What's for Dinner?

I try not to ask: “What do ya’ll want for dinner?” Is that strange? Think about this: Until the 1960’s most American kids came to the dinner table and ate what had been prepared by their mother, including vegetables. These days, it’s less common for a stay-at-home parent to prepare dinner at home (let alone using fresh ingredients). It’s no secret that the number of meals actually cooked and served at home has been on the downward trend for decades, and the number of meals eaten away from home has been on the rise. The latest data suggests that the average American eats 4.5 meals away from home each week. What happens when we take our kids along for the eating-out experience? That’s right; they look at the kid’s menu and choose between four or five options (we could go on from here regarding the general low nutritional value of most restaurant foods marketed to kids), then order what they’ve selected; the same as we do. Regularly offering kids a wide variety of menu items is one way we create in them a sense of entitlement. Additionally, when we all order from the menu, each member of the family sits down to a different meal (if we sit down together, at all), and family members experience dinner in a less communal way. Bonding around the table is muted in more than one way when this is the case, and kids inadvertently become demanding. This may be an extreme example, but my kids have some cousins who grew up eating only pizza, hot dogs, chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese for dinner. The kids refused anything else, so the parents prepared two separate meals: one for the adults and one for the children. Think that’s crazy? It can happen easier than you think. Consider offering options to your kids at home. You make the selections for dinner and allow them to choose from among your preselected menu items. For instance, would you like gravy on your mashed potatoes or not? Would you like your salad in a separate bowl or on your dinner plate? Would you like meatballs with our pasta dish or have the meat cooked in the sauce? You get the idea. Yes, it’s good to offer kids options, but it’s not good to foster a demanding attitude and sense of entitlement in our children (as we often do, and have been doing for years, as a matter of convenience when we’re too tired to cook). It can be unhealthy on many levels to allow kids the right to choose what they will and will not have for dinner. Parenting isn’t all about their rights. It’s about our responsibility.

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