I was never shamed at the table. But we always had two choices, and they were “take it” or “leave it”.
One talent my mother instilled in me was to teach me how to eat politely as a guest, when what we were being served was icky. We weren’t allowed to say “I don’t like that!”
Sure thing. Cat Au Gratin with capers is quite a delicacy, and fills the belly well.
My father spent much of my childhood trying to bully me into eating food I had absolutely no interest in - chief among them rice pudding, which is a Christmas-related delicacy where I come from.
I loathed it, and loathe it to this day, to the point where it makes me physically ill. I suspect that had he not forced me to eat it several years in a row despite my having tasted it and finding it distasteful, I would eventually have come around to it. Instead, for at least three years on end, Christmas Eve devolved into hours of dreadfully anticipating the moment the rice pudding was put on the table, rather than gleefully anticipating presents. The mere smell of rice pudding still makes me sick to my stomach.
I personally believe insisting that children taste something before refusing to eat it is good parenting practice, but forcing a child to eat something they have already tasted and professed to not liking is counterproductive in the extreme.
Serious question: why should they have to taste it at all?
Why not let the child be the determiner of what goes into his body? Which is the more important lesson-- 1) to taste some food or 2) to teach the child that his body and what goes into it is 100% under his/her control?
What’s more important is to teach them that eating what you like is not always the most important consideration. It’s more important to learn that you can and should try to get over food avoidance issues. It’s more important to learn the discipline of eating a balanced diet than it is to not eat something just because you don’t like it It’s more important to learn that if someone else is responsible for preparing your food, even for a single meal, that you show your appreciation by at least trying something, and in fact eating a reasonable amount, even if it’s not your favorite food. Its more important to learn that you should not always expect to get what you prefer.
But I don’t believe that shaming it humiliation is ever a food idea.
We had to at least try everything, but my mom was not an adventuresome cook. And neither of my parents liked vegetables or seafood. Once we had canned peaches in heavy syrup, and I hated the texture of the peaches. My mom let me just drink the syrup. Healthy eatin’!
I come from a family of pretty picky eaters in general. If I had been allowed to simply dismiss food by smell or sight for the first 5-6 years of my life without tasting it, I would have been either morbidly obese or starved to death. Young children will reject food on the slightest of whims, and requiring that they at the very least taste is, in my mind, a good compromise between respecting their wishes and right to self-determination whilst not simply letting them do whatever the hell pleases them.
Why expose them to anything new?
One reason: Kids need to learn how not to trust their first impression on occasion. Sometimes things look gross, but they might just surprise you.
Another reason: “Gross” ain’t gonna kill you. Sometimes you’re going to eat something that doesn’t taste all that good, and you need to learn how to deal with it diplomatically, without being all drama queeny about it.
Yet another reason: Many tastes have to be acquired. According to this source, it can take a kid 10 to 15 tries before he latches onto a food.
Luckily for me, I have a fast metabolism (unluckily when I was working out; it was a real job to prepare and eat enough, and I lost most of the weight I’d gained when I stopped). I smoke, too, which helps a bit. Also, when I get focused on something like work or a particularly knotty problem, I won’t even notice being hungry, sometimes for hours on end. I eat healthily enough, with the occasional treat, but I’m not really a dessert type guy.
So I don’t have weight issues, but I can still pack it away. When I was a teenager, my mother would call me the Hollow Leg. 
No, it was usually, “if you don’t eat, you can’t have/do X later”. Or, “you have to have X number of bites”, etc. Fortunately, we rarely had anything I didn’t like, and I liked most veggies. (I used to eat a LOT of salads growing up!) Once I got older, I was given the choice to make myself something if I didn’t like what we were having.
We used to get crap at school about “starving kids in Ethiopia” if we didn’t eat all of our lunch, or threw food away. It wasn’t that we were forced to finish anything, but the principal definetly tried to push it on us.
I had to sit at the table until everything was eaten. Up until around 9pm I think, then I could go to bed. But whatever I hadn’t eaten was served up cold for breakfast the next morning. And anything left was then warmed up for lunch or dinner until I cracked and ate it. It only happened with two foods in particular that triggered my gag reflex; I wasn’t a picky eater and ate pretty much everything else. My mum had some power struggle / control issues and this was just one manifestation.
Unsurprisingly, I have not had the healthiest of relationships with food and have spent many years trying to improve that. I don’t think my parents approach was the right one.
Awesome point and along with it.
We have some Asian neighbors with kids and once when my son was 4 he was playing over at their house and stayed for lunch, which of course was Asian. Well he refused to eat any of their food which I was so embarrassed about because I felt it was insulting to them. Luckily they were good sports about it and now10 years later he LOVES their food.
