Enjoying Dinner With Your Kids

positive mealtimes

There are lots of different approaches to dinner that mums use to encourage their children to eat.

I have been reading mums blogs, browsing forums, talking to friends to find the main approaches that are used.

These are;

Dinner is served and there is no alternative, so eat up or go to bed hungry.
This is dinner and if you don’t like it you can have only X. X is the same option each night, ie bowl of cereal or vegemite sandwich.
If dinner isn’t eaten, it is taken away until the child is hungry and brought out again.
Bite rule – eat x number of bites before you can leave the table or have dessert – even I have used this one a few times.

The above approaches are very much ‘that food is fuel only’ with a negative focus to food, eating and dinner. These methods tell your kids;

This food must be eaten or else
Dinner is a chore because I can’t leave the table until I have finished go hungry
There is no other food until you eat this
Eat your greens before the yummy stuff
They have won (By allowing X it gives your child a way out and if they love cereal or vegemite sandwiches even better)

These approach works for many families but as a lay ‘foodie’, eating to me is enjoyable and pleasurable. Eating is very much wrapped up in our social lives. Going out for dinner, meeting friends for a picnic, summer bbq, birthday parties, end of season soccer party, catching up for a coffee all involve food.

We have all heard about the benefits of eating dinner as a family and it conjures up the image of everyone enjoying mealtime with healthy food for children that they don’t complain about and is relaxing with lots of talk and laughter.

We need to teach our kids to enjoy food to make this happen so it leads to a positive mealtime and this in turn develops a healthy relationship with food. So how do we make food enjoyable for kids and not just fuel.

Take off your adult hat of what dinner is to you. Dinner for adults is sitting at a table, eating nice food that someone has taken the time to cook, relaxing at the end of the day, talking about your day and the current issues.

This is an extremely hard concept for kids to understand. They like to eat with their fingers, can’t sit still and it’s not until about 8 years of age that this will happen on a regular basis. Their approach to dinner is ‘my tummy feels funny and I need food to make it stop’. So they eat until the feeling goes away.

So put on your kid hat and think what kids like to do best. They love to play! Their ‘world’ is about play and through play kids find about themselves and what they like and what they don’t like.

From Yuck to Yum is about making food fun rather than a battle. By creating a happy experience around the dinner table means kids will automatically be more responsive to eating dinner and trying new foods.

It also gives you more quality time with the kids which is essential in our time poor society and it may also bring dad home earlier from the office!