The Food Rules I Don’t Follow
When it comes to feeding kids, I do it my own way
When my kids were little, I heard the warnings: don’t become a short-order cook. So I felt like a failure when I found myself preparing three separate meals for dinner — one for the adults and one for each child, five years apart in age. The prepping, cooking, and cleanup happened in multiple stages, too; the kids would eat early, hours before my husband would be home from work (we could unpack all the heavily gendered patterns here, but that’s a story for another day). It wasn’t ideal. But everyone was getting fed, the kids were growing, and we muddled through.
Still, I remember wishing things were simpler, and I had no one to blame but myself. Clearly I was incompetent at this seemingly basic aspect of parenting. Cue the shame spiral.
I had no idea there was a well-established method to ease our particular brand of mealtime stress. But this was a pre-Instagram, pre-podcast world, and long before “child feeding expert” was a term I had ever heard. The idea of taking a specific approach to feeding kids (beyond “breast vs. bottle”) was completely unknown to me.
I fed my kids the best I knew how, and I got through one meal at a time (or should I say, three meals at a time). As my younger child developed a broader palate and the kids…
