Chapter 15
Food Fight
Food is great. Unless you’re a young child. Then it falls somewhere between an inconvenience and outright torture. Before puberty, kids resist food like adults resist exercise. Not all foods, of course. Children make exceptions for anything covered in cheese, ketchup, or chocolate. Those aren’t toppings; they’re the elixirs of life.
Nobody knows why young kids are such picky eaters. Your child loves and trusts you above all others, yet they also suspect you’re trying to poison them. It’s a valid concern if you’ve ever tasted brussels sprouts.
But in trying to protect themselves from dangerous foods, your kid does more harm than good. Not to get too technical, but if your child doesn’t eat, they’ll contract a medical condition called death. As a bare minimum parent, you should avoid that diagnosis for your kid at all costs. It’s less work to keep an existing kid alive than to start over with a new one.
Against the Multigrain
Believe it or not, making sure your kid eats is controversial. According to overachieving parents, making your kid clean their plate will traumatize them for life. Never mind that their life won’t be very long if they don’t take in any calories. Uptight mums and dads claim forced eating creates an unhealthy relationship with food. Apparently the healthy alternative is starvation.
Bare minimum parents don’t buy any of that. We don’t buy much of anything. We’re pretty cheap.
Young children are motivated more by taste than by hunger. A kid could eat sweets until their stomach literally explodes. The sudden combustion would just create more room. But if the same kid had a choice between starvation and eating a single stalk of broccoli, they’d walk toward the light. There are no vegetables in heaven.
There are three times a day a young child is guaranteed not to be hungry, and those are breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Their appetite will return as soon as you clear the table. You might try to capitalize on that by cooking a new meal or pulling out the secret reserve meal you set aside for just this occasion. Don’t bother. It would just make your kid lose their appetite again. The more time you spend preparing something, the less likely your kid is to eat it. Your effort is the world’s most powerful diet plan. Get used to it.
Skipping one meal should make your kid hungrier for the next, but it won’t. Your child has the willpower to resist an infinite number of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. In between meals, they’ll complain they want snacks without making the connection that they wouldn’t be hungry if they ate the food you literally put in front of them three times a day. Instead, they’ll skip meal after meal until they fade out of existence or you finally give them what they want. Chocolate chip cookies are cheaper than a funeral.
Gird Your Tenderloins
So you should just feed them whatever they want, right? Not even close. Though it seems like the easy thing to do, surrendering to your child’s culinary whims will make your life infinitely harder. Once your child understands they own you, their demands will only increase. Soon, instead of snacking on chocolate chip cookies, they’ll brush their teeth with them. Don’t even ask about the mouthwash.
As a bare minimum parent, you should stand your ground on meals. “I’m full” is always a lie. Your kid will find more room as soon as you bring out dessert. A child’s stomach is big enough to hold two tablespoons of mashed potatoes or forty pounds of chewy sweets. Fifty if they’re caramels.
This selective space allotment is deliberate. Your child will find one or two foods they like and never make room for anything else. Once they eat macaroni and cheese, there’s no reason to try other foods. You can’t top perfection.
Don’t empower this slow suicide. You’re an adult—allegedly. Make your kid eat the meal you made. If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for the person you created in your image and likeness. You’ll have a hard time proving it, though, because your kid won’t want to let it hit their tongue. They’ll know they don’t like it just by squinting at it from across the room.
Too Much of a Good Thing
As long as your kid is actively ingesting food, you’ve done the bare minimum. Don’t worry about the side effects. The experts that overachieving parents listen to are terrified of childhood obesity, but they shouldn’t be. It’s hard enough to get your kid to eat anything. If your child gains too much weight, you’re parenting right. The experts are just angry your kid would outlast theirs in a famine.
Things That Are Your Fault According to Parenting Experts
A child’s metabolism is a magical thing. It turns on and off at random. One day, your kid will eat their body weight in a single sitting, and the next, they’ll be on pace to take one bite a year. It all depends on your child’s age, the phase of the moon, and whether or not you offered them ice cream. There’s no way to know if your kid really doesn’t need food at the moment or if they’ve simply chosen to fade out of existence. Anything beats mince stew night.
It’s better to err on the side of too much food than not enough. One way you end up with a large child, and the other way you get a dead one. Use any means necessary to get your kid to finish their food. If they hate you for it later in life, at least they’ll still be alive. The dead don’t hold grudges. Except when they do, but that’s a problem for the exorcists.
