also know that the second you gloat (even if it is to yourself), you have jinxed yourself. One day they don’t feel like broccoli anymore, and they start screaming in their high chair, and frazzled you throws some cheerios on the tray just to make sure your kid gets enough to eat. And if you have other kids, lord help you, because if they see that their baby sibling is getting cheerios, you can bet the broccoli on their plate just got a whole lot less cool. My point is, it snowballs. And once you know that your kid has voiced an opinion about not liking a certain food anymore, you are a lot more hesitant to put it on their plate. And at the end of a long day, you don’t want to hear complaints and you don’t want to hear crying so you opt for something that you know will appease them. You really just want the kids to eat well, so they can sleep well, so they can learn better, and in the moment, you don’t want to battle over food. So sometimes, it is just easier to cook a box of mac and cheese and be done with it. I get it.
But I also truly believe that this is one of those parenting things, that only you can change. Your kid isn’t going to teach himself or herself how to eat better, you have to. It will also make your life a billion times easier if you can stop worrying about your child’s food habits. If you read my “Dinner Rules” post, you know that I can be a bit of a bear myself at mealtimes and I really have little sympathy for my kids when they start voicing too much of their opinion with food. I am not afraid to let someone go to bed hungry and I try to eliminate as much food waste as possible by saving whatever they don’t eat. All this being said, my six-year-old boy has always been my least adventurous eater. Won’t try foods he hasn’t seen before, doesn’t like stuff with too much flavor. And to top it all off, he has never liked avocados. Of all the foods that he doesn’t eat, this is the one that drives me crazy. How can he not like them? Everyone else in our family loves them and he won’t even try them! He easily would be the kid that would live off of chicken nuggets if I let him. But I don’t. So, determined to put a stop to what I saw was becoming a slippery slope of poor eating habits, I put him in my own picky eater boot camp this past summer. Here were the rules:
- No more ordering off of the kid’s menu (we started sharing entrees instead).
- If he wanted chicken nuggets that badly, we made them.
- No more homemade lunches—school lunch only. In Cambridge, we are very fortunate to have a food service director who is also a registered dietitian, so I’m really happy with the lunch menu and felt that if he watched his peers eat different foods, he would be more comfortable with it.
- Take cooking classes offered through the community afterschool twice a week.
- We got him a set of kid-friendly knives for his birthday and I started bringing him into the kitchen with me, first to watch and then to help prep.
- Repetition is key. I knew he didn’t like certain foods, but I picked one that I really wanted him to start liking (the avocado) and just started putting in on his plate. Of course I had been doing this for years and he never touched them, but I kept at it. I also had him meal prep avocado after avocado after avocado. Again he never ate it, but he got used to smelling it, touching it, and putting it on his family’s plates to enjoy.
Basically, my boot camp motto was “you aren’t an adventurous eater? Great, you are now the family’s food guru.” How could I expect him to be an adventurous eater if I wasn’t exposing him to a challenge? It was like wanting him to be awesome at rock climbing without ever taking him, well, rock climbing. With cooking, I wanted him to feel like he had a special privilege that the other kids didn’t have and to gain a confidence that he had a special skill set with something that he wasn’t comfortable with. He was my chopper, my pasta “doneness checker”, my table setter, and my spice-adder. He quickly became my right-hand man in the kitchen. And guess what? Last night, something magical happened. We were eating fish tacos and he asked for seconds. So, I took his plate and as I was walking into the kitchen asked “do you want more of the fish?” “No, I want more of the avocado.” The mother f-ing avocado. Thank goodness my back was to him because I smiled so big and may have even done a small fist pump. A million amazing thoughts raced through my mind “IT WORKED!! We did it! He’s a great amazing wonderous eater! Thank goodness for cooking classes, thank goodness for repetition. My husband and I RULE.” But I played it cool, for one because I try really hard not to make food a big deal and also because when I got to the kitchen, I saw that having seconds was no longer an option and we were out of avocado. “Sorry, buddy, we are all out….I have more of the corn tortillas though.”
“Ugh, mom, I really don’t like those.”
