Not Sure How To Handle This...Advice? - Page 5

[hakeber]

no, musician dad, I mean specifically about the wrapped up food that isn't wanted. It can just get chucked for you, can't it? Cause as you can see I do/did all those other things, too.

But that last one didn't work for us, not ever. And I just can't blow off that sort of waste. I don't think you get the shere volume of snacks half eaten and eventually trashed that did and could have continued to accumlate, molding and soggy in the fridge, never to be eaten, if my two year old child had been allowed to just start as many new snacks as "his body told him to". You must have naturally just more conscientious kids than mine was, because mine would likely have happily gone on like that till every last item in our month's grocery list was half eaten inside of a couple days.

C'mon, tell me what I'm missing?

The truth is I don't know if I feel all that badly if now and then I pull the parent card. I am the parent. I do pay the bills. I do make the rules. I do set the moral codes. That's my job. I don't always feel the need, but sometimes I really do. Issues of waste have me flashing my sherrif's star faster than you can whistle dixie. I give everyone a fair trial, a chance to plead their case, but it is my town, and some rules are non-negotiable...we don't waste food. Since he had PROVEN himself untrustworthy of finishing a snack later, he was not going to get a new snack now...I mean that was after MONTHS of food wasting. MONTHS of just watching food get thrown away! I can't condone that without hating myself.

[hakeber]

Originally Posted by Anastasiya

My DH and I call our second son "The Intactivist". He is very, very picky - obsessively so - about everything being whole and perfect. I could never serve him 1/4 or 1/2 a sandwich because he would be consumed in tears. He wants the WHOLE sandwich. Cut a banana in half? Oh, that devastates him like nothing else. He becomes a bundle of inconsolability. Give him 1/2 box of raisins rather than a whole box - even worse. A small bowl of cereal? Not going to happen.

So, for him anyway, smaller portions just never worked. Wow. Kids are SO different from one another.

And leaving a snack tray out doesn't work either. The older kids start to pick at his once theirs are gone, and he flips out. Either that or the baby somehow manages to get ahold of it.

I so can't imagine doing that with four kids...or more

Kudos to you.

[mamazee]

I don't have a lot of problems with food being wasted, and I've never forced any issues with food. I change my own behavior. For instance, half an apple is a serving of fruit, and is how much a child is usually hungry for. I cut the apple in half when I give it to her, and I have a squirt bottle of concentraed lemon juice in the fridge specifically to put a bit on the other half of the apple before I put it in the fridge. It does't get icky, and my dd just helps herself to the other half. If my dd wants PB sandwich, she won't eat much, so I cut a piece of bread in half and make just that much pb sandwich. I've never told her she has to finish anything before going on to something else, and people seem to naturally look at leftovers when they are hungry for snacks. If I put something in the fridge, 95% of the time it'd disappared within 24 hours. Maybe the difference is that I'm fine with throwing out what few leftovers dont' get eaten? It ends up being very little and I really don't think that small amount of food is worth fights.

We care about hunger and keep a coffee can on the table that we put money into at every meal, and when it gets heavy we give the money to either a local food pantry or to an organization for world hunger. It isn't like we don't teach that lesson.

[hakeber]

Originally Posted by mamazee

I don't have a lot of problems with food being wasted, and I've never forced any issues with food. I change my own behavior. For instance, half an apple is a serving of fruit, and is how much a child is usually hungry for. I cut the apple in half when I give it to her, and I have a squirt bottle of concentraed lemon juice in the fridge specifically to put a bit on the other half of the apple before I put it in the fridge. It does't get icky, and my dd just helps herself to the other half. If my dd wants PB sandwich, she won't eat much, so I cut a piece of bread in half and make just that much pb sandwich. I've never told her she has to finish anything before going on to something else, and people seem to naturally look at leftovers when they are hungry for snacks. If I put something in the fridge, 95% of the time it'd disappared within 24 hours. Maybe the difference is that I'm fine with throwing out what few leftovers dont' get eaten? It ends up being very little and I really don't think that small amount of food is worth fights.

We care about hunger and keep a coffee can on the table that we put money into at every meal, and when it gets heavy we give the money to either a local food pantry or to an organization for world hunger. It isn't like we don't teach that lesson.

I think that's totally reasonable, especially when you have a lot of kids in the house. I just saw WAY too many nibbled on gummed over and discarded items being left in the fridge for far too long and ds doesn't have a host of scavengers co-habitating with him like I did growing up. He really grew to take food totally for granted like he was entitled to a fridge buffet all day, leaving everything mauled and unappetizing for anyone else including himself. But as I said upthread, I would totally be fine with him having a new snack if he could find someone else to finish the one he started. I just found myself feeling forced to finish a million things I didn't want, need or ask for, or throw out heaps of food, enough to feed another child. At some point I felt the wastfulness was getting truly obscene, and when you spend two days a week working with kids who take not even the roof over their heads for granted and you spend seven days a week educating educating youn adults from developing nations around the world to fight oppression like that, it was really hard for me to sleep at night being complicit in that sort of waste.

Yes, I am a bleeding heart, and I am taking my kids for the ride. Maybe they'll both wind up like Alex from Family Ties instead.

I like the idea of lemon juice for the apples...though you wanna see the hissy fit thrown when I tried cutting an apple in half or in slices for ds back then. You'd think I was cutting off his fingers! I avoided that meltdown (we found it far far worse than insisting he finish that same apple later on in the day) and just bought much smaller apples/bananas/mangoes etc.(yes, my ds eats mangos like an apple...skin and all -- he's such a little weirdo) It's a good idea for child #2.