Besides, if your kid ends up fat, it won’t be because you made them finish a peanut butter sandwich when they were five. Experts only think that’s a threat because experts are paid to find threats. Without imaginary dangers, they’d be out of a job. And then their kids wouldn’t have anything to eat.
Regardless of whether or not you make your kid clean their plate, nobody has a good relationship with food. It’s a testament to our dominance as a species that our greatest danger is being too well fed. We’re victims of our own success. That triple fudge sundae isn’t a dessert; it’s a victory lap. Eat up.
Eat It or Else
Making your kid eat takes balance. You don’t want your child to starve, but you also don’t want to violate your bare minimum principles. There’s no point in living if you have to work for it.
Fear not—you can coerce your kid into eating AND be lazy. Mix and match these tactics until your child finishes their dinner or grows up and moves out, whichever comes first.
• The Waiting Game: Order your child to sit at the table until their food is gone. Make sure you don’t have anywhere else to be that month.
• Positive Reinforcement: Praise your kid every time they take a bite. Get loud. Use pom-poms and a megaphone. Deploy streamers. They’ll eat faster to end the embarrassment. Be ready with the Heimlich maneuver.
• The Numbers Game: Tell your kid they can be done after a certain number of bites. Quibble over the amount of food that constitutes a bite. Use third-party negotiators as necessary. With luck, your kid will focus more on the numbers than on their food. They won’t even notice they’ve cleaned their plate—or they’ll avoid eating anything, but become good at maths. Either way, you win.
• Half-Off Sale: Give your kid twice as much food as normal, then tell them they only have to eat 50 percent of it. They’ll feel like they got a deal. If it’s good enough for a used car salesman, it’s good enough for you.
• Rebranding: Serve the same foods as always but call them something different. Chicken breasts are “mega chicken nuggets,” and mashed potatoes are “shredded French fries.” If your kid doesn’t believe you, apply ketchup. Then it will all taste the same anyway.
• Temptation Island: Tell your kid that if they finish their dinner, they’ll get an awesome dessert. Then bring it out and eat it in front of them. They still won’t finish their meal, but at least you won’t have to share.
• Transfiguration: Make sound effects to turn a spoon or fork into a plane, train, or other inedible form of transportation. Your kid will want to put it in their mouth. Deep down, every child is a mini Godzilla.
• The Hunger Games: Tell your kid if they wait too long, you’ll eat their food. They won’t race you. In fact, they’ll probably want you to eat it. But at least you can blame your extra pounds on them. Baby weight only gets worse after they’re born.
If any of these tactics work for you, let me know. I’m still trying the waiting game. My kids have been at the table so long, I had time to write this book.
Special Selection
Don’t beat yourself up if the meals you make for your kid don’t hit every category on the food pyramid. Even if you try to feed your kid the healthiest foods possible, you won’t be able to. Nutritional science changes all the time. Within your own lifetime, you’ve seen foods go from bad for you to good for you to bad for you again. If you feed your kid too much fat when fat is good and it suddenly becomes bad, you poisoned your child. But if you deliberately poison your child, you might accidentally make them healthier. It’s best to feed your kid a wide variety of foods. That way the stuff that helps them and the stuff that kills them will cancel out.
Enforce that variety, no matter how hard your kid resists. It’s dangerous to give your child a special menu they don’t need. When you let your kid out of eating something one time, you take it off the menu forever. Showing weakness in front of a child is like bleeding in front of a shark. The only thing on the menu will be you.
Your child won’t eat the same two or three foods forever. Their tastes will broaden as they age and will go into overdrive once they move out. It’s amazing how good everything tastes when you mix hunger with poverty.
By forcing your kid to clean their plate when they’re young, you’ll hit all three benchmarks of successful parenting without breaking a sweat. If you teach your child to eat when there’s food, not when they feel like it, they’re more likely to survive when they move out and have to support themselves. Those doughnuts in the break room aren’t a snack; they’re a free meal. Your kid is also less likely to be a social deviant if you break them of their arbitrary dietary restrictions at an early age. If they grow up and insist on eating a specialty diet like organic or gluten-free, they’ll have to rob a bank just to cover the food bill. Finally, even if you do wreck your kid’s eating habits by feeding them when they don’t want to eat, they won’t blame you for their weight when they’re an adult. They’ll just look back wistfully on a time when they didn’t have to cook for themselves.
But until then, it’ll be up to you to make your kid eat enough to stay alive. Don’t be shamed by overachieving parents. In the long run, your kid won’t hate you for making them clean their plate. Their only regret will be not eating more when they had the chance. A metabolism is a terrible thing to waste.