Dinnertime Fun: Making Separate Meals for Kids
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I will not make separate meals for kids. I, like every other new mother, told myself that frequently while my first kiddo was starting solid foods. I am not going to be that mom! They can eat what WE eat, or else they don’t eat. I don’t have time to do dinosaur nuggets! I absolutely refuse to raise a child who only eats macaroni and cheese!
Cut to five years later, and almost every night the boys get a separate meal from what we eat. Dinosaur nuggets, no, but they do get the Dr. Praeger fishies pretty often.
On our very best nights, the boys eat disaggregated versions of what we eat. If we’re having Mediterranean Stew with stew meat, tomatoes, and zucchini, the boys may get a bowl of broth (strained so there are no “green pieces”), shredded stew meat, and — if I’m feeling really crazy — a zucchini or two on their plate, perhaps coated in cheese.
(It’s a crutch, I know! I’ve started splurging on real Parmesan cheese after reading about how many wood chips are in the shelf-stable versions, though.) Another version of a “win” for me is when I can use the same oven temperature (and, dare to dream, time) for the boys’ food as for ours.
But most nights, they get a smorgasboard of kid-friendly things.
We bought divided, dishwasher-safe, sturdy plates from Corelle, and for the protein portion the boys may get a cut-up Applegate hot dog, deli meat, shredded chicken, fish sticks or fishies, sliced chicken breast strips, shredded cheese, sliced cheese, yogurt, or cottage cheese. (This is a stock photo above, but it’s a pretty good representation of my kids’ dinners! Except they don’t eat fries. No, I don’t know what kind of children I’m raising.)
For fruits, they’ll get applesauce, or an apple, or cut-up cherry tomatoes or strawberries or grapes or whatever other fruit we have on hand. They’ll get some nuked peas and carrots, or blanched green beans (thank goodness my eldest loves those!), or broccoli with Parmesan cheese.
Sometimes I’ll give them rice — white, brown, or one of these quinoa/brown rice/garlic blends. They may get a bowl of consomme, strained miso soup, or other broth. I try to fight the siren’s call of pasta or mac n’ cheese as often as possible because they both ignore all other food when pasta is an option.
(Pasta with meatballs may be the only meal that I can serve all four of us — and then I nuke some zucchini noodles for myself and my husband to bulk up our pasta portions.)
I was amused to read online about how two married gourmet foodies, chef and restaurateur Wylie Dufresne and Food magazine editor Maile Carpenter, regularly feed their kids chicken nuggets as well — and I felt better:
“He does make breakfast once in a while,” Carpenter conceded. “He’s the master of eggs. But for weeknight dinners, our kids won’t even eat what I make. They eat chicken nuggets and pasta and once in a while a cucumber. It’s the best I can do.”
Kids: they have a way of wearing you down.
So, ladies — do you give your kids the same foods you eat, or do you make separate meals for kids?
Have you “lowered” your own eating habits to meet theirs (and now enjoy dinosaur nuggets regularly) or have you just given in and embraced the separate meal strategy? For those of you who are out of this stage — share your tips with us; how long did it go on, and when did it end?
Pictured: Pixabay.
I read this thread with considerable interest, though I’m not yet a parent. Kat, I’m extremely interested in the fact that you used to share my philosophy of no separate meals, but ended up changing. Can you (or someone else who was similar) describe how you made that shift? Was it a gradual wearing down or one big tantrum that made you drop the no-separate-foods rule? I’d like to be as prepared as possible when I have kids and so these comments are incredibly helpful.
Posting late to make anyone with a picky kid feel better: I did it all wrong.
When my son (now 6) was an infant, my husband worked overnights, so he was asleep at dinnertime. So I fed my son the foods I knew he would eat, and waited until he was in bed to cook “real” dinner. This worked fine at first — my son ate a few different kinds of meat, all kinds of produce, and I congratulated myself that I was doing well. Then he started refusing his standard foods. So, stupid me, I stopped serving them. His list of acceptable foods got smaller and smaller By the time my husband was working normal hours again and we realized “oh, nuts, we have a picky eater,” the die was cast. We have slowly been working our way back. But most nights he does have his own dinner. Luckily, he would be content to eat a plain cheese sandwich every night for the rest of his life, so he eats that if he doesn’t like what we’re having. IMO, the alternative to the “real” meal should be verrrrry boring, and something that kids can make/fetch themselves from a fairly young age.
All this to say: Don’t fall into my trap. My advice to parents of infants is, start them on eating what you’re eating. Have family meals. (If cooking with a little around is too much, cook a day ahead and eat “leftovers.”) If you want the little one eating meatballs with veggies in them, then everyone should eat them.
