Hands up if you hate dinnertime with your kids. Don’t be shy. Some nights, my hand is raised high. Dinnertime with young children is rough.
As a mom of small children:
I prepare dinner one-handed most nights because my other hand is holding a child.
I need a crystal ball to determine which foods my children will agree to eat on any given day.
I feel like an FBI-trained negotiator, but instead of releasing hostages, I’m just trying to get my 4-year-old to sit in the chair and eat before it’s time to go to bed.
I don’t even bother sitting down to eat so I can get extra kiwi, another fork, or ketchup instead of ranch dressing 60 times per meal.
I thank God above we have a dog who can help keep the floor relatively free of food that has been dropped, flung, and dribbled by my 2-year-old.
If your dinners sound anything like this, you probably don’t look forward to dinnertime either. And you probably have some guilt about that. You want the idyllic family time around the dinner table. You don’t want your children to develop weird associations with food that could last a lifetime. There has to be a way to not hate dinnertime, right?
I haven’t cracked this code by any stretch of the imagination, but I have learned some things that make dinnertime bearable. Most of what I learned came from Instagram, and @feedinglittles in particular. Megan and Judy are truly an invaluable resource, and I encourage you to go check them out if you are even slightly intrigued by the tips I’m sharing below.
How Not to Hate Dinnertime with Kids
1. Opinions
I have recently begun asking my 4-year-old what he wants to eat the following week for dinner as I work on my meal plan and grocery list. Of course, I only grant requests that are within reason. I don’t let him pick ice cream for dinner every night. But if he tells me he’d like spaghetti and meatballs next week, I add it to the menu. If he has had a hand in picking what we eat, he’s way more likely to eat it.
I’ve found that a good old-fashioned cookbook is a great tool to use to accomplish this purpose. We can sit down together and leaf through the book, looking at the pictures and talking about what looks good. Just last night we sat down and flipped through How Sweet Eats’ Everyday Dinners. He picked her Cheaters Tomato Pie, so it’s going on the meal plan for next week. Here’s hoping he eats it!
2. Options
Kids love to feel like they have power. I can often trace back the bad behavior of both my kids to them either feeling powerless or losing a power struggle. To help alleviate these big feelings over power in our family, I have incorporated age-appropriate choices wherever I can. This includes dinnertime.
Although it’s not realistic to give your kids options for what to eat for dinner every night, you can give them small choices to pick aspects of the meal each night. One way I incorporate choice into dinnertime is to let each kid pick what fruit he or she would like to have with dinner. We also alternate which kid gets to pick the plates for the meal. I have found that starting the meal off with a choice helps to set the right tone for the rest of the meal with very little effort on mom’s part. If you haven’t incorporated choice into your kids’ lives yet, give it a try!
3. At least 1 safe food
Kids are notoriously picky eaters, especially from the ages of 18 months to 5 years or so. Both my kids were voracious eaters for their first two years of life. They loved everything I put in front of them during this time and ate Brussels sprouts as happily as mac and cheese. Then the switch flipped and they began to prefer all things beige. Although there is nothing wrong with having a little beige food on the plate, none of us want our kids to subsist entirely on bread products and potatoes.
My solution to this problem, which comes straight from @feedinglittles, is to offer a variety of foods on the plate at each meal, but to make sure there is at least one “safe” food that I know the kids will eat. This ensures that they won’t go hungry, even if they decide they don’t want to try anything out of their beige comfort zone that night. For my kids, I’ve found the following to be their most consistent safe foods, in case you need some inspiration:
Bread and butter or olive oil
Banana
Blueberries
Cucumber slices
Cheese
4. Dips
It’s no coincidence that “dip dip” was one of the first words both of my kids mastered. They have their favorite dips, of course, but really any time I offer a dip they’re into at least trying it. There’s not much my 2-year-old won’t dip into ranch dressing or ketchup, and her brother gets a lot more food in him if I offer him Chick-Fil-A sauce. My strategy is whatever works, and this works, even if I think kiwi dipped in hummus has a strange flavor profile.
5. DIY
Do it yourself dinners are my kids’ favorites. They love to feel like they’re making their own dinner. It definitely makes them want to eat it more if they have a part in putting it together.
It’s not realistic to think that you can have a DIY dinner every night, but sprinkling one in here and there (maybe once a week), helps out a lot. When I do DIY dinner, I put each component of the meal in a silicone muffin cup on the plate. They can put the ingredients together however they want. It’s fun for them to decide what to mix together and it’s fun for mom to watch them come up with some interesting combinations.
Some of my favorite DIY dinners are below to give you a little inspiration:
Tacos
Pitas (I LOVE these BBQ Ranch Chickpea pitas)
Loaded baked potatoes
Chili with fixins
Fancy salads (my Franks-obsessed 4-year old approves of this Buffalo Chicken Chopped Salad)
6. Engagement
I am guilty of picking up my phone when dinnertime isn’t going well. I don’t want to yell at my children ever, but especially during dinner. When I feel myself getting close to pulling the yelling trigger, I escape into my phone. Well, guess what? When my kids see me disengage with them, it only makes the dinner experience worse. They want my attention focused on them rather than my phone, and they will stop at nothing to get it. My kids will spit food, purposefully fall out of the chair, and say bad words to direct my attention back to them.
After several instances of a simply frustrating dinner devolving into pure chaos because I picked up my phone, I have learned my lesson. I make a real effort to engage with both kids during dinner. We talk about our days, we tell funny stories, we sing Disney songs, we just have family togetherness time. When the kids really feel like they are an integral part of the family and the dinnertime ritual, they’re more likely to participate in eating the meal. So we keep the TV off, the phones and tablets away, and focus on one another.
My journey to not hating dinnertime with kids is far from over, but these small tips have inched me toward my ultimate goal. I’m looking forward to learning more ways to improve our dinners. Please leave your tips below!