"Just feed them what you eat"

[Cindy1802]

I am at my wits end with kids and how crap they are at eating. I have a 5 and 2 year old, who both are fed good diets. They get a home made meal from scratch every night of the week. They have always been served what we eat, moderated with no chilli/low salt etc, but recently it's been grating on me how often they complain about what's in front of them. I am adamant I am not going to be making multiple meals every night. I did my reading during the weaning stages and read many sources saying to feed them what we eat. But everything is apparently disgusting! For context, they have rejected this week:
Tomato and chicken orzo
Pea asparagus lemon risotto
Butter chicken curry
Satay stir fry veg and rice
Kid friendly chow mein
Roast veg tray bake with sausage and halloumi

They will sometimes pick through and eat the sausage, plain pasta or a particular veg, but many times it's just moaning and complaining! Please tell me I'm not alone!!
Thanks for the rant, I feel a tad better already 😆

I must have forgotten to tell my kids they weren't supposed to like lemon.....

Children often have a higher tolerance for, and even preference for, sour tastes. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2789429/

We don't give children credit. A lot of them, DD included, LOVE lemon. Mine would lick lemon slices for fun.

my youngest kept asking for “red meat and rice” after she finished nursery, I did look at the menu but not sure what that was.

I have three kids. One is an adult. He has afrid so I’m well used to dealing with food aversions. I give them what they will eat. Plenty of raw veg on the plate, some kind of protein and some kind of carb. I always put out fruit and yogurt. They sometimes have modified of what we have but I find if we are all to eat the same then it’s the simple stuff, beef casserole, roasts and Yorkshire with veg. Or spag bol. Kids don’t need the same as us, they need a lot more fat for a start.

Well this is the funny thing. Or not

sh will happily suck a lemon if in a glass of lemonade from a pub etc

kids. Fickle little fiends 😉

Children are food dictators as far as I can see - I now have a 17 and 15 year old . It has always been my priority to make sure they’ve eaten a decent quantity and as balanced as I can make it . I wanted them to grow and be healthy . I quite often make more than one version of a meal each night . Normally in roasting tins as it makes it simple . I gave up all eating exactly the same years ago . There is nothing wrong in changing your approach if it isn’t working . It’s a lot less stressful knowing they will eat - no judgement intended parenting is a tough gig

I'm surprised how many posters are saying they wouldn't eat your menu! I think it sounds fantastic.

I have basically the same situation as you - I love to cook, and bought a few family/weaning cookbooks when DC in the hope we'd all be eating the same thing and they'd end up adventurous eaters. This did not happen, there's only so many times you can have them reject stuff before you get disheartened. My DC would cheerfully eat pasta for every single meal if I let her, and so far we've had zero success with mild curries, any kind of soups, stir fry or anything like that.

I'd say keep at it, with adaptations. E.g. if your meal is a roast veg and sausage tray bake, give them the sausages plain and, for example, raw pepper and carrot sticks saved when you did your chopping, with some sort of carb, even if just bread and butter or a quick baked potato. Whenever I'm cooking I'm now thinking what element I can separate during preparation or what I can adapt without too much fuss. Or whether I can blend a sauce for her portion. Not ideal but we can only do what we can do!

You don't need to do anything? That's clearly all she needs and wants to eat? Just sit and eat your own meal and don't comment on what she eats, or put any pressure on.

I keep remembering something from DD's toddlerhood. Her, her BFF and I were sitting at a party in front of a load of cut up raw veg, all happily munching away. BFF's dad came over and said, "yuk vegetables". He's a white bread and beige food man. I told him off for being an idiot.

His child (now 16 yo) has energy drinks for breakfast and is really unhappy with her body.

My child cooks for herself, makes her own chili oil, totally adventurous with food. And has no body issues at all. Her last PE report card said, "DD is an ambassador for health, food and exercise". Which baffled me because although she likes exercise, she hates PE, as any decent person should 😀

Now I know I was lucky with DD, no major food issues. If you child has them it's a hard road. But BFF didn't have them when she was small. They were installed.

I would not have eaten any of that when I was a kid, tbh I would probably reject most of that now. There is nothing on there that to me looks like a regular weekday dinner. My Dad liked to cook so we had some great roasts, fajitas, homemade sweet and sour chicken, steak etc. on the weekend, but there was none of that during the week, it was my Mum's simpler spaghetti bolognese, jacket potatos or chicken nuggets/sausages and oven chips.

I think your menu sounds absolutely fine - I genuinely have no idea why people think kids will not eat it. Some kids are just a bit fussy, and tend to grow out of it if provided with a wide range of foods - don't be put off just because of a bit of moaning.

