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.
my 2.5 yo eats what we eat. i serve new dishes all the time and she doesnt bat an eye. she doesnt eat a ton of vegetables but does not insist on a tiny menu of kid foods. i give a lot of credit to reading and following the following books:
-bebe gourmet (baby food recipes)
-french kids eat everything
-how to get your kid to eat, but not too much.
i am 100% willing to put her to bed hungry and she knows it. it rarely happens but her not eating a meal does not worry me. we never comment on (criticize or praise) her eating or demand that she eat a certain quantity or try anything. we serve dessert (if any) with the meal. her school serves lunch but i usually send a higher quality, more varied lunch for her. if she complains about the food being served we just say “if you dont like it, dont eat it” but dont offer other foods. if she asks for something else we say “it’s not X time right now.”
i was helped out of the gate by the fact that she’s a hungry and generally flexible kid in general and i honestly dont know if i could follow through with all of this with a more difficult child or one that needs to gain weight.
My kid was an adventurous eater until around age 2.5, when she steadily started restricting the range of foods she would eat. Many friends have had similar experiences. Just when you congratulate yourself for doing such a great job of raising an adventurous eater, the kid suddenly decides that she will eat nothing but Kraft Dinner and applesauce pouches.
I have never had the energy to prepare my daughter an entirely separate meal, but I will frequently disaggregate dishes as Kat describes, remove her portion before adding spices or sauces she doesn’t like, or make her a simpler version of the dish we are having, such as a plain cheese quesadilla when everyone else is having quesadillas with vegetables. Sometimes I’ll serve her a different vegetable if it costs me little to no effort (baby carrots or frozen peas).
We still eat a varied diet with lots of veggies and spicy foods, but I’ve pretty much stopped cooking a few things she particularly detests, such as beans. Once in a while I’ll also fix something that she loves but the rest of us don’t particularly care for, such as pasta with alfredo sauce.
I’m a solo parent most nights, so the idea of cooking separately just for me is exhausting. We all eat the same thing, no short-order cooking and no special requests (unless planned out ahead of time).
I always serve 3 foods. One is something I like, one is something they like, and one is some kind of fruit or veggie. So we might have tortilla chicken, jello, and green beans. Or quinoa, butternut squash, and a dinner roll. Or salmon, popcorn shrimp, and applesauce. And yes, chicken nuggets, fries, and peas. Sometimes if I find a cookie or chocolate, that gets added as a 4th thing, at the same time as the meal.
They sometimes cry and whine that they don’t want dinner. I enforce the one-bite-rule, where they have to try a bite of everything and then can say no thanks, but otherwise let them choose how much they eat. They still have to sit at the table, which means I’ve had more than my fair share of eating-while-tantrum, but for the most part dinner is a pleasant experience.
I will not feed my kids a separate meal. I do make sure there’s at least one thing on each meal that they are familiar with. But they eat what we eat. Sometimes what we eat is fancier or more complex, and sometimes it’s simple and kid friendly. But no matter what I don’t do separate meals. I don’t have time for that. And my 7 year old and 2 year old eat. And if they don’t like it, there will be another meal at some point. I’m not against nuggets or such, but there’s no way I will make my kids another meal on a nightly basis. I know it’s not for everyone, but that’s one thing that I just couldn’t do. Dinner is difficult enough without another layer of complexity.
My 2.5 year old always eats what we eat. I don’t force her to try everything, but, if there is a food she particularly loves (right now it is rice), she can’t get seconds until she eats some of her other food. She has done really well with this kind of “bargaining” since a very surprisingly young age (somewhere around one?).
I do try to keep in mind what she likes, but we eat pretty varied food and she is very adventurous. We went to Europe last year and always ordered the weirdest things on the menu for her: squid, octopus, rabbit liver. She loves food! We’re really lucky.
A lot of that is probably temperament and some of it is our own interest in food, but I also credit baby led weaning for her adventurous eating. She’s been eating what we’ve eaten since the beginning and I think that helps.
I often find myself making a separate meal for my 21 month old because she eats dinner at around 6:30/6:45 and goes to bed around 7:30, and my husband and I usually can’t sit down for a meal for ourselves until around 8pm at the absolute earliest. It’s usually protein + fruit + veggie.
Honestly, it’s the timing that kills us more than the food itself. At 6:25 we’re literally walking in the door and it’s a whirlwind until kiddo goes to bed – it’s walking/feeding the dog, feeding kiddo, cleaning up daycare food containers and preparing food for the next day, playtime, brushing teeth, etc. I think that if/when she starts going to bed later that we’ll have more of a fighting chance of having dinner together, and then I won’t be making a separate meal.
We’ll often save leftovers for her next dinner (fully seasoned – not changing a thing about our food). We also give her things that we think she’ll like (right now she’s loving Dr. Praeger’s fishies with ketchup. I think it’s mostly the ketchup). We do try to eat a meal together on weekends, typically breakfast.
We do feed our two year old separately mostly due to time and space constraints, though that may change soon. If we have leftovers from our dinner the night before, I will often offer that, but more often than I’d like she does get stuff like ravioli with meatballs, grilled cheese, PB&J, mac & cheese (sometimes with peas and tuna stirred in). I always offer some kind of veggie and fruit – sometimes she’ll eat the veggie, sometimes not. She’ll usually eat the fruit and a yogurt. I will fill requests for “sides” (yogurt, a particular fruit if we have it on hand, etc.), but I won’t generally give her a different “main” thing than what I’ve prepared.
Her diet most days is definitely blander than I’d like, but the one reason I’m not too worried about it is she does tend to be open to more strongly flavored foods when they cross her path. She love curry, salsa, spicy tortilla soup, capers, anchovies, blue cheese, etc. So I do try to offer things like that when I can. I keep waiting for her to do the classic toddler thing of no longer being open to all these various foods. It hasn’t happened yet, but I realize it still may. In the meantime, my only real hard and fast rule is not to force her to eat anything in particular and not to make a big deal of it if she won’t taste something. I’ll put whatever it is on her tray and if she objects I just say “you don’t have to eat it.” Sometimes she tries it, sometimes she doesn’t. Either way I’ll just offer it again some other time. I just don’t want to make food the subject of a power struggle, for both our sakes. The fact that she has been a “good eater” so far probably makes this a lot easier than it otherwise might be.
We’re definitely in the “they eat what we eat” camp, and have been since they got off purees. They do still eat hot dogs and chicken nuggets at lunch, and occasionally we might make something that’s not really kid friendly (entree salads, mussels) and give them something else, but that’s it. We eat dinner fairly late, so if they don’t eat, they don’t get anything else until breakfast, and we really haven’t had a big problem enforcing that. FWIW, most of our regular meals are relatively kid-friendly, though (we like pasta way too much!). Spices don’t seem to bother them, but the older one wants to gorge on carbs while the younger wants meat, meat and more meat, which is funny.
My 4 year old has definitely started to get more picky in the past year or so, which is frustrating and can result in more stressful dinners, but I don’t think that we’ll budge on not making separate meals.
My kids eat what we eat. They are 3 & 1.5. I think the 3 year old completely refused dinner once, but otherwise they eat it. We do not have rules about having to eat everything, though we do ask them to try a bite of everything. (Daniel Tiger singing “Try new food, ’cause it might taste goo-od”). Sometimes they eat everything on their plates and want more. Sometimes they barely nibble. But they are pretty adventurous eaters and can stand spice. The oldest gets to order whatever he wants when we are out to eat.
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.
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.
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 ;).
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.
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 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.