FWIW, I was told that Bread and Jam for Frances would encourage picky eaters to try new things. It did not, in our case. My son just kept quoting the line from the book, “I won’t try anything new.” Thanks a lot, fictional hedgehog.
Late to the party on this, but we never cooked different food for our almost-11-year-old son, unless we were having something spicy like Thai red curry or red chile enchiladas. Then, I would make him something else, like a quesadilla, and he could share our side dishes. But 97% of the time, from the time he was able to sit at the table with us, he ate what we ate. Our pediatrician is from India and told us, very plainly, that in India children eat what their parents eat – even strongly flavored/spicy things – from a young age, and we shouldn’t make my son separate, blander food, because then he would naturally prefer it. I will say that over time, we adjusted our own meals to include things he would eat. But we were never big on nuggets or fish sticks – we’d make baked chicken or grilled fish and he’d have to eat that. We do make Annie’s mac and cheese as a side dish, but frankly, we did that before we had kids. :-)
As a result, my son is a very healthy weight and is also not super-picky about what he eats (although he did go through those phases). We don’t argue about eating vegetables unless it’s zucchini, which he detests. But broccoli, green beans, butternut squash, acorn squash, asparagus, salad, etc. are all fine. He’ll eat salmon, tilapia, steak, pork chops, stir-fry, Italian food, Mexican food, etc. Or he doesn’t, and that’s no tragedy either. If they won’t eat, they’re not that hungry and parents shouldn’t make a big deal out of it. Just say, okay, and let them leave the table. I think letting him be in control of how much he eats is makes a big difference in his overall food consumption. Sometimes he cleans his plate and sometimes he eats two bites and is done, but that’s up to him. He knows there’s no eating after dinner, so on days where he’s hungry, even if the meal is salmon, zucchini and quinoa (one of his least favorites) he’ll eat it.
I have a 5 year old son. He eats what we eat and can always have bread and butter and he always has milk. We make sure to rotate in meals he enjoys – breakfast for dinner (eggs, fruit, toast), pasta, etc. Nowadays we’ll let him even choose what’s for dinner one or two nights a week. Comically, we’ll also let him pick a vegetable most nights, which he generally won’t eat unless its peas. He ate pretty much everything until he was about 3 and then got very picky. I see signs of his food choices regaining some variety.
CPA toddler eats whatever daycare provides her or what we eat for dinner. We do let her have yogurt with dinner pretty much every night, which she loves and is enough food to make me not worried about her going to bed famished if she doesn’t eat the rest of the food. No special meals here. We can barely get it together enough to cook for ourselves.
That said, I ate like four foods when I was a kid and now I’ll eat pretty much anything, so all hope is not lost if you have a picky eater. My parents were not AT ALL adventurous eaters and we lived in a rural area with no restaurants, so we only ate pretty boring “american” food cooked within an inch of its life. I thought I disliked steak for years until I had one that wasn’t cooked well done.
I highly recommend the Dinner: A Love Story cookbook and blog if this is a hot button issue for you (and it doesn’t have to be – I hold no judgement for parents who go the separate/white foods meals route with their kids). But the author Jenny Rosenstrach has great suggestions about how to deal with a picky eater without feeling like you’re fighting/caving all the time.
We lucked out with an adventurous eater – at 4.5 she eats just about everything we do as long it’s not too spicy. She digs fish and seafood, most cheeses, and eats a pretty wide variety of foods. We don’t always eat together as we get home from work on the late side, but she has eaten pretty well from the beginning (her face the time she accidentally got a hunk of wasabi was priceless). I think baby-lead weaning helped get us started on the right path when she was tiny, but other than that I think we just lucked out. She’s a voracious eater too, eating much more in a sitting than most kids her age, which I think also helps. She’s HUNGRY so she eats more of what’s put in front of her.
All this to say, I applaud all efforts to encourage kids to eat the same food as the adults, just as it’s a huge timesaver, but it’s not worth killing ourselves over. And let’s be real, in most cases it’s the moms who stress about eating than the dads, so there’s an unfair burden there too (although my husband is a pretty good partner in cooking most of the time – he just doesn’t stress like I do on the logistics).
Following with interest. I have to say that I have largely given in to doing separate meals because of the time constraints mentioned by others above. I console myself in thinking that my older son eats relatively well, lots of fruit, yogurt, cheese, although he probably eats too many snack-type things. He also gets one “treat” (i.e. small piece of candy, cookie) a day, which is a firm rule unless it is a special holiday or we are at the grandparents. I don’t have the will to police what the grandparents give him, and its coming from a place of love so I look the other way. My only serious complaint is that he will not even try some things, especially vegetables. I try not to pressure him and stay relaxed but DH sometimes does try to convince him and if he does try it he immediately says he doesn’t like it. I asked him what vegetables he does like and he said, “french fries.” UGG! My mom tries to remind me that I was quite the french fry lover as a kid and I turned out alright. I’m trying to model good choices and eat veggies in his presence and hopefully one day he will come around…..
