KINSHIP SNACKS: How To Get Kids to Eat Their Dinner

Plus: how the Aunties rallied for pandemic twins; intergenerational friendships in L.A.; matriarchy; one household, four parents; magic keychain offers time off, free visits to the back doctor.

Welcome! I’m Lisa Sibbett and this is The Auntie Bulletin, a weekly newsletter about kinship and community for people who choose to help raise other people’s kids – and the people who love us. You can read my archive here.

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Kids! They Won’t Eat Their Dinner!

You know what I’m talking about. It’s dinnertime and they’re busy making a hospital with their stuffies; they won’t come to the table. Or they’ll come to the table but really they only want to crawl under the table. Or they’ll sit in their chair and chatter but not touch their food. Or they’ll eat one bite of rice and then crawl under the table.

“Eat your dinner!” the adults say. “Try a bite! You like this kind of chicken!” Nada.

We went to Bend, OR for a wedding last summer, and while there we spent a lot of time hanging with friends and their kids. This restaurant was a fave.

Sometimes it’s just an ignoring of the dinner. Sometimes there’s more of an “I don’t like that,” a food rejection. But when everyone’s tired, the adults may start handing down commandments about numbers of bites and the kids may start howling in rage and throwing their plates on floor and then they get hauled off to bed flailing and screaming and when at last the parent gets the kid into bed, the kid goes, “I’m hungry.”

When kids try to skip dinner, Aunties can sometimes intervene and change the course of the evening. This is because our tanks don’t tend to be as low as those of primary caregivers – we can still be inventive and playful toward the end of the day, at which point parents tend to be running on fumes – and because most Aunties don’t eat with the kids every single night, we also have the advantage of novelty.

Today’s post is about how to persuade kids to cheerfully eat their dinner – a feat involving attention, resourcefulness, and creativity, as well as healthy doses of trickery and ruse. I’ll start by showing you an awful video in which a kid has a nuclear meltdown at dinner and a so-called supernanny coaches the parents to command him into exhausted submission. It’s an approach most parents fall back on sometimes – but let’s be clear that nobody actually likes doing this. Much better for a kid to eat dinner laughing than crying. Much better for the adults to coast, rather than battle, through mealtime.

I totally have permission from Bill Watterson to use this image.

Now, only watch this unpleasant 5-minute video if you’re feeling up to it. Here’s a quick summary: A small child is losing his mind because he doesn’t want to eat his corn and chicken. The parents, evidently frustrated, tell him to eat and not yell at the dinner table. Then the visiting nanny intervenes – this is from that British Supernanny show from the mid-aughts, maybe you remember it – and she commands the child to obey. The kid continues screaming. A time-out is imposed. More screaming. The parents are coached to be firm. Another time-out. At one point, the kid runs away and takes a fall and really starts screaming. After 1 hour and 16 minutes of conflict, seemingly exhausted into submission, the child tearfully eats two bites of chicken. Nobody looks happy. The end.

Aunties, there is a better way. In fact, there are many better ways.

If you want to find out how to persuade kids to eat their dinner without tears, upgrade to a paid subscription now! It’s $5 per month or $50 for the year.