I have noticed over the years, that a big part of being a parent is that you gotta walk the walk if you are talking the talk, because, let’s face it, kids can spot a phony a mile away, this includes you, their beloved parent and they will call you out on it too.
I’ve never been a “do as I say, not as I do” mother, and I am aware of authenticity in relationships because I have the crazy thought that if someone can’t trust your word, then they can’t trust you at all. Well, that’s how I gauge whether or not to believe a person, anyway. It’s almost embarrassing how little faith I have in people. I still love them and stuff, I just don’t trust them.
I recently found a recipe for tofu chocolate pudding, (which sounds wacky but totally works) which my son loves. I am secretly elated. I have to do everything I can to not make it all the time because I know he will also “go off” favorite meals too. I am continually on the lookout for recipes that are better for you than the original fast versions with all sorts of artificial and highly processed ingredients. You know, the ones where you would get about as much nutrition eating the box it came out of as the actual product. For myself and him, but it’s a constant issue, because who doesn’t love convenience?
It’s quite distracting/terrifying to start reading ingredient lists and then looking them up online. And as we are mainly grazers in our eating habits, (you know a couple of main meals, but we survive on snacks and smaller meals mainly) so to be realistic, I am always looking to up our snack and small meal game.
Although, I am continually torn between wanting him to just eat food and wanting him to eat healthy nutritious food. It doesn’t help that my son is a fussy eater, and he always has been. Always.
I remember when he was a baby introducing solid foods (of course it was all homemade purees lovingly prepared from organic produce) and being so excited to introduce my small human to all the goodness he could handle. He didn’t share the sentiment, he would pull hilarious faces and push the food out of his mouth with his tongue, screwing up his little nose, a very cute but solid NOPE, of course, I would try things 10 or 12 times – as every parenting book says- and still, I would be heartbroken, wondering what I was doing wrong.
And then as a toddler, he would push his bowl away, with a very loud NOOOO.
I’d do choo-choo trains and planes, and he’d laugh and still not eat.
All this time and effort preparing his meals and he was having none of it.
Didn’t he understand all the time and effort I put into cooking his meals? Or check out reviews and ingredient lists online of baby/toddler food and snacks?
Of course, he didn’t, he was a baby. It was the purest and most honest reaction.
We have not found any food allergies or sensitivity, he’s just fussy.
I think it is a texture thing, and I get it, for years I couldn’t eat raw tomatoes (too seedy, slimy, and gaggy) or oysters (too much like clumps of mucus) because the texture was too much to digest, I still have a hard time with chunky textured dishes, but have managed to overcome the resistance to tomatoes.
When he was really young I used to think it reflected poorly on my own mothering skills – after all other mothers apparently have their children eat everything, what was my problem? I was obviously a failure.
Later on, I also used to think “omg I don’t want him to be that one kid that ONLY eats a random handful of foods. How embarrassing”. As if my son’s food preferences somehow reflected my terrible parenting skills and inability to feed him nutritious food.
It’s almost funny to me how, as mothers, we automatically see something as our own failing, when most of the time, it is just that the kid is a certain way, and how other people perceive that, is on them. Turns out our children are individuals with likes and dislikes and preferences all their own. Crazy.
Over the years I have tried every approach: Coercion, rewards, striking deals, various rewards systems when he was younger, agreeing on a meal before cooking it, planning our meals with him for the entire week, pleading, and even some begging, but none of them worked for longer than a couple of meals.
The only thing I haven’t tried is forcing him, making him sit there until everything is eaten, even if it’s cold. It seems wrong to keep a child at the table and force them through bullying to eat things they just don’t want to. Because that’s what it is. Bullying.
What if you did that to another adult? Or your grandmother? Wouldn’t that be considered some sort of abuse?
I can only think the people who go on about “in my day there were only two options- eat it or go hungry”, or “make them eat it” somehow feel it is their right to inflict the same misery on their children that they experienced, or don’t realize that now they are the adults or maybe they do not realize they are instilling food issues.
And the old standby of “that’s how I grew up, and I’m fine” doesn’t fly either. I would argue that none of us are fine.
Now that I’m an adult, I can laugh in horror about being stuck at the table, dramatically crying, being forced to eat cold juicy veggies I hated, choking them down half-eaten, hiccuping, and gagging. If I had the discipline, I would have developed some sort of eating disorder, but besides being chubby, I was lazy. This girl was never going to starve herself. But I definitely don’t want to do that to my kid. Way to make meal times miserable.
My son is older now and has braces. It’s cranked up the what-to-eat anxiety (on my part) a little more but changed the emotional weight of the whole situation. I have never experienced a mouth full of metal things glued to my teeth with wires and bands slowly exerting pressure to change the shape of my jaw and teeth, but I imagine it sucks big time.
The added bonus, however, is that he is now a teenager and we can have conversations about appropriate reactions and responses to food. He understands and does his best to be polite about food. So that’s good. Gotta take those wins where I find them.
I still find myself thinking about food a whole lot though.
I notice my own perspective on the topic has changed dramatically, as we have navigated the various obstacles and conflicts in life, the feeding thing isn’t so urgent, not such a big deal.
My son can feed himself the basics, make a sandwich, and some oatmeal, and make himself avocado toast so he will never go hungry. I’ve been trying to teach him how to cook his favorite dishes, and although he’s not really interested, he’s not really the kitchen-inclined kid, I used to stop for a moment stunned when I’d come across the kids cooking shows, where did these young chefs come from? Are they trained from birth? How are they so interested in food?
But mainly I have eased the mental pressure on us both by stepping back and acknowledging that he is allowed to have thoughts and opinions that do not line up with mine about food. And the world and life. (shock! horror!)
I’m less emotionally tied to whether or not he eats the food I cook, (if he does yay! If he doesn’t, I get lunch tomorrow.)
I realize as a mother it is very easy to slip into toxic control interactions around food and let’s face it – almost everything when it comes to our children. At times I have caught myself trying to keep him in some mental box, treating him as if he is a particular way because that’s how he was last month, last year, etc, entirely forgetting that he is rapidly growing and evolving, and it’s not just his height or shoe size either.
So, like so many other things in my mothering voyage, it is fluid, a dance of holding on and letting go. But now that he is older and time is going by faster, I have made the choice to not get caught up in the small stuff. Because it’s all small stuff.
I guess only time will tell if I have made the right choices, my instinct tells me I am on the right track, and that’s good enough for me.
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