Recently on Facebook, I posted a dinnertime cry for help. Our evening meals have gradually been getting worse and worse as the boys play up, refuse to eat, throw food and egg each other on. I had reached the end of my tether.
The suggestions that I received were super: ask Little O to play big brother and make sure that Baby E doesn’t act up, have dinner a little earlier, reward charts for good dinnertime behaviour, old favourites on hand to cook for them quickly, slapstick humour when they do behave and drinking wine (for me), which I think would probably be the least effective but certainly the most enjoyable of the suggestions.
And then this week, I read this article by Tim Lott in The Guardian and that nailed it for me. Since making these changes, dinnertime has become, if not fun, then certainly far no longer painful.
Some of the things that stood out for me in the article were the relaxed attitude that Tim Lott suggests:
My improvised and cobbled-together policy can be summed up thus: don’t get too stressed about the serving of food, just do your best to present fresh and varied food without making the consumption of that food an emotional battleground. “Do your best” does not mean “be perfect”, incidentally… Relax. If you are living anywhere like the middle-class microculture I live in, the greatest danger to your children is not malnourishment or obesity but anxiety around food.
and the advice of Claire Potter, who has written the fabulously titled ‘Getting the Little Blighters to Eat‘:
Don’t invite children to a power battle … when it comes to eating, behave as if you have no power. Completely let go of the parent-to-child authority that you use in other areas of life. Simply give your child their food and act as if you don’t mind whether they eat it or not. No commands, no orders, no tellings-off, no threats, no punishments, no bribes.
So, more relaxed dinners has meant a more relaxed Mamma and also more relaxed little boys, who play up less and actually eat more.
Win win win win win.
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