94 Comments
Oct 4, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

So thankful for “make the labor visible.” My all-male fam truly does not understand my deep hatred of dinner. In one fell swoop, you all validated my hatred, exposed meal planning as the worst job on earth AND I got community. Thx Takeaways: joint planning and starting tonite as chef NOT getting the forgotten salt and pepper.

Expand full comment

The best, most honest article about family dinners I have ever read. I found myself screaming yes, yes yes again and again (please don't touch me while I eat!!).

We have reached the point, with kids ages 11 and 7, where only the youngest member of the family regularly renders family dinner unbearable (he's impatient, opinionated, yet charming--a dangerous combo at mealtimes), yet still, all of this resonates. The only other thing I've found that helps: putting him in charge of ambiance--folding napkins, lighting candles, even pouring wine for the grown-ups (and holding my tongue if he spills). Somehow this helps him feel more invested in what's happening at the table, even if he still rejects the actual meal, and bolts first. It's a start.

Expand full comment
Oct 4, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

I like all of this a lot, especially as I have a kid for whom anxiety management involves a lot of calendars of various types (daily schedule, weekly calendar, yearly calendar, "year at a glance" circle view with all special dates tagged and immediately visible) that he can independently check whenever the urge strikes. (sudden consuming need to know precisely how many days until the first day of school after winter break, right when I'm packing lunches? go count 'em on the circle calendar! live your best life!). I bet he would love a "dinner calendar."

I am still really struggling with the massive schism between what I want dinners to look like for us, and what they actually look like. My partner regularly doesn't get home until 9, and I have forgiven myself for preferring to eat with him versus my kids, so from there it's just a hop/skip/jump to serving "kid meals" early and "actual meals" later. It's the polar opposite of what I thought would matter a lot to me before I had kids, and I cope by just kind of viewing it as a stage to be lived through.

A surprisingly helpful plot twist in this has come from precisely the 4:30 post-school hanger, and the fact that I'm fortunate enough to have my mom able to pick the kids up from school many days. She's retired and single and very introverted, and with that combination can get pretty lonely and sometimes that "blah" kind of bored. So I asked her if she would be willing to handle serving a dinner immediately post-school, on the days she gets them, and I'd cover the grocery costs. It turns out my mom (who HATED cooking/meal planning/etc when I was a kid, back when it was one more stressful thing to do in a day) finds a lot of joy in planning and preparing meals my kids will like, that are a lot more intricate than my own, and my kids are starving when they eat them so they eat more. Then, when they're back home with me in the evening, I am just dealing with serving a dessert or snack instead of a dinner. That frees me up to be a lot less stressed/enraged throughout the evening gauntlet, and play a board game before bed, or invest way more effort into reading all the book characters in different voices when it's reading time, etc. And then after I've got them settled into bed (or sometimes before! Thanks, convection-oven-air-fryer thing with keep-warm function) I get started on one dinner, the dinner I actually want to eat.

If my mom ever tires of making dinners for my kids 3-4x/week, and I can't just totally farm this part of my life out, I am absolutely pivoting to the least-sucky option of family meal planning.

Expand full comment
Oct 4, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

Re: making hot dogs fun: There's a deli near where I used to live that serves two kinds of ~ very fancy ~ hot dogs, one of which may be fun for pickier eaters and one which is probably an adult special. The first is an apple-cheddar dog, served with sauteed slices of cinnamon apples and cheddar melted over. The second is the Chilean "completo" style hot dog, which includes sauerkraut, avocado, mayo and sriracha. They serve both in pretzel buns, which go a long way to making a hot dog feel like a whole meal and not just a snack.

Expand full comment
Oct 4, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

Oh man, the screaming about food they hate. We’ve been working on this for years, with some improvements. One thing that has really helped me in the moment is to say, “you can just say no thank you.” It’s totally true that if you won’t accept a polite no, you’ll get a rude no! And when one of my kids says “no thank you” I reinforce it by saying “thanks for saying no thank you!” I am very happy whenever I get a polite no right off the bat, because I hate it when people scream at me.

Also, when one of us is putting in a grocery order, we’ll ask if anyone has any requests. Sometimes people do, sometimes they draw a blank, but this usually helps us in the snacks and dinner department. I don’t meal plan the whole week, but I have a rough idea of what we’re going to make. So I try to have some items that people like so they are available when I’m cooking.

Expand full comment

"I really hate dinner when I have to eat it while actively tending to another living creature."

I loved this one.

Expand full comment
Oct 4, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

My 12yo is also a weird pesto kid! I can’t stand even the smell (ancient pregnancy aversion that never went away), but we have always done “choose your own sauce” pasta. He now will also eat Alfredo, but still adds pesto to it. It works for us as long as he puts the lid back on the jar and keeps it away from my side of the table!

For hot dogs, I’ve been making a fennel slaw - fennel, apple, scallion and a citrus juice vinaigrette, in whatever proportion works for you (1 bulb/1 apple/1 scallion here) - and it’s so great on hot dogs or bratwurst with bbq sauce.

Good luck! It gets better, but wow does it ever suck in the middle of it. Your rules and new process sound great.

Expand full comment
Oct 4, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

OMG the bolting from the table!!!! we manage to enforce a "wait for all children to be finished eating before you disappear" on Friday night when we have a regular Shabbat dinner with friends. There's one slow eater who is also confident and a bit bossy so it works. the rest of the week it's a shit show and frankly half the time I dont particularly want the children's company after the whingeing and whineing they normally happens during dinner.

Expand full comment
founding

A couple of times during the pandemic, my partner and I were discussing dinner and I looked at him and said “I hate all of the food in our house.” No real point there other than to say I can completely relate to hitting a dinner wall!