I agree to teaching your kids to at least try something is important. But I don’t agree to teach them to choke shit down just for the sake of being polite.
Also, if you’re a guest in my home, I just want your stay to be a pleasant one. If I’ve put something on your plate you don’t like, please don’t eat it. You won’t hurt my feelings, I promise.
There’s something in the middle.
A major lesson I want my kids to learn is that life requires you to do some things you don’t necessarily feel like doing. And that’s okay. As long as there’s a reason to do it (which honestly when you’re a kid may just be that an adult whom you trust is telling you it’s necessary–with a few obvious exceptions), and as long as it’s not dangerous, it’s okay, and sometimes important, to do those things you don’t feel like doing.
These may include:
-Stopping running when dad yells to stop. (A certain three-year-old I won’t name ran out into a road earlier this week, despite her dad’s frantic cries to stop, and got in all kinds of trouble for it).
-Doing your math homework, even though it’s easy.
-Doing your math homework, even though it’s hard.
-Cleaning up your craft table, even though you want to play with it.
-Cleaning up the mess on the floor, even though you didn’t make it.
-Eating your flippin’ cheese pizza, even though you’ve just decided to be the only kid on earth who doesn’t like pizza and even though you loved pizza last week.
Now, I’m not going to get into an extreme power struggle over any of these, except for the running-out-in-traffic one. If you don’t do your math homework, or if you don’t clean your craft table, or if you don’t clean up the mess, there’s gonna be a consequence (that newfangled word that lets modern parents pretend that we don’t punish kids, it’s awesome). Maybe you lose computer time, or maybe you don’t get to hang out with us while we bake cookies, or maybe if you threw a truly epic snit your dad won’t read you a bedtime story (the ultimate punishment, er, consequence).
And if you don’t eat a reasonable dinner, defined by eating everything in your serving, you don’t get a treat after dinner.
I’m not going to force someone to choke something down. But it’s an entirely salubrious lesson that sometimes doing something unpleasant clears the way for getting to do something pleasant. I have no trouble teaching that lesson to my kids.
And that’s why I loathe broccoli now.
We aren’t crazy formal at my house, but I do have rules for eating and table etiquette, which include (but are not limited to):
My mom used to plate our food for us (and still tries to sometimes). Then she’d proceed to make fun of us or comment on how much we ate if we finished all of it. In fact, she STILL comments on how much I eat. “Well, you certainly ate a lot more than I did,” “You ate that awfully fast, overly,” or my favorite, “Calories, calories, calories. I wonder how much you’ll have to run to burn that off. [cue the puffed up cheeks to simulate fatness]” But if we didn’t finish all of it or go back for seconds, she would sometimes cry and thought it meant we didn’t love her.
Food is a strange thing - you need it to live, but you can develop a horrendous relationship with it. I don’t want my kids to associate the amount of food they eat with how much I love them, and while I feel guilty sometimes for throwing away food, I’d rather throw away half a meal than teach my kids that they need to choke it down after they’re satisfied. Everyone’s got their own view of how to handle it, though - maybe if my mom hadn’t associated food with love, I’d skew more toward requiring my kids to clean plates.
When the kids hit their teens, we decided they were old enough to decide what they liked and didn’t like, so we’d work around that as best we could.
When I was 17 (and I’d hated eggs my whole life) my bitch of a grandmother tried to force me to eat an omelet for dinner. I tearfully went to bed hungry. I vowed then and there never to force my kids to eat something they had (consistently) turned their nose up at.
I never got into food battles with my kid, but my wife, who is very health-conscious, has made this an issue from time-to-time.
I remember an epic showdown over cabbage rolls. I was in tears at the table, my mother insisted I stay there until I ate at least some, and finally my dad relented and let me leave. I still won’t eat cooked cabbage and the smell still makes me gag. And yes, Mom, even the rice filling tastes like cabbage to me, even if it doesn’t to you.
My mother tried all kinds of different ways to get me to eat foods I didn’t like, including the starving children in Africa line. I didn’t have the words to articulate why I wouldn’t eat them, just that I didn’t like them. But isn’t that a good enough reason? Some foods I still won’t eat to this day because they still trigger my gag reflex, some that I wouldn’t touch then, I love now as an adult. Most of those foods I did eventually try, I did, not because I was made to, but because at some point in my life, they looked or smelled good enough in front of me for me to want to try them.
Both my wife and I (separately) came up with that response as kids. It did stop my parents from using it – though not from making me try new things. It didn’t help her at all.