Dinner times at grandparents'

Children can eat non bland food too.

My DD is 2 and much prefers things like curry, spiced chicken, proper Italian pasta, chilli, etc to plain pasta and cucumber.

She eats what we eat.

6.30-7pm at the latest. Eating too late is not good for digestion.

Lol we used to have this with a certain couple of relatives (childless at that time).

Not only was dinner at 8pm, they served "tea" (with cake/biscuits) at 4pm. Guess how that ended up.

I'd feed the children tea at 5pm. And expect them to be in bed around 7pm I think, if they are under 5.

I'd then feed the adults between 8 and 9pm and have adult conversation without small children.

Early tea for the kids, then dinner for grown ups at normal time.

Early tea can be any number of quick meals - it doesn't have to be just a sandwich

I am not a fan of family meal times when the kids are young.

Eating my (always glorious and well thought about) dinner with lovely (let's face it - adult) company/peace is my favourite part of the day. And I've always protected that.

I'm not swapping that for 'do you know mummy, mummy do you know mummy. Mummy, one and one makes two mummy' accompanied with a bland meal of spag Bol or something.

Btw I do enjoy my kids, and spend a lot of time with them, but not at my precious dinner time.

And bizarrely, now that they're older, and more interesting, and they really love food like me, we do spend a lot ot time preparing and eating food together.

So by-passing plain pasta and cucumber meals with boring chat when they were small, hasn't stopped them being able to converse round a table as adults.

In this instance I always fed dc earlier and then put them into bed before dinner with GP's. I could then enjoy a glass of wine!

You clearly don’t know much about under 5s or nutrition. There is nothing wrong with a last nights leftovers or a sandwich and soup - it’s carbs, dairy, protein and lots of vegetables. No harm will come to a toddler who eats this for 5 whole days 🙄. I trust you can throw in a bit of fruit and a glass of milk without creating too much drama?

I can only assume you don’t like these family members and don’t want them to visit you, as you are clearly determined to be a martyr and make them feel as unwelcome as possible.

Or you disapprove of them feeding their kids at 5pm and want to make some sort of point about how their choices are wrong. I assume you are the mother or the MIL - my advice to you is that you to learn not to sweat the small stuff .

Save all your disapproval of your child and their partner’s parenting for things that actually matter. Then you have a tiny chance they might listen to you.

DC aside (who need to eat earlier), I think it’s much harder for adults who eat dinner at 8pm to eat earlier than vice versa. I just wouldn’t be hungry at 5pm so wouldn’t eat much. If you can’t wait until 8pm you can have a snack.

IME nursery tea for the DC then an adult dinner after they go to bed works better than a compromise midway. You just end up with tired, hungry kids who are either too tired to eat or too hyper to sleep, and stressed adults from dealing with the DC. It’s quite nice to have an adult dinner without DC once in a while!

Id feed the kids first. But...ask their parents advice. There is no way i could eat my own dinner that early ...

I think it's far easier to eat earlier than your usual time than later than your usual time, as the person who's eating much later than normal will feel very hungry.

I actually don’t agree with this, there’s nothing worse than being expected to eat a full meal when you’re not hungry and even worse if you have to prepare it too. Have you not seen the Vicar of Dibley where she’s presented with 6 Christmas dinners? And especially for older people I think sometimes appetites can decrease naturally so the result would be that they just wouldn’t eat. And it destroys the social atmosphere of having a leisurely dinner with a few drinks into the evening. Far better for the hungry person to have a cracker or something and wait in most circumstances, although obviously if they’re going to fall asleep they should eat the whole dinner earlier.

Did you deliberately miss the soup, leftovers bit?

Actually we're just modelling our start times being earlier than yours. I finish at 4 because I start my day at stupid o clock. Which means my child is home from nursery before 5pm, meaning eating before 6 is entirely possible.

DH and I have always been early risers and DD has naturally woken early, regardless of her bedtime. She wants to be in bed by half 7 ish most nights, so she needs to eat early. We like to eat all together as that's how we were brought up and we both enjoyed it.

It's different to you, it's not us saying we're better or being smug or anything like that. We just work different shifts.

We always feed my kiddo on his normal schedule when at grandparents, that means breakfast around 8.30, lunch around 11.30 and dinner around 4.30. That's the schedule he's on at nursery so we stick to it generally on weekends. We usually bring food to cook for DS and sort it out when we're ready. Then adults eat later. If my parents or in laws tried to suggest I shouldn't feed my kid at the time that worked for him I just wouldn't be visiting them again until kid was on a later schedule.

I am of grandparental age and am sometimes surprised by the specific food requirements of today's children (we definitely didn't have the vast array of toddler specific snacks and pouches and meals and so on you get today when we were raising ours), so I do get a little bit of the reluctance to make everyone else fit in around the kids rather than vice versa, but surely anyone who's ever met a toddler even in passing knows that it's a terrible idea for everyone's sanity to let them get hungry and tired? Any under 5s who visit here are stuffed with food from the moment of their arrival, and anything that lends itself to an early bedtime so the adults can eat in peace without dodging food missiles or having to shout over the toddler's rage/babble is generally also encouraged! IME most parents especially if the kids are fussy eaters usually have a multitude of tupperwares and snacks on their person just in case too so I'm quite happy if they want to stuff the little darlings horrors full separate to what I've provided!

If I was the grandparents in this scenario I'd definitely want the children to eat by 6 at the latest if they're used to dinner at 5. Either by fetching them something suitable to eat myself or asking the parents to choose something from the kitchen/pantry to feed them, or bringing everyone's dinner forwards (I wouldn't want to eat at 5pm myself, 6pm OK if warned in advance to not have a late lunch), or getting the parents to bring some child-friendly food with them, or even warning them to feed the toddler before they come if for some bizarre reason I had an aversion to anyone in the house including infants eating anything before 'official' dinner time. I understand wanting to serve your own dinner when you want it, including at 8pm but forbidding a toddler from eating for a full 3 hours after they'd normally eat is just a recipe for an unpleasant evening all round surely?

I'd find it absurdly late fullstop! I'd be well past it at that point.

I agree someone has to change, and it should be the people visiting, not the hosts.

@applestrudels if they know your routine from their visits to you does that mean you don't compromise when you are hosting?

My FIL (many years widowed) had a very fixed routine for meals which made life pretty uncomfortable when we visited with small DC. As a grandparent myself now, we always align our mealtimes with whichever DGC are visiting.

Do you stick to your normal schedule when they come and stay with you? Or compromise? If everyone gets on well and you've found ways around the stress of staying there (raiding fridge!) then it all sounds fine as it is to be honest. Flexibility is a good thing to teach kids. But then the concept of a routine is pretty alien to me so I get lots of people wouldn't agree and prefer to do things their way!

You ask why adults should wait and children shouldn't

Because they are adults. They are meant to have developed maturity which involves understanding that children with smaller stomachs, less emotional and physical development/maturity are less able to cope with waiting to eat than an adult.

Adults should be tolerant of those individuals who struggle - whether that be because of disabilities or young age.

As they get older people will have to tolerate their difficulties and try to help them manage this rather than say 'that's not convenient for us, just learn to fit in and eat what we tell you/when we tell you'

I don’t like cooking twice, and would secretly hope that the parents would look after their kids and clear up afterwards, leaving the kitchen ready for me to do the evening grown up meal.

Of course they would be my guests and I’d have all the food.

I wouldn’t eat my evening meal at 5, no.