My in-laws are big meal kit people, and since the one they get comes with photo cards of each meal they give the cards to their 5YO and let her pick dinner every night. Since they’ve made the big-picture recipe choices, the adults know it will always be something they like, too.

And re: bolting - my parents’ solution for this was not to let us leave the table until we’d asked, “May I please be excused?” My younger sibling definitely had some nights of hanging off of their chair and blurting “mayIpleasebeexcused”. It was unusual for our parents to say no but I do think it worked as a reminder that dinner is a thing you do with other people.

Expand full comment
Oct 4, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

Thank you so much for this - I don’t know how much I have the energy to implement right now, but it’s great to have it to percolate away in the back of my brain, and I am always here for solidarity around the question of dinner.

Expand full comment
Oct 4, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

I absolutely love the visible passion in this article. Very well said! In stark contrast, I read an article recently by a finance blogger I used to love about hacking his neurotransmitters by doing things like spending time taking in the sun first thing in the morning and eating a handful of almonds as a meal, and I was like 'big yawn'. Here is a man obviously not having to do much care work for other people, getting to focus on his needs, and as a result - *shock*! - feeling great. Feeding others (or making sure they eat) is a tremendous amount of work.

Expand full comment
Oct 4, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

We have definitely slipped on how many nights we make our kid eat at the table with us, which honestly is partly because by the time we make dinner after getting him home from afterschool, he has already had a turkey sandwich and some sliced apple or vegetables. There's just no way we've found to regularly have a full dinner ready at a time that's reasonable for a kid to eat given a 5:30-5:45 afterschool pickup with a 20-minute walk home. Except on nights when we order, or are exceptionally organized about having done all the prep work before leaving for pickup. He has one afternoon with a sitter and we don't have to go get him, so that's a good night to cook and get him to sit down. But definitely a couple nights a week he eats his sandwich etc before we have dinner for ourselves ready.

But our huge win, and I may have said this here but I'm not sure, is that he spontaneously started eating salad a couple months ago and he is still doing it. He had always rejected all leafy greens except chicken saag, and I guess a brief iceberg lettuce with blue cheese dressing phase. And then one night he decided to try the salad we were eating and he LOVED it. With a creamy shallot vinaigrette dressing from How to Cook Everything, go figure. When he was telling his grandmother his favorite foods, it was high on the list. It's just one of those perfect examples of if you don't pressure them but they see it regularly, eventually they might go for it on their own.

Expand full comment
Oct 4, 2022·edited Oct 4, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

This is so, so good and so, so right. Thank you.

We instituted don't yuck someone else's yum this summer and have seen a big difference. Accompanying that is the rule that instead of sitting at the table screaming "GROSS!" you can request a PB&J - only a PB&J, no other special requests - instead of what's on the table. Once my son (he's 5) figured out that if he didn't complain and just made the request, I would comply with it equally without complaint, all has been mostly well at dinnertime.

My finest moment since the institution of this rule came last week at my inlaws. My MIL served pork loin with a bunch of veggies. Mostly innocuous, my kid would probably eat at home, but he was both feeling sick with a bad cold and out of his comfort zone. He said "No thank you, no thank you" to everything MIL tried to put on his plate. She turned to me and said, well, can you get him something he will eat? I said no, he either eats what's on the table or he... and I looked at him. He whispered to me, "I can ask for a PB&J here too?" I said yes, he asked, I made it, he ate it, my MIL made a face and was like "Well I guess he's easy to please if you're making dinner." Most of us were happy, I can't take responsibility for her too.

I am going to try the meal planning with his input next!

Expand full comment
Oct 4, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

I love this topic so much and only wish I had read this very article about 8 years ago... maybe more. But I'll take it for now. And all the insights from other readers - priceless. I've got a whole pocket-full of great ideas.

I had one question on Rule 2 No Pressure. I am 100% on-board but my question is, if your kids are not required to eat the meal in front of them, what are the alternatives? I did just learn about "one back-up option" from genius reader, Lela, and will rapidly be implementing this but is this also your practice?

I am relatively new to Intuitive Eating and working through a lot of issues there - and I, too, went through an utter hatred of meal planning while still being a pretty restrictive eater. Since I've started repairing the damage there, I've actually started loving meal planning again. I bought myself a bunch of new cookbooks and love perusing them for new ideas. I also enrolled my son (12) in a virtual cooking class and now he makes dinner on Wed (and I can eat anything he makes because there are no more restrictions! wahoo!).

And finally - i mentioned this somewhere in these comments but its worth repeating - I decided I was no longer cooking or planning for weekend dinners. We usually order pizza or something for Friday night, my partner (male) is on for Saturday nights - which defaults 70/30 in us ordering take out, which is fine by me - and Sunday is either kid-led or a "fend for yourself" event. I have to say, closing down my "services" over the weekend has made a huge difference. I love to cook but it is easy to get burned out and feel unappreciated by those you feed. Spreading out the mind space for planning has been the best thing I've done for myself. 10/10 would highly recommend. ❤️🌈🌸

Expand full comment
Oct 4, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

Love this. I may get my kids to do this as well. I don’t mind the cooking but the deciding is too much after awhile.

Re: the meal planing when away for the weekend, maybe have an “in case of emergencies” meal plan that everyone agrees on? Then you could pull that one out and remind them they already agreed to it? Just a thought.

Expand full comment
Oct 4, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith

There was a time when we (adults) were really into making Oki-Dog style hot dogs: wrap a dog or two in a flour tortilla w cheese, chili, & salsa and heat (for the purists, I am aware that this is not an authentic Oki Dog...). I find that changing up the bun situation can add enough interest.

Expand full comment