Does this get easier once they have more teeth? My daughter is 11.5 months and has two teeth on the bottom and that’s it. The problem with giving her “what we eat” is that a lot of what we eat (especially the vegetables) is legit hard to chew. Like, pieces of raw cabbage or peppers, steak, etc. It’s not that I’m afraid she’ll choke (I cut it into pretty small pieces), more that she gets frustrated by that stuff.
And then much of what isn’t hard to chew is really spicy (we cook with a LOT of spice — like, many jalapenos). And it doesn’t help that she goes to bed at 6:30, which means 5:45 dinner, which means there is no way she is eating dinner “with” us.
This whole thread is stressing me out a whole lot, actually. She eats well in terms of nutrition (mostly meat/vegetables/fruits) but not particularly creative meals (lots of scrambled eggs, broccoli with lemon juice, rotisserie chicken, that sort of thing). Now I’m worried I am ruining her palate forever by not figuring out a way to give her everything we eat…
I’m on team no separate meals too. We try to only introduce one new thing per meal and make LO try it but do not require that he finish it. The only exception is if I want to make something more gourmet that includes an ingredient that I know LO hates.
My kids eat what we serve. We will do things on the side where practical (e.g., spaghetti sauce on the side, but I’m not going to deconstruct a stew or casserole). That means that they have gone without dinner many nights. My son has become very adventurous and will try anything; my older daughter will make herself try things often enough to be reasonable. My youngest daughter still sulks and refuses to eat more often than I would like. But, there is not enough time or money or mental space or mom patience to devote to making them a separate meal at night. They get to choose their breakfasts completely–we provide reasonably healthy options and they pick and generally make it themselves (not the 3 year old). We pick dinner.
Our kid used to eat anything and everything until about age 4 1/2. Now he’s the stereotypical picky eater who wants only hot dogs, chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, and the like. I won’t make him a whole separate meal but will fix a sandwich, soup, or burrito for him, if he doesn’t eat what we eat. And if he doesn’t eat what we eat, there’s no dessert.
My son has been “picky” from day ONE! Never ate any of the green baby food and it’s still a struggle to get him to eat anything green (he is 2.5 now). He usually eats earlier than we do since my husband gets home after 7 most days, so I feed him either some version of leftovers from the night before, or I make him a snack plate of something. One thing that has helped as he has gotten older is having him help me with dinner prep. If he helps to make it, he is somewhat more inclined to at least try what he made. Doesn’t always mean he will eat it again though. Typical foods are: sweet potato fries, eggs (scrambled or hard boiled), PB & J or PB & banana sandwiches, breaded chicken I make at home, hummus, any kind of bread, potatoes, one or two pieces of whatever vegetable we ate the day before (gets eaten 30% of the time), and green smoothies. I try to eat something while he eats his food, usually the vegetable he is eating to try to encourage him. Doesn’t always work. I will also mention that I am a registered dietitian, and all I can say from seeing many kids from all types of families is that some kids just don’t like certain foods! Just like us! And forcing them makes it so much worse. At the same time, including one new food or something that they don’t like that you have prepared for the rest of the family is encouraged. Unless they are very selective eaters, kids come around. In short (haha), I do usually make something separate for my son, but I try to make them very simple foods so that I am not spending a ton of time making something else.
My kids eat what we eat. My 3.5 y/o is a great eater, so when there is something she doesn’t like, I respect it. But when it happens, it tends to be something DH won’t eat either (and she’ll say it totally independently of him). Neither of them like tomatoes (sauce is fine, just plain or very large chunks of tomato) or baked potato. My kid also doesn’t like French fries, hamburgers (veggie burgers are OK) or Tatar sauce. But she’ll eat almost anything else- some stuff with more zeal than others. I don’t like pot roast or salmon so I get that there are just things you dislike. She’s good about trying when we ask.
I almost died the other day when I took her to Chick Fil A and she asked if they had mussels. Clearly we don’t do fast food often ;).
So interesting. My kids almost always eat exactly the same thing we do. Usually it’s not fancy and we do dial back the spice.
I like this topic! We generally eat the same thing as our 17 month old, but our pre-baby diets were probably pretty childlike anyway. If anything, having her and doing it this way has raised our eating standards – we’re definitely eating more vegetables and actual ‘meals’ and less frozen pizza and mac and cheese. She always gets a fruit (we usually don’t) and almost always gets a vegetable, whether she eats the veggie or not.