I find it quite interesting that people think kids have to have food in a certain style, such as spaghetti bol, or macaroni cheese - but yet tomato and chicken orzo is not any good - even though orzo is just pasta of a different shape?

We seem to be pre-programmed to think kids will only eat certain foods. It's quite interesting that in many countries, when you go out for a meal, there is no kids menu, but children can often choose half portions from the main menu. Whereas in UK restaurants, kids seem to only be offered a choice of chips, nuggets, fish fingers and pizza. I'm not sure when this seemed to happen - I don't really remember it being a thing when I was a child in the 70s (not that we ate out all that often).

I've been to places where a sheep's stomach full of blood and boiled, washed down with a cup of fermented horse's milk is a normal meal. Fed to the kids. And me. Which was the limit of my tolerance I will admit.

It is strange what we think of as children's food. Or 'normal' food.

But it's pretty likely the reason you're a fussy eater as an adult (which you must be to reject OP's range of delicious foods) is because you weren't exposed to a good range of foods as a child, and were instead fed bland UPFs. This is not something to aspire to.

Blimey-do people really not eat any of the things the OP has listed? That’s just weird.
Getting in before the crowd pile on to say obviously allergies excepted.

Those meals sound lovely, OP and definitely the sort of things my children ate - I cooked from scratch every night too.

But it's not the sort of thing I'd have fed them every night or at 2 - maybe at 5 though.

When mine were little, they liked things like homemade cheese sauce with cauliflower, broccoli and pasta and a bit of cayenne pepper; homemade meatballs and tomato and red pepper sauce; and things like kedgeree. I seem to remember those featuring quite heavily and we ate a lot of broccoli! There might just be a lot of flavours in that that their palates are not yet ready for.

I used to eat the same as them for ease - even if it wasn't always exciting. But it does mean that they'll both eat pretty much anything now that they're adults.

Good grief! I'll eat most things but that would have tested me!!

I agree with the idea of 'children's food' though. My daughter was really disappointed at a wedding when she was 4 to be served chicken nuggets and chips. I ended up sharing my dinner with her. She was really good about it but looked so disappointed and asked why she didn't also have the "nice food".

Kids are weird as one day one of my MiniTracy's would happily be eating risotto for years then reached 14 & hated it.
Decided that parsnips & asparagus that she'd rejected at the age of 9 are foods of the gods now that she's in her 20s.
Mushrooms & celery got rejected in the teenage years (unless they were hidden in bolognese or casseroles) & now are firmly back on the menu.
Olives she loved them when she was little then hated them until she turned 16 - now we fight over the last one.

I just went ok & if she really didn't like something after 3 tries then I didn't force her & just went with the flow.

However when all DC were going through there "urghh I'm not eating that" phase even with traditional British food they got given toast instead.
Within days they'd be back to eating dinner normally.
So with most kids it might be them just asserting their independence.

However I do understand with some children it may be a sensory issue due to ADHD/Autism or other issues.

Totally agree.

Another who thinks your menu sounds lovely and who despairs at some of those responses telling you to “keep it simple”.

We’ve always cooked similar things to you. Our rule was you have to have a small plate with a bit of everything first, then for seconds you can have only the bits you like. Sometimes the “little bit” on the first plate was really minute, but the point is they would taste it again and over time often changed their minds. The rule applied to everyone, so DH and I also had to have “a bit” of things we didn’t like!

Now in their teens there are very few things they won’t eat. No, we don’t make them taste those anymore, but they do sometimes do it off their own bat to check if they still don’t like them.

Hell would freeze over before I’d start making different meals for everyone. Anyone who’s not happy with my meals can take over the cooking! I appreciate that’s not feasible at those ages though 🙂

Oh it tested me!

Why should kids have bland and boring food?

We fed ours what we ate, occasionally we would change something, ds2 didn't like tomato sauce on pasta, so he would have pesto, but we would all have basically the same thing

The only reason people think spag bol is simple kid food and chicken & tomato orzo is too sophisticated is familiarity.

If OP keeps serving it, it will become familiar to the kids, even if initially they pick and complain.

I love the idea that spag bol is a simple basic kids food.

In the 1970s spag bol was a weird, exotic and unfamiliar food. My mum made it, and none of my friends knew what it was.
Spaghetti came in tins as hoops with tomato sauce.

Now, due to familiarity it is a simple basic.

The same is true of all foods. If they are fed mild chicken curry from an early age, that is 'normal' food.

My kids grew up overseas, we were living in Central Asia. There was a pretty limited diet due to remote living and I was always struggling to feed them an interesting a varied diet.
We came home to my mums. She gave them sausages and chips, assuming all kids would like that. They had never had English sausages, and never had chips. They hardly ate anything.
But give them pickled gerkins and they were happy.

kids food doesn't exist. Familiar food does.