To only let my children have fresh fruit/yoghurt for breakfast?

[Sunshinesunflower]

They have plenty of healthy food during the day but I don't really want them thinking the day has to start with them shoving lots of hot food or sugary cereals down themselves.

There is plenty of fruit for variety and just a small amount of plain yoghurt.

Aibu? I have always disliked the concept of breakfast so fruit seems a reasonable compromise.

Just read the beginning of the thread again, OP, your oldest child is eating 6 portions of fruit a day. That does seem a bit excessive.
I noticed he has soup with 2 slices of granary bread and butter before bedtime. Why don't you give him the bread (or one slice) in the morning instead? That way he would still be eating the same amount, but it would be timed differently.

that sounds a bit too diet like to me, if the child is slim.

Fish fingers on toast? On what planet is that a good breakfast?

OP

I have never seen a stronger case for RTFT.

"Fish fingers on toast? On what planet is that a good breakfast?"

My 6 year old would tell you that fish fingers are a vital component of all healthy meals.

I can't imagine many people would eat fish fingers as part of their breakfast

And if the OP feels pukey about eggs, she ain't gonna go for fish!

Fish is fine but perhaps not at 7 in the morning!

smoked salmon is a brilliant breakfast thing - on an oat cracker with philadelphia. all bases covered, really filling.

I'm like you - I don't do breakfast. Not sure I ever have. I don't however let that get in the way of what the kids eat, and they are major breakfast afficionados - they'll do 3 or 4 different things while I have a cup of coffee. It's horses for courses but you can't assume their approach is the same as yours.

Fish fingers on toast does sound like an exceedingly strange breakfast - but if done on sourdough toast, with mayonnaise and perhaps a smidgen of rocket or sundried tomatoes, it would be a wanky and delicious lunch!

Beans on toast is a classic for a reason.

It's not so much I'm assuming they will do it in the same way as me - we do have smoked salmon on a Sunday, in fact :) - just that the breakfast I give them is something that fits into our lives well.

I don't want to start a row all over again but honestly a lot of these options really are an enormous amount of food and would overwhelm anyone! Thats okay if you're having a small lunch and sort of snack tea as I know some people do but we don't!

There are a history of bowel problems in both families: beans on toast and eggs for that matter are best avoided - trust me!

They are only enormous amounts of food if you dish up enormous amounts, Sunshine. You could serve an enormous amount of fruit and yoghurt - but you don't.

We've made suggestions for content, not portion size - you control that.

Plus, you'd adjust the rest of the day's food according to what they'd had for breakfast, wouldn't you? Ie. if you gave them porridge, you'd serve smaller portions of carbs at the other meals.

It feels as if you are viewing all of our suggestions through your 'Anything other than fruit+yoghurt for breakfast is gluttony' lens, and assuming we are telling you to pile their plates high with all sorts of foods - which we aren't, honestly.

For many of us food is just food. (Yes, people have preferences and likes and dislikes. Some avoid meat or other foods for cultural regions.)

But I suppose it's unusual for everything to be quite so loaded. I can see that if you have a complicated relationship to food it's all very frightening. (Some things are greedy, others are smelly, or sick-making, others are seen as likely to cause digestive disasters.)

Most of us are in an easier happier position. We just put stuff on the table and children eat it, because children need to eat.

A bowl of porridge with some sliced banana isn't a lot of food (unless it's a trough!). Toast with peanut butter and an apple isn't enormous unless you serve up a ton of it. Fish fingers on toast sounds like a totally weird suggestion to me but still not gluttonous.

Lots of people would say that your kids eat an enormous amount in the evening by having what sounds like two dinners. And it seems odd that you're happy those two meals in a short space of time but consider anything more than fruit for breakfast - a good ten or eleven hours since they last ate and three or four hours before they'll eat again - as excessive and greedy. It just seems illogical. A decent portion of full fat Greek yoghurt with a banana sounds like a fine breakfast for anyone to me. But a selection of other fruit with 'a small amount of yoghurt' sounds like it might not always be enough for growing kids especially if the yoghurt is low fat. It might be fine and it's certainly giving them plenty of nutrients and is better than a bowl of sugary cereal which loads of kids have. You don't have to cook fish and eggs or a full English or whatever. But it's not really fair to judge people as greedy and grotesque if they do. And if what you do works for your kids then don't invite MN to criticize it because I guarantee that any menu that anyone posts on here will be ripped to shreds!

sunshine I don't understand why you start a thread on AIBU, asking total strangers for their opinion, when you could have just asked your child for his opinion. Is he allowed to have an opinion on his food ,or does he just have to eat whatever you decide to give him?
You're obviously reading this thread because you keep popping on again, yet you refuse to engage with any of the many posters who have given you advice. Why?