BTW, I don't mean to imply that others here don't care about issues of starvation and poverty, and I deeply apologize if that's how it came out. There are lots of ways to build awareness. This (living here, volunteering, teaching, working with families in distress) is just how we do it, and we find a real need for consistency in that way of life. Allowing a family member to start but not finish everything on his snack shelf (which were in small portions to begin with) then never want to touch them again, or to make special requests and not eat more than a bite, was not consistent with our values or our work. We had to make a change.

[MusicianDad]

Originally Posted by hakeber

no, musician dad, I mean specifically about the wrapped up food that isn't wanted. It can just get chucked for you, can't it? Cause as you can see I do/did all those other things, too.

But that last one didn't work for us, not ever. And I just can't blow off that sort of waste. I don't think you get the shere volume of snacks half eaten and eventually trashed that did and could have continued to accumlate, molding and soggy in the fridge, never to be eaten, if my two year old child had been allowed to just start as many new snacks as "his body told him to". You must have naturally just more conscientious kids than mine was, because mine would likely have happily gone on like that till every last item in our month's grocery list was half eaten inside of a couple days.

C'mon, tell me what I'm missing?

The truth is I don't know if I feel all that badly if now and then I pull the parent card. I am the parent. I do pay the bills. I do make the rules. I do set the moral codes. That's my job. I don't always feel the need, but sometimes I really do. Issues of waste have me flashing my sherrif's star faster than you can whistle dixie. I give everyone a fair trial, a chance to plead their case, but it is my town, and some rules are non-negotiable...we don't waste food. Since he had PROVEN himself untrustworthy of finishing a snack later, he was not going to get a new snack now...I mean that was after MONTHS of food wasting. MONTHS of just watching food get thrown away! I can't condone that without hating myself.

I guess what you're missing is that we have never had something that needed chucking unless it was from a dinner that was just too big for the family. Even then, we try to use/eat as much of it as possible. And like mamazee's house, about 95% of what goes in the fridge eventually gets eaten.

[ssh]

We've always let our DD, age 4, completely self regulate and she 's been getting a lot of her own snacks since around 2. We don't seem to have had the waste issues some other posters seem to have had. DD often gets out a container of beans, a box of triscuts or a handful of grapes or berries and then just puts back any she doesn't want. Banana or browned apple pieces just go into oatmeal or muffins the next morning. Sandwiches and toast do seem to be the things that most often don't get finished, but they aren't requested often. Like musician dad's family we like leftovers and even snack on them. Also I think food issues and possible later obesity are more important that an occasional thrown away bit of food. Most of our waste comes from things like the last corn bread muffin got moldy or I should have frozen the last of the gumbo.

[KBinSATX]

I think really the key to not going crazy is simply offering small portions. Folding a piece of bread over and making a sandwich out of just one slice rather than a whole sandwich, offering things in small portions, etc.

I am almost 40 now and I still remember my mom talking about me having to eat things because in other parts of the world people were starving. As a child I couldn't make the connection there. It didn't mean anything to me. If she wanted to mail my snack to the starving I would have much preferred that over gagging on it myself.

I also agree about the obesity issue. Both my husband and I were trained to clean our plates and not waste anything. He's been struggling with obesity all his life and has just been diagnosed with diabetes. I don't want that for my kids. I'd much rather they leave something on their plate and still be able to listen to their bodies.

[coffeegirl]

Originally Posted by hakeber

I guess you're right. Maybe it just teaches them not to be so flighty and flakey about food. Maybe it just teaches them not to ask for more than they really want in the first place. I totally get that body cues are important, and something to teach my kid about...I just think a perfectly EQUAL thing, if not even more important in my book, that I wanted to teach my kid (and as far as I can see I have) is to ALSO be considerate of the fact that in our family we just simply don't snack a bit on this and a bit on that and then leave the dregs of it on the shelf of the fridge until it is too gross to be eaten anymore. It's wasteful, and morally wrong. We think about our food and make careful choices to start with, we finish what we start and we don't waste food. Which means we take the time to learn from our mistakes how much food to take in the first place. Sometimes that means eating a grody sandwich from earlier in the day rather than the luxury of a fresh one. I also believe that by giving ourselves these boundaries, we teach ourselves to really think carefully about it FIRST. We listen to our bodies BEFORE we make the snack, or if we can't, we don't get to have the luxury of extra snacks.

I don't really think catering to the whims of one's body TRUMPS the moral values of my family. I don't. I don't believe that anyone NEEDS an apple before dinner but absolutely can't first try to finish a half of banana they didn't finish earlier first and THEN see if they still need that apple, or for that matter the APPPLE THEY HAVE SITTING IN THE FRIDGE FROM EARLIER!!!

I mean seriously...am I supposed to let my kid have a new apple when there is a half an apple they left from earlier that day sitting in the fridge? You must be joking! I'm just not even going to pretend that I would consider that reasonable.

I agree with this 100%. I don't want to raise my girl to be finicky about food, and I know that one way to do this (I know from experience, mind you) is to offer kids endless choices on food all the time. Everyone has individual tastes, everyone has something they dislike or really like, etc. But a lot of these preferences are trained into kids at an early age and can be avoided, IMO.

I wouldn't force a child to eat anything they hated. I'm talking about preferences that aren't strong...where the child could go either way on the PB&J for instance, but when given other options, will go for the other options or just answer no to the "do you want the PB&J?" question because they're at the age where they like to answer no to things and be a contrarian. lol

We're just going to try to be reasonable, and not waste food, and teach the little one that we don't waste food.

eta: Also totally agree with the previous poster who mentioned smaller portions of snacks being key.