Do you make "special" dinners for your toddler if they don't like what you are eating - Page 6

[Heffernhyphen]

When DH was little, spaghetti sauce made his lips tickle. So his mom would make him oatmeal and stir in the butter until it melted saying, "Where's the buuuutter?" in a sweet, southern sing-song voice. He still remembers it fondly and sometimes I hear him asking our son, "Where's the buuuutter?"

I pray that my son will have such fond, loving memories of me when he's 40.

[hipem]

My kids have a pretty early bedtime and dh gets home just in time for their bedtime so most nights I make them dinner and sit with them while they eat and then dh and I eat after they go to bed. Sometimes we eat the same thing but more often than not I make us something else. My kids are picky and won't eat nearly the variety that dh and I will but they eat a pretty balanced diet so we don't worry about it. I'm not a short order cook when we eat together but it doesn't bother me to make them a scrambled egg or grilled cheese or offer a bowl of yogurt or cereal.

[MommyofPunkiePie]

I don't usually make a separate meal for DD, but if she doesn't want to eat what I am eating, she doesn't go hungry. I always have some rice and (beans, spinach, mushrooms, etc.) in the fridge that I can just heat up for her. I have also found that if she resists eating when I am eating, she will, 9 times out of 10, eat that food later.
She is sensitive to carrots, zucchini, butternut squash, and wheat, so she can't have anything with these ingredients. However, she is only sensitive to wheat through my breastmilk, so I can eat foods containing the others. If this is the case, I do make her something different since I haven't investigated cross-contamination yet.

[CaraboosMama]

Nope. The only time we make her something else/modify her meal is if what we are eating is super-spicy.

eta: I should note that my dd is NOT usually a picky eater, though. My DH on the other hand....

I partly agree w/ posters who think that giving your toddler a different meal is setting a bad precedent. But...I only partly agree. Like adults, children have different moods and cravings. What I don't like is when adults insist their children will ONLY eat chicken nuggets or other similar crappy food. The adults are the ones doing the shopping, preparing the meal & serving the food. If you child will "only eat junk food" the adult is the one responsible for introducing that food in the first place. If my dd did not want what we were having, I would be willing to make a healthy substitution within reason. I would definitely encourage sharing in the family meal first.

[shawndauganda]

I'm with you! Whatever mommy fixes is what we ALL get! It's not only helpful for us mommies, but it teaches good manners for when the kids are visiting others.....and in some cultures it's rude to turn away food because "you don't like it". So, we try to offer a couple of things, and they need to at least eat a little of it all.....and can eat more of what they like if they want : ) It's challenging at times for sure....but in the long run, I think it teaches our children more about respect than it does about food!

[katallen]

I don't make an extra meal, but I will make a sandwich or a different fruit or vegetable. I also usually make some foods that I know she will eat with the new food or food she may not want so that I don't have to get up again. DD can't buy and prepare her own food and I only buy what I will eat so I try not to get upset about preparing something else.

[PinksMommy]

Hmm, well, actually I am going to be making a "special" dinner for me and DH and any other grownups and DD gets the "real" dinner.

She is 17mo, and just now we are making up an entire new diet plan for her to combat severe intestinal issues. Her new menu has to be extremely high fiber, no dairy, no potatoes, rice, white starcy stuff, etc.

DH and I are not sick and don't need to eat like that and really enjoy eating dairy and potatoes especially. For the most part though, DD gets the same vegetables served as I make for the whole meal, and for our bread and pasta products, we have already switched to all whole-grain for everyone, much to DH's chagrin.

Also, DD doesn't like beef yet. I think she will, she just isn't ready. So when we have hamburgers or a pot roast or something, I will serve it to her but she mostly will only eat the side items and not the meat.

[anarchamama]

I to come from a family of punitive eaters. And I was picky and then I think it just turned into a battle of wills. I would sit at the table for hours every night, until eventually my dad would put food in my mouth and hold my jaw shut while I gagged and swallowed. becasue of this I feel in some ways incapable of having good judgement about this and follow dh's lead. Our meal rules are basically this:

1) You don't have to sit at the table and eat with us, but you do have to respect the meal, which basically means leave us alone to eat in peace, if ds doesen't want to eat he usually sits under or near the table and plays quietly.
2) I am not a short order cook, I saw aunts who fell into this and made literally three seperate meals at each time. No way. If they don't like whats for dinner they can get something else (I feel so wierd about it I can't even do a one bite thing, I am just worried I will take it personally) that requires little to no preperation. Yogurt/fruit/crackers/pb bread. we generally haev only reasonable healthy options around so I don't worry to much about it.
3) DS only ate pureed food for a short time and then I started just giving him whatever was finger appropriate out of our meals.

I am really uncomfortable with food disipline and I suspect we often over estimate how much food our kids really need. DS can be a picky eater but its toally random, his loves and hates fluctuate madly every day, so I think it's more about him asserting himslef than anything else, which is fine with me. And you can get him to eat darn near anything if you pretend to be mad at him for eating it, he gets so excited about being "naughty" that he wil chew it up and swallow it before he even knows what it is!

