I certainly don't expect my high-energy 3-year-old DS1 to sit at the table for an hour and eat perfectly with a fork and knife and say things like "Will someone please pass the salt?" I try to have age-appropriate expectations, and at his age/stage I feel it's appropriate to expect him to sit at the table for about 10 minutes and eat something, even if it's not a lot.
To give some background, he still nurses lots and doesn't eat a lot of solids. He's very picky with solids too. I'm fine with him not eating what we eat and will offer him something different if it's healthy/quick/easy/convenient. I don't make separate meals, but I have no problem grabbing him some baby carrots, cheese, and whole wheat crackers if that's what he wants. We're also not very formal with meal times. He mostly grazes during the day and dinner is the only meal for which we all sit at the table. We've been doing so a little more at breakfast but usually DS1 will come over and sit for a minute, eat a few Cheerios, and then go back to playing. At breakfast he likes to sit in a regular chair and does fine with it, at dinner he usually sits in a highchair still if he joins us at all. We give him the option of sitting in a big boy chair, but often he'll take the opportunity to climb on the table and get into DH's and my food, the salt shaker, our glass of water, etc. Needless to say we don't tolerate the climbing on the table. Sometimes he wants to climb all over Daddy, making it very difficult for my husband to eat his food. At Christmas Eve dinner at my sister's house, she had a special kids table for DS1 and her 5-year-old son, and DS1 refused to sit so we let him go play but I felt bad. Same at Christmas dinner at our house. I could feel everyone judging us both times, and while that usually doesn't bother me, it bothers me when I'm not super-confident in our decisions to begin with. Both times my husband kind of took the lead on letting him go play, and I understand why... because we couldn't physically force him to sit at the table and it would have ruined everyone's meal if he were throwing a fit. And we try to take special circumstances like holiday meals into account too; it's not something we necessarily do on a regular basis at home.
Anyway, I do want teach/enforce some very basic expectations, like sitting at the table for 10 minutes. I don't even mind if he doesn't eat and we give him a toy instead; I know we can't force him to eat if he's not hungry. I do think that part of the "problem" is that he often asks for a snack in the late afternoon, so he's probably NOT hungry at dinnertime. It's really important to us to teach him to eat when he's hungry and not when he's full, so I don't want to limit his food intake when he requests. So anyway, now that I've identified my expectations, how on earth do we enforce them? We can't physically force him to sit in his highchair or regular chair. And even if we could, I don't want him to sit crying at the table for a certain amount of time just to prove a point. He speaks well, but I think it's beyond his understanding for us to explain that dinnertime is family time and even if he's not hungry we'd like him to sit with us, etc. Sometimes if he's eaten a sufficient amount of healthy food before dinner, we'll give him a cookie which I'm actually OK with (I'd be getting tomatoes thrown at me on the Nutrition board), but I don't want to make a habit of bribing him with dessert.
Any tips or advice will be greatly appreciated. TIA for any replies!
