You spend a lot of time and effort planning, preparing and serving a meal to your family. All for them to say “I don’t like that”. How do you respond?
I grew up with the mentality of you eat what’s put in front of you or you don’t eat at all. That worked for me. I usually ate what was there because I really like food! I have tried to keep this mentality alive in my family but it doesn’t always work.
There are so many options of quick and easy things to eat like crackers, chips, snacks foods that they can get on their own. The problem with these things are they are not always very nutritious and can be expensive to buy in comparison to making a meal. The battle comes in when everyone wants to just eat snacks and not the meals.
We sit down at the dinner table most nights to eat dinner together and they get to eat whatever I fix then. Even if they don’t like it. They have to eat at least a portion of it. Now, I don’t usually fix stuff they don’t like but sometimes it just happens that way. If I tried to always fix something everyone likes we would have the same few meals over and over again. I do try to give a variety of different meals on different days just to spice things up a little bit.
That still doesn’t take away the battle throughout the rest of the day. Do I want the battle of making them have fruit instead of just letting them get a snack on their own? Do I want to hear the whining? Do I need an extra battle on top of everything else I have going on?
Once you give in to the battle, it’s so easy to keep resorting to the snacks. Why not make life easier on momma? Why can’t their be a variety of nutritious snacks that aren’t so expensive? Even buying in bulk doesn’t make the price much better.
I know not having the snacks in the house is the best option to get my family to eat meals but then I lose the advantage of convenience. Are you more of a snack all day kind of person or the 3 big meals kind? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.