Today’s Leave It To Beaver focuses on Beaver not wanting to eat his Brussel sprouts.
June explains they are perfectly delicious while Wally says, “All you have to do is gulp them down.” Ward interjects, “Perhaps…” which is interrupted by June saying, “It’s the same thing every time we have a green vegetable. He’s getting to be a poor eater and he’ll get sick if he doesn’t eat the proper food.”
June says he’ll have to sit at the table until he eats them. Beaver just sits and sits and sits.
So the question to parents is, do you go through the “food wars” with your kids? Did your parents do this to you? If so, what were the outcomes?
My mum was pretty lax, her attitude was, “Fine don’t eat it, go hungry.”
My brother took on my mom when he was just a little shaver. Apparently he decided he would rather hold broccoli in his mouth forever than swallow it. Mom put him on his little chair and left him in the middle of the kitchen for some time. Later, she removed the broccoli from the mouth of her sleeping boy and put him to bed.
Hey, doesn’t the Family Circus have anything to say about this?
My parents at first were all “you don’t have to eat all of it, but you have to at least try it.” As we got older, this changed to “you don’t have to eat it, but don’t expect me to make you something else.”
My kids were always reasonable. “You have to at least try it,” was my thing. And my kids always at least tried it. A decent percentage of the time they liked what they tried.
BTW, my 17 year old son and my 20 year old daughter took dad out for sushi for Father’s Day.
My family also had a rule that if you complained about something, you got another helping. Thus, you would hear crazy things at the table such as, “Oh boy! Okra!”
This is what we do for our kids. We gave desert, if there was going to be a desert, with the meal to avoid the “eat this to get that” game.
“A child presented with food will not starve.” (Don Denham) They may become anemic if the foods they are presented with don’t contain enough iron. Throw some raisens in there. So far so good.
I was making hamburgers for the kids and the last 4 or 5 times the kids just ate the burger or nothing at all. I was starting to think they weren’t burger kids (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Then one evening, after 3 hours at the pool, they each ate an entire burger with wheat bread acting as a bun. I think the earlier attempts followed times when the kids had snacks or other food prior to dinner.
Another scheme is to have the kids help prepare the food item. My experience is that the kids will be more interested in eating something they helped make. Watching my child slice up a zuccini with a knife was kinda scary, so I swapped it out for a plastic knife. And then I switched back to the knife. They gotta learn sometime.
I’ll never, ever understand why people do the food wars thing. Why on earth would you try to force a child to eat something it doesn’t like? Just let them skip meals, or make something else for themselves. They won’t starve.
Then again, I was a “good eater”. This was never an issue at my house.
Some parents don’t like the idea of their kids saying no to something the parent wants them to do. The food wars are often ultimately about control. The kid has control over what he or she eats, the parent wants that control.
We don’t have food wars. We request that the kids try at least one bite of everything, but it’s a request, not a demand. Nobody is sitting at the table for two hours because they didn’t want lima beans or whatever. That said, our kids are very good about abiding by the one-bite request.
If they don’t like what’s for dinner, they just don’t eat much for that meal. No big.
I do restrict snacking for the hour or two prior to mealtime, though.
When I was a kid, vegetables in my house seemed to only come in a can and I hated peas. I literally could not swallow them without gagging. In fact when I moved to England the first time i was asked if i wanted mushy peas with my fish and chips, I looked at the guy like he had completely lost his mind for even asking.
My dad would make me stay at the table until I ate them. Eventually my mom would feel sorry for me and let me leave the table after choking down a few of them but to this day i still can’t eat the little buggers.
I’ve tried to avoid food wars with my own kids, mostly because I’ve got one who’s a bit bigger than she should be and want to avoid any mother daughter control issues over food. Unfortunately said bigger one is also a pescetarian who doesn’t actually like vegetables all that much; wants to drown the cauliflower in cheese sauce etc. SO that’s fun. Trying to get her to eat something other than pasta. Thank god she loves salmon.
Now the big war is getting them to eat at all. As a teenager I ate everything in sight so a kid who refuses to eat breakfast and often turns down dinner may as well be from outer space in my book.
Neither one seems to have rickets or an iron deficiency so far and I’m watching very carefully for teenage eating disorders so I just bite my lip most days and throw away a lot of food that doesn’t get eaten.
We have a three bite guideline (I’d call it a rule, but there’s really no enforcement) because the first bite, you just choke down to get it over with. The second bite, you may tentatively taste. The third bite is when you can say with some informed experience that you don’t like it.
Because tastes change - even grownup tastes - you have to try three bites each time it’s served, because you never know if you’re a Big Kid who will like coleslaw this time!
Other than that, no, there are no Food Wars in my house. There’s what I’m making for dinner, and there’s a pantry and fridge full of fairly nutritious stuff you make may your own meal from if you like. I am not a short order cook, but I’m also not going to pretend that this is a battle I can win.
I have 4 kids, and I’ve never had to get into ‘wars’ with any of them. I make a healthy dinner, and they are free to eat it or not eat it as they like. If they don’t eat it, they don’t get other foods, they can wait until the next meal.
I think this works very well. No extra stress for mom, no extra stress for kids, and all of mine are healthy and not picky.
I must confess it does rather bother me that my child would really prefer to eat nothing but starch. And peas, if they’re mixed with rice. So yes, occasionally we do have food battles where I try to get her to at least taste the nice green bean or piece of chicken. (Partially, too, because she does actually like green beans once she eats one! But getting her to eat that one is a battle.)
But ever since one of my friends was flabbergasted that my kid would actually eat peas, I try to just be grateful that she eats any vegetable at all. Though I still do try to get her to at least taste whatever it is that we’re eating.
We have a peanut butter sandwich rule. But they have to make their own peanut butter sandwich.
But we also have a “try it” rule. Why? Because I hate it when my kids’ friends show up for dinner and stare at the plate. And we have a “don’t complain” rule - because its worse when the kids’ friends complain. I want my kids to be decent guests.
Try it first was always a rule for us, but we had to recognize that there are some things that a person just doesn’t want. For reasons too long to go into, my husband absolutely will not eat chicken. There are certain things I refuse because they disagree with me, like bell peppers. If I’m going to make mini-portions for us, well, some nights I felt like a short-order cook, but everybody had something reasonable, and the nutritional needs were met over a week’s time, if not daily. After all, if Johnny or Sally doesn’t eat the peas on Monday but eats plenty of fresh spinach on Tuesday, what’s the difference?
In general, Mom’s rule was “give it a try, if you don’t like it, you find something else.”
HOWEVER, her rule was suspended when we were at someone else’s house. Eat what’s on your plate, or starve. Mom would get excited days in advance whenever Grandpa let on that he was making vegetable soup for Sunday dinner. It would be all she could talk about. Then we’d get to Grandma & Grandpa’s house, and she’d gobble it up by the gallon. I hated Grandpa’s vegetable soup, and I went hungry many a Sunday night.
Similarly, my stepdad had friends who would host fish-fries. Mom and my stepdad both loved LOVED those fish-fries, and we would go several times per summer. Your choices of what to eat at these fish fries was generally limited to two things: fish, or nothing. I can’t stand freshwater fish, so many a summer night I went hungry. To this day I won’t go near it.