[ayme371]

I always offer ds what we are eating but he can be picky and gets in "moods" with his food. One day he loves it and the next he hates it. I do not want to make meal time a battle so I will offer him something else if he does not like what we are eating, I do not cook a completely separate meal though.

I have too many memories of drowning eggs in catsup and sitting at the table with a hunk of steak in my mouth for hours. Not pleasant!!! I do not want to do that to my ds. I was a pretty picky eater but now I'll try just about everything and I hope my ds will be willing to as well.

[AmyC]

I have only read the first two pages of posts to this thread, but wanted to throw in my two cents while I have the chance.

I do not make a different meal for my 2 year old (she's 26 months) but I do find myself getting up to get things for her, sometimes. For us, it generally works this way: she is in the midst of eating her food, and she'll suddenly look up and ask for "kiwi, please?" Or she'll ask for yogurt (she's used to plain yogurt; we buy it locally) or maybe applesauce. (These are all things she's asked for at least once, at one time or another. Not perpetual requests, and not to replace the dinner she's eating.)

She's also asked for "hini butter" (tahini) on Ak-Mak crackers, especially if I've offered it as a snack recently, and MANY times she's asked for cheese. Sometimes cheese and "brown crackers," which is what she calls Kashi multigrain TLC's. She goes through phases of asking for oranges a lot. And she sometimes will ask for walnuts. Every once in a very long while, she'll ask for a cup of "cow's milk." (She doesn't really drink it routinely, so this is sort of a special request, too.)

She usually asks for one thing, if she's asking (though sometimes it's a pair of things if she's used to them going together--hini butter on Ak-Mak, cheese with crackers, walnuts & cranberries, etc.)

It seems to me that her requests often make sense, nutritionally. Most times that she has asked for something like cheese or yogurt, I'm happy to get it for her because I suddenly realize I'm not certain that she's really had enough fat. And if I've got it, I will sometimes give her half an avocado in chunks (as part of her dinner) when there isn't any avocado on our plates. Not necessarily by her request, but different from our meal.

And I've noticed that she'll ask for orange or kiwi or blueberries when she's eating meat, especially if I have not combined the meat with tomatoes or some other source of Vitamin C in our meal. (Or sometimes she'll ask in addition to the tomatoes we already have.) It makes sense to me that she might need the vitamin C to improve her body's absorption of the iron in the meat, and I don't find it impossible to believe that she's asking for something out of some kind of intuitive awareness or instinct about what she needs.

Once she did ask for noodles (we had had leftover spaghetti for lunch, and she'd eaten it all and wanted more) and I remember she was upset when I told her I didn't have any. She got over it, but she was upset, expecting me to make some. The same has happened if we've been out of milk when she's asked. I guess I could have cooked pasta for her, but it seemed ridiculous since she was basically eating her meal, had other things to eat, and it would have been a fair bit of effort. So maybe I'm not acting like a short order cook with her, I don't know. If she asked for pasta during dinner (when we weren't having pasta), I can't imagine myself fixing it for her.

However, the only food she consistently doesn't seem to eat is bell peppers. She is accepting of mosts foods, at least most of the time. So it's not a matter of asking for an alternative to her dinner and me accomodating that.

True, I can't always predict what she'll eat and what she'll ignore (of the things that she likes, I mean. It seems to go in cycles: lately she hasn't seemed as crazy about pasta but more interested in eating all the other ingredients OUT of the pasta dish, which is a switch from when she would devour noodles first) but I've never known her to flat-out refuse to eat a meal that we're eating.

And sometimes I've found that giving her some chunks of cheese, or putting some frozen berries on her plate, or otherwise accomodating her request, makes her eat up something that she was previously stalled on in the meal.

I have sometimes wondered if accomodating her requests for extra things is somehow "bad," in that "maybe I'm making a mistake by following my instinct, here" kind of way. I don't know; it seems to be working for us. I find things that are compelling in various points of view expressed here. It does make me wonder.

[Earth Goddess]

We've been pretty lucky with DS. He's 21 months now, and there isn't much he doesn't like. And he's very good about trying new things. There have only been a couple of times that he really didn't like what we were having at all and so I made him a quick alternative--some pierogies, steamed broccoli, hummus w/pita, etc. But most of the time he'll eat what we're eating.

[lbp215]

Just to add my two cents...I read and heard some really good advice to help alleviate feeding issues. As a parent, it's our responsibility to offer healthy, nutritious choices for food (and we DO NOT want to be short order cooks in our house and we DO want meal times to be family times which to us means everyone has the same choices more or less to eat) and it is our child's responsibility to eat the food in front of him. If he chooses not to, then that's his choice and we know he won't starve. So we absolutely include him in our eating...we all eat the same. It does make us more conscious of our food choices as well..making sure we eat vegetables and other healthy options.

[Khadijah]

Most of the time DS(13months) he will eat what we eat. But some times he dosent want it. So yes I will cook him something seperate from what we are eating. If he dosent want what we eat.

[mb722toddler]

Toddler eating -- reflection of me and others around her

Hi, lately my toddler is asking for foods I would rather not give her. I don't make an issue out of it. I do my best to feed her healthy. She is a reflection of me -- I have not been eating healthy -- and she helps me to see this. I know if I eat helathier, she will learn by example.