The Dinner Dilemma

When I was kid and imagined my future life as a wife and mom, one of the things I did NOT look forward to was the prospect of preparing meals three times a day.  My frequent babysitting stints had taught me that kids expected to eat again mere hours after eating a meal, and it took considerable effort to prepare and clean up meal after meal.  And this monotony continued on, every day and forever.

I was right and wrong in my predictions. Preparing food every day is definitely hard and is sometimes boring, although I've actually learned to enjoy cooking and baking and I love to see my family enjoy food I have prepared.  But I way underestimated how monumentally difficult the task of feeding my family would actually be.

I had lots of texture/taste/smell food issues as a kid. In the 1970s I was the classic "picky eater." Now I recognize that my pickiness was the result of a hyperactive tactile sensory system.  Trying to feed me caused my parents lots of grief during my growing up years and I have very few positive memories of mealtimes as a child.

Payback is a bummer.  Genetics have prevailed and each of my kids has tactile defensiveness and other sensory issues, which results in some seriously picky eating.

Trying to provide healthy food for 6 (well, 5 now that Brandon is grown) very different people is a challenge, but these are the things I wrestle with every day which turn it into a perplexing and sometimes frustrating puzzle:

• I really value healthy eating and feel like this is incredibly strong preventive medicine. This means a variety of foods.
• Everyone in the family eats healthy foods but few eat the same healthy foods. They don't even all like the same fruits and vegetables.  Everyone has a few core meals they enjoy and most would be pretty happy to eat the same few meals over and over. 
• But the meals each kid likes don't intersect at all. There isn't a single meal I can make which every single person likes.  Not one.
• I do not want to be a short order cook, preparing 4 different meals. But I also value the positive effects of meal time together, talking and sharing stories about our day. This kind of camaraderie simply does not happen when the anxiety level rises and food becomes a battle.
• And yet, I know from personal experience that the only way to improve issues with foods is repeated exposures to unfamiliar foods. By doing this for most of my life I've learned to like most foods and to love many foods I wouldn't have dreamed of eating as a child. In fact, I'm kind of a "foodie" now and I crave unique, unfamiliar, and ethnic foods. There are still some things I don't like and that's okay. I can work around it. I really try to teach my kids that we all have some foods we may never enjoy, but there is another big category comprised of foods which aren't our favorites but which we can still make ourselves eat.  It's within this category that we can push the limits of what foods we will eat.
• Back to my list of complexities .  . .  our schedule is crazy busy. Just figuring out how to get food prepared at all means that I have to be proactive, prepared, and intentional about menu plans. Last year Bailey suggested that we make a two week calendar of meals (because she has learned to really like new recipes, and she knew that I would never make something new if it wasn't planned way ahead of time).  I have been doing the two week menu, and it has definitely expanded our culinary horizons.
• Except it really hasn't, because a high percentage of family members won't try any new recipes. So I'm back to square one. Going to the extra effort to make something new or fun and also preparing several other meals.
• I've tried every single thing in the picky eating parenting books, to little avail. The long list includes requiring kids to make their own healthy but boring meal if they don't like what we are eating, requiring kids to make a meal every week, asking kids to find recipes for foods they want to try, encouraging them to expand their food repertoire with "lateral moves," foods that are similar to ones they already eat but different in some unique way; incentivizing food bravery, attaching a punishment to the refusal to eat dinner.  Dan and I are always strategizing what we could do differently and trying to figure out why everything we try goes awry. We generally go around in circles and end up at the same few key points:

1. Kids need to eat. Regularly. They also need to learn good health habits regarding food.
2. Kids need to learn to eat food that other people eat so they can co-exist in the real world.
3. We don't want food to be a stressful thing and we don't want mealtimes to be a battleground. At the same time, we do want kids to push themselves to try new foods.
4. The kids are probably not going to push themselves to try those new foods, so it's up to us to enforce it.
5. And now we're back to the crux of the food battles. We have to constantly push something which is really difficult, while at the same time encouraging everyone to eat healthy and well balanced meals and enjoy mealtime. Three times a day.  Whew.

I will say that each of the kids has improved considerably as they have gotten older. It gives me hope for everyone. I can foresee a time when figuring out what to prepare for dinner doesn't require an Excel spreadsheet.

In my lowest moments (and believe me, I have them) I remind myself that I know from personal experience that is is scary and almost painful to confront food issues which are created by misfiring sensory systems and reinforced by anxiety. I truly have empathy for my kids. I also know, and I remind them frequently, that it can get better, but they have to be willing to experience discomfort. I am glad that I have this knowledge so I can do my best to help them. I also know that these will be issues they will continue to work on all their lives. I also have to have hope that somehow it will all work out. That they will grow up to be functional and healthy eating adults who can tackle the picky eating conundrum with their own kids. And when I am the grandma I get to NOT be the bad guy.  Cookies for dinner?  Grandma says yes!