Because it sucks to spend $15/lb on a nice steak only to have your kid complain about it. It’s not a battle worth fighting. Most often, I’d do a London broil for the three of us and save the good stuff for when he’s out. Everybody’s happy.
Because it sucks to spend $15/lb on a nice steak only to have your kid complain about it. It’s not a battle worth fighting. Most often, I’d do a London broil for the three of us and save the good stuff for when he’s out. Everybody’s happy.
Why would you give your kids lesser quality food than you are eating? When I make steak, my kids eat the same steak I do.
Surprisingly, they also eat whatever I make for dinner. I don’t make things that I know they don’t already like, but I will make new things to see if they like that.
There are millions of recipes out there, and more than enough that are likeable by both myself and my kids.
If I get a nice rib-eye, t-bone or porterhouse, the steak, potato and vegetables go on my plate, but only a potato and vegetables go on my daughter’s plate.
…my daughter’s vegan, so this isn’t a problem, I just have to listen to her harangue about me being a cow murderer.
We’ve never allowed our kids to have something different than what everyone else at the table was having (well, except when they were babies). Now at 9 and 11 they are not picky eaters and will try almost anything - they especially love spicy Indian or Mexican food. The only weird exception is that my son has an aversion to pork, especially ham and bacon. I think it stems from seeing the movie Babe as a youngster.
Anyway, if we’re having steak (which is not as often as I’d like), they get the same kind we’re having; just smaller portions. On the other hand, I readily admit that we save pricey meals (filets, high-end seafood, etc) for nights when we know they won’t be home. 
When I grew up, steak was only for family gatherings and going out. My grandfather was usually the steak cook and I can still taste the chargrilled, burnt fat well done steaks we had. I didn’t want any other cook of steak until I was in my early twenties and discovered medium rare. My point is- don’t worry about ruining palates. Do what works for your family- kids will naturally grow into their own palate.
My three siblings and I have always have been adventurous eaters. We were never allowed to be picky but my mother was an excellent cook so the very few meals one of us would not touch at home were pretty memorable as exceptions. Our two sets of grandparents lived in the same town and were from very different food cultures (Southern vs. Pacific Northwest) so we had a huge variety in what we ate at family gatherings. If you wanted to eat what the adults ate, we were always allowed as long as we cleaned our plate but in general we got to choose what we put on that plate. I don’t remember ever being required to eat a different cut of meat or lower quality food but with a big grandchild brood at gatherings, there were usually kid friendly choices. At home, we usually wanted to lick the plates and we definitely ate what my parents ate but nothing was fancy- four kids means steak is not a regular option.
“Lesser quality” seems like overstating it. It’s not as though they’re getting a bucket of wormy gruel or rat meat. The reason why would be fairly obvious: because the kids don’t care much either way so the extra money is wasted. Your experiences may vary based on your kids.
Tastes and interests change as you age, both culturally and biologically. Kids are much more sensitive to sweetness in a positive sense and to bitterness in a negative sense (as well as other flavor types). There’s no reason to just assume that they’re being cheated if they’re not eating the same things you are because they’re not tasting them the same way anyway.
Now, naturally if they’re pining for a bite of your steak as you eat it and you’re saying “Haha, go eat your meatloaf, stupid kid!” then that’s different. But there’s a pretty good chance that they’d actually prefer the meatloaf anyway.
When I was growing up we never had anything but top sirloin on the grill because it was the cheapest steak that wasn’t round steak that you could feed seven people with. To this day, my brother still buys sirloin steak because he doesn’t understand that we only had top sirloin because it was all we could afford, not because it was good steak. The rest of us buy good steak now.
Every time I try to get my younger daughter to eat a steak she always says it tastes weird and she doesn’t want it. She’ll eat hamburger just fine. But she’s a picky eater and when she says it’s weird it’s because it’s not pork, which is what we have more often.
So she’ll eat pork chops, pork roast, pork ribs, any kind of grilled or roasted pork. So if I were buying steaks for me and my wife I’d get a pork chop for her, not because it’s cheaper but because she’d prefer it.
The OP said “cheaper cut” which implies lesser quality. If you know your kids don’t like steak, then that’s one thing. Purposefully giving them something less than what you are eating just seems wrong to me, especially if they know that what you are eating is better.
I don’t have kids, but I have fond memories of Sunday afternoon barbecue when I was a kid. My parents and I each had our own Porterhouse, and my dad was even kind enough to cook mine the way I liked it (aka, a good vet might be able to save it) even though he and Mom liked theirs more well done.
I was a fussy eater as a child, but I had some pretty expensive tastes in what I did like (lobster, for instance). I was allowed to order it when we went to nicer restaurants.
As for me–if I had kids I think it would depend on the kid. I’d let them try the good stuff and have it if they liked it, but I certainly wouldn’t coax them to eat it if they didn’t like it or didn’t care.
My cousins and I got hamburgers or hot dogs at steak grilling affairs. We liked them better.
Huh, that never occurred to me. Our general rule is that I’m cooking one dinner, not multiple dinners … but two different cuts of meat prepared the same way is not quite the same scenario as cooking an alternate entree.
Usually, my daughter eats some of mine, for things that tend to be sold in a single portion size. Or, for things I know she likes well enough to want to eat a larger portion, I will plan in advance to use the leftovers from her portion for something I would really enjoy bringing for lunch the next day – so I will know to have some good bread and horseradish on hand for a steak sandwich. I am not one to complain about eating steak two days in a row.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with getting a cheaper cut for the kids, but I probably wouldn’t have thought to do that.
Everybody gets the same steak, unless they are heathens who want to destroy it by cooking past medium rare, then they get a hamburger.
When that would happen to me as a kid, I’d seethe silently. I always liked steak.
Sometimes we get several cuts of steak, sometimes not. I have two teens and two “babies” (almost 5 and almost 2). We adults tend to like big hunks of ribeye, which, while generally tender, can be a bit difficult for little ones to navigate, no matter how carefully I try to cut it up. But I’m pretty sure I’d have a toddler riot on my hands if I tried to serve them a hamburger instead of the good stuff. The four year old watches the grill like a hawk and won’t even let hers rest. 
My older ones tend to like strip steak (if they aren’t playing vegan that month…;)). So if everyone’s partaking, I often get 2 ribeyes and 3 strip steaks. But if porterhouse is on special or the flank steak looks really good, then we all have the same thing. A well-seasoned, rareish London Broil is a thing of beauty.
(Off-topic: exactly when and why did flank steak stop being cheap? I used to buy it more frequently in my broke years than I do now. It’s often like the second priciest cut here, no lie. Now get off my lawn!)
We cooked burgers for our young kids and steaks for ourselves. Starting around 12 or 13 they got steaks too.
I think they just preferred burgers when they were younger. I don’t recall exactly when that changed.
When I buy steak, we usually all get the same thing. One difference that has happened is that I’ll get a porterhouse for hubby, while the kids and I will eat a strip steak. When the kids were little and couldn’t eat a whole steak, we shared off our plates to feed them.
When I was young, our family ate (cheap) pork steak much more frequently than beef steak. I used to prefer it, in fact, since it was what I was used to.