Teaching manners to children, 4: Regarding “issues”

I’m sorry this post is late! Last week we flew to Memphis for Violin Daughter’s graduation from The Center for Western Studies’ gap year program, and then this week we drove home with her. I cannot recommend The Center highly enough. It’s a fantastic program and John and Day Hodges are fine people who truly love their students. If it’s at all possible for your child to spend a year at The Center, you should take advantage of it!

On to business! Last time I said, “at that stage the only rule I had was that I did NOT want there to be Issues surrounding mealtimes.” This time I want to expand on that.

Part 1: Definitions
Part 2: Basic principles
Part 3: Earliest stages

Part 4: Regarding “issues”

The nature of food and meals

Food and meals are meant for nourishment and comfort and fellowship. It is the parents’ duty to nourish their children, which is another way of saying that you owe it to these little people whom you have brought into the world to nurture and comfort and feed them.

I wanted our mealtimes to be peaceful and pleasant times, so that precluded having fights with the kids about what and how much they were eating (or not) and it also precluded using food for rewards and punishment.

But how do you do that? Here are a couple of principles to keep in mind:

Principle #1: Prevent issues from arising in the first place

Principle #2: If a child is hungry he will eat what is given him*

So, if I didn’t want to have to force-feed my child, thus creating an issue, I needed him to be hungry when he came to the table. In order for him to be hungry at mealtime, I had to limit snacks. At some point in my life as a mother, I got tired of my kids asking for snacks (because even though we are to imitate our heavenly Father, who delights when we come to him with all our needs, Mama is a finite being and only has limited amounts of time, energy, and attention, and not only does she need to recognize and accept that, but her children need to learn to respect it), so I put out a bowl of fresh fruit and told the kids they could eat whatever they wanted from it, whenever they wanted it, WITHOUT ASKING. Raw fruit never stopped my kids from being hungry at mealtime, but your kids might be different.

My responsibility then, was simply to keep the bowl of fruit filled, and to remind them not to ask me for snacks. This included not caving in when they wanted bread and butter or trail mix or whatever instead of the designated snack. If you are going to make a rule, you must stick by it. If you cave in on occasion, you are merely teaching your children that if they pester you enough they can get what they want. You must be, as Cindy Rollins would say, impervious to their pleas. They are not going to starve to death before supper, no matter what they say.*

Also, you must do all of this cheerfully and confidently. Remember, you don’t want negative emotions attached to food, and you certainly don’t want them feeling insecure in your decisions. You are the adult, and your confidence in your own decisions will help them have confidence in you.

So, one food rule we had was that one about snacks.

Another one was that they could have seconds of whatever they wanted, so long as they had eaten everything on their plates.

In order for this to work, I had to fill their plates myself so I could control portions. This meant that I had to know each child well enough to have a good idea of what a reasonable amount of food was. This also meant that on occasion they’d have a growth spurt and their appetite would get ahead of me. I’d notice that this had happened when a child would eat seconds and thirds and fourths of mashed potatoes. When this happened, I’d adjust the portions of meat and veggies at the next meal, so that there wasn’t ROOM in their tummies for four servings of mashed potatoes.

Notice what I would NOT do: I would not stop them after seconds of potatoes, and tell them that they had to have another serving of broccoli before they could have more potatoes. To do that would be to make potatoes the reward for eating broccoli, and like I said, I didn’t want that kind of thing to go on.

A third rule I had was that desserts were a separate course, and getting dessert was not contingent on anything other than it being time for dessert.

This was especially hard for Mike to handle because he grew up in a family where dessert was always a reward for having eaten everything on his plate.

I had no qualms about enforcing this for two reasons. One was that for the most part the kids weren’t leaving uneaten food on their plates. The other was that dessert was a rarity in our house. We have birthday cake several times a year, and I make pies for major holidays, but dessert is never a regularly expected course.

One bit of advice when making the dessert: Be sure that you make an amount that is sufficient for each person to have ONE reasonably sized serving, and no leftovers. This avoids the issue of people eating too much dessert, and it also avoids having them beg you for leftover dessert when they want a snack before bed, or the next day.

By this point, you might be concerned about wasting food. I really hate throwing out food too, so I had a couple of different ways of dealing with this. One was that if there was only a tiny bit of food left over, I’d just throw it out. I mean, I would NOT encourage them to eat “just this last bite” in order to keep from wasting it. To do this would be to train them to ignore their bodies’ signals that they’d had enough to eat, which is to say, doing that would train them to overeat.

If there was really a lot of food left, and they said they weren’t hungry, I’d tell them that I was going to put it in the fridge, and if they got hungry later, they should eat it, instead of fruit. This is my one kind-of-exception to the fruit-only snack rule. A few times, when I was a very young mother, I continued to bring this plate of leftovers out for meals until it was all eaten, but that was horrible. Finally I limited myself to bringing it out for the very next meal, but not more than that. If the child had eaten nothing during that time because that food was so distasteful to him, I figured maybe there was something going on that I didn’t understand, so I didn’t make an issue of it. At the following meal, we started fresh.

Another concern you might have is training a picky eater. I remember when #1 Son was just three and a half or four years old and on Sundays I always made a pot of 15-bean soup and started the bread machine before leaving for church, so lunch would be ready as soon as we got home. This son LOVED the fresh bread and HATED the soup. He would eat his entire slice of bread and then not eat any soup at all, so I had to figure something out. What I finally did was this: At the beginning of the meal, I would cut his piece of bread in half and set it on a small plate close to me and tell him that when he had eaten half of his soup, he could have one half of his bread. Then after he’d eaten the second half of soup he could have the rest of his bread. That worked well for him. He never learned to like 15-bean soup, and he’s still a picky eater, but he does know how to eat what’s placed before him without complaining.

This almost looks like using the bread as a reward for eating the soup, but I think that because of the overall environment around our meals, it didn’t feel like that to him, and it never was stressful. He never fussed over that rule—he just buckled down and ate the soup.

I want to reiterate how important it is to be consistent and firm and confident, while being open to adapting as difficult situations arise. I stress the firmness as foundational because I think that today the temptation for us parents is for flexibility and adaptability to be our modus operandi, and we only become firm when we’re really tired and stressed out. This is really hard on children. Children need to know what to expect in order to feel secure, and the key to that is parents who act with gentle consistency, loving firmness, and humble confidence. 

These principles were things that I had in mind from the time my first children were quite small, but much of the practical application developed after I had to start thinking hard about training in table manners. Next time I’ll tell you all what caused me to have to step up my game.

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* Barring medical issues, of course