He's fine with it. He's never asked for anything for breakfast - he needs encouraging to eat in the morning.

I go to threads I'm on button so see new replies.

I'm not engaging with peculiar advice to stop giving him fresh fruit and start giving him fish fingers on toast

Bowel problems are likely to be affected by so much fruit though.
If your children have shown so signs of this problem while eating so much fruit, then maybe you could assume they would manage beans on toast without issues?

You have a distorted idea of what constitutes an 'enormous' amount of food, and your thinking is very black and white (anything that is not small and 'light' i.e. mainly fruit, is 'enormous') -- did you explore this tendency to black and white thinking when you had counselling?

On the subject of fish fingers on toast I didn't mean to derail the thread btw, when mentioning it I had this for breakfast for many years as a child, alternating with ready brek occasionally too, or sometimes marmite on toast. I loved and still love fish fingers, and my mother had one of those grills above the oven so she used to grill three or four fish fingers for me, and then I would put them between two slices of buttered whole grain toast and squirt a little lemon juice on them. With a glass of orange juice (not squash or 'orange beverage') or half a grapefruit, or a tangerine in winter, this was a nice balanced breakfast (imo) and my mother was happy to see me eat something filling heading out to school. I was fully conscious that this was an unusual breakfast choice even at the time. I was always a skinny girl and among the taller children in my class. I was very fit and active.

I'm not engaging with peculiar advice to stop giving him fresh fruit and start giving him fish fingers on toast
There is the black and white thinking again -- 'the alternative to fruit and a little yogurt (how little?) that may or may not be protein-rich Greek yogurt is fish fingers on toast'...
It is not.
There have been suggestions of bagels, cream cheese, avocados, tomatoes, cucumber, peanut butter or almond butter on toast or whole grain bread. All good sources of protein and fats.

The statement that you made wrt fruit vs. fish fingers is disordered, black and white thinking. You really should reconsider your aversion to counselling, for your own sake.
Life could be a lot more pleasant if you didn't feel you were being backed into a corner all the time or holding the line against gluttony or enormous amounts of food, coping with the fear that you can't handle food, that it will overwhelm you, along with memories you may have from childhood that cause you to associate food with being dominated/forced/overwhelmed.

I wandered onto this thread as I wondered why something so banal had almost 600 replies.

Some rather nasty comments, no wonder mn gets a bad rep!

During high school my breakfast was a can of irn bru- I was still an A grade pupil.

Some people just aren't breakfast people.

I know of plenty of DCs who have no breakfast or chocolate/ fizzy drink on the way to school. Fruit/yoghurt is an improvement on that.

My dc's council nursery said that their lunch was often the only meal those DCs got that day.

It shows how detached a big chunk of mners are from reality that they think it's common for DCs to have a cooked breakfast before school.

Even when free breakfast clubs were set up in schools here their take up rate was often just 10%.

OP I do think you have some food issues- not uncommon in the UK. Some help might improve things but it's really not the end of the world.

I think that one problem is that really small children accept whatever they are given/not given as 'normal.' If they are not staying overnight or for longer with relatives or friends, then whatever their parent/s do is 'normal'. (Perhaps children might ask about cereals that are advertised on TV, but that's about it.) If the parents don't offer choices or much variety or other meals, then that is how it is.

As a child I could have cereal and/or toast. (Never fruit juice, yogurt, bacon etc etc.) I think once as a teenager when I was going away for a week there was an offer of a boiled egg, 'because you're going on a journey.') So now, I really enjoy eating lots of different kinds of things for breakfast.

They don't have 'so much fruit' - they have a different amount of fruit daily.

They don't have bowel problems; I was trying to be polite but what i meant was I don't want them producing stinky trumps all day. Embarrassing for the eldest at school and nauseating for me. And I don't think people have clocked how young my daughter is - she's not 1 until next month.

OK based on your last pot, you can cannot be for real.

Um. Flatulence is normal. Children - boys particularly - find it hilarious. I think unless you feed them on a diet of kebabs and curry, any smell is likely to be within a normal range.

I'm not sure it's possible - or desirable - to supply a diet that is 'windfree.'

Perhaps it's not really an issue about what to have for breakfast now, but how to get more flexible later on, when they're likely to want to eat differently.

Beans don't actually make most people fart...