Mr. Garland and I had very different experience with food growing up. In my family, most nights we ate fast food and when my mom cooked dinner, it usually meant we were having Hamburger Helper. I subsisted mostly on turkey sandwiches and Ramen noodles, and McDonald’s was my restaurant of choice. It was very rare for fresh produce to be served at our table, and I wasn’t complaining because I was picky. I wouldn’t touch salad until I was in high school, and even then it took years before I would eat vegetables on the regular. To this day I’m very picky about what I will and won’t eat, and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have nearly enough fruits or vegetables in my diet.

Mr. Garland, on the other hand, grew up in a home where dinner was cooked almost every night and his family ate a very wide variety of foods. He grew up eating sushi, Indian food, and every vegetable under the sun. He’s one of the least picky people I’ve ever met, and will eat just about anything.

Now, I’m not making any sort of commentary on the way that either of us grew up – I am perfectly healthy, not overweight, and keep a reasonably balanced diet as an adult. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way either of our families did things… it was just very different. As a result, Mr. Garland and I have pretty differing opinions when it comes to food, and it’s been interesting to work out the kinks as Jackson gets older and more verbal about what he does and doesn’t like!

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Jackson recently discovered the joys of ketchup… and leaves, apparently.

Mr. Garland’s approach to food is much stricter than mine:

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you have to eat your vegetables even if you don’t like them, no picking around the things you don’t like, and dessert is something that was never really available on the regular in his home, so he doesn’t see a reason for it most nights. I, on the other hand, remember how awful it was to be a picky eater and how much stress it caused me… there were times where I had genuine anxiety about going to a friend’s house for dinner because I was worried I would gag or throw up if I had to eat vegetables that I didn’t like! I would never have been able to “force” myself to eat something I didn’t like. In addition to that, I grew up in a household with very little rules about what I could and couldn’t eat, and I have very good self-control to this day and have never had an issue regulating my intake of sweets and “bad” foods. I feel that kids know what they do and don’t like, and if they don’t like things we shouldn’t make mealtime more stressful than it needs to be. I also don’t ever want to instill the idea that certain foods (like dessert) are more valuable than others, so I don’t believe in withholding dessert until the less desirable foods are eaten. However, dessert was also a valued part of the meal in my home and my dad and I both have the sweet tooth of a 5-year-old child.

Basically, we have opposite opinions on all mealtime rules!

At this point in our parenting journey, it hasn’t mattered too much that we see things differently – Jackson is still a bit too young to truly understand any rules we might put into place, and we’ve got a little while before we really will need to enforce anything related to mealtime and what he does or doesn’t eat. However, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about how we want to handle things in the future, and we have managed to come to a compromise on what we plan to do:

– We agree that Jackson will have to at least take a bite of all foods offered (a teacher I used to work with called it the “no, thank you” bite!) each time they are offered. After tasting the food, if he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t have to finish it.

– We’ll encourage healthy choices when it comes to dessert, sweets, and “junk” food, but we won’t place severe limits on them because we don’t want to place them on a pedestal or make them even more desirable. Instead, we’ll just provide more healthy options in the house than unhealthy options, and we will be careful not to use dessert or treats as a reward.

– We both agreed easily that we will never make Jackson finish a plate or force him to continue eating after he says he’s done. We want him to be able to recognize when he’s full and respect that feeling, so when he says he’s done we listen – even if he’s only had two bites of dinner.

I obviously can’t predict exactly how well we will stick to these “rules” as Jackson gets older, but I feel good that we’ve come to a compromise on how we plan to handle things. Mealtime can be such a stressful thing for so many families, and we want to make things as easy as we can while still teaching Jackson to have healthy habits. Now I just need to work on being a better example for him… I’m gonna have to start eating more veggies one of these days!

How do your mealtime philosophies differ from your partners? What are your rules for eating with your little ones?