AIBU - Child friendly kids menu...

[Blearymorningeyes]

Is there such a thing as a "child friendly" kids menu? Surely all kids menus are child friendly?!

I invited my SIL to my favourite Mexican restaurant for my birthday. She has 2 DC, ages 4 and 7.

I sent her the kids menu to look at, which has mini versions of Mexican fare such as fajitas, nachos and enchiladas, plus some "plainer" things too, such as chicken breast with mash. She just messaged me saying "Hi Bleary, can we please choose a different restaurant, because the kids menu doesn't really look very child friendly?". I feel sad as I and was so looking forward to going to this particular restaurant for my birthday and I don't see why her kids wouldn't like at least one thing on the menu - it's pretty standard, isn't it?! By "child friendly" does that translate to "It doesn't have sausages/fish fingers and chips"?

AIBU in thinking that my birthday restaurant choice shouldn't be changed because of this?

I hate confrontation... Help!

• You have to ask with parents of fussy eaters how they came to start eating Nutella on toast, fish fingers, waffles, Cheerios, frubes etc in the first place.

You must have given them that crap in the first place for them to think it was a food. If they had oy ever been fed fresh home cooked food from weaning they wouldn't know there was food like junk out there to prefer.*

This!

Why is liking sushi a boast?

Kids like sushi these days. And olives and hummus. It’s pretty average fare these day’s and not exactly ‘only available from Harrods’ is it?

@Temp123999
It’s not an either/or situation though is it. Giving a child a macdonalds doesn’t then automatically mean they will never touch sushi or olives
My kids have always had a massive mix of good and naughty foods. Lots of macdonalds, pizza, chocolate, sweets, crisps etc but they also have always Eastern things like sushi and olives and blue cheese and lentils.
Sometimes banning some types of food can backfire and make the child crave them more when they are older as they have become a temptation good.

I'm sorry but it's true when they were in year 4 and representing the school at Athletics my son used to ask for ham sandwich as some the boys would turn their noses up at anything out of the ordinary whereas much to sports teachers amusement DD would have a small flask of miso soup and some sushi.
It's not a boast it's a fact my son went through a phase at around one of refusing anything lumpy and I gave in and let him have two small yogurts instead of the usual one, my then 8 year old niece remarked to me and her mum "baby cousin is lucky he doesn't eat dinner but gets two puddings so I reverted to giving dinner followed by the usual one pot and after couple of days he resumed eating normally.
Before someone starts criticising me for starving him he still had either cornmeal or quinoa porridge for breakfast and soup and fruit for lunch .
Some children have genuine issues but working in public I witness a lot of bad eating habits due to poor parenting it's not a coincidence that children are becoming overweight due to being labelled fussy and fed junk.

@BrieAndChilli
I stated that my children had eaten McDonald's it's just not a favourite.
I'm black British born in UK to carribean parents my husband was born in Africa most of the children at their school are from ethnic minoritie parents which is why they eat a large variety of foods plus part of my job is promoting healthy eating to families with young children.

My children are British and eat a wide variety of foods also. We like to cook from scratching cook a wide variety of cuisines from Thai, Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, African, french, German, and a variety of others. We also teach the kids to cook.

They will happily eat macdonalds or other junk when out and about though.

Temp123999 I said McDonald’s because it was the easiest way of saying I would bring chicken nuggets and chips from somewhere with us. It didn’t need to be a happy meal. I was a child who would eat anything and it was v distressing that my DD was so fussy. Believe me, we tried a wide variety of things with her but she would only eat the blandest options like chicken nuggets and chips or a plain cheese sandwich. We managed to get counselling for her on the NHS because she was diagnosed with Selective Eating Disorder and we have come through the other side. She is 11 now and will tuck into stir fries and curries and a variety of vegetables. A happy meal or similar was a short term solution to being able to enjoy the odd meal out at other restaurants with her when she was at the height of her food phobias.

@Temp123999 well DD went through a phase of refusing everything. Even the yogurts and toast. Took me ages to get her to eat something again. Took even longer to get her to eat 2 meals a day. I bloody cried when she had her first happy meal and happily ate it all. She can still go now a full day on one bowl of cereal in the morning if left to her own devices.

I'd like to see you spend two weeks with your 2yo baby eating maybe a bag of crisps or ice cream all day and then tell me you wouldn't try anything no matter how crap!

She was weaned on soups, home cooked meals, rice , sauces and spices (I'm not British), various meats etc. She just stopped eating it all, including her milk.

I saw a paediatric dietician who said after days of food refusal, McDonald’s or the like was preferable to starvation. We went 3 weeks once with ds1 only eating a couple of chocolate fingers a day. They said the best approach was not turning food into an issue, give them what they will eat and then introduce other foods on the table with no pressure to try them.

@ComeOnBabyPopMyBubble
I can understand trying different foods but can't understand the mindset of I've tried usual food then yoghurt and toast but don't the paediatrician suggested you pop to McDonald's and pick up a happy meal for a two year old this a big voice of foods to try in between a well balanced home made diet and McDonald's.

If child refuses all fluids would you offer coffee, Coca Cola or my G&T...

I would offer coke and tea. I don’t have a problem with kids drinking those things. I don’t have coffee tho, so my kids have sips of my tea if they want.

@Temp123999

If child refuses all fluids would you offer coffee, Coca Cola or my G&T...

Well when Ds was a toddler in hospital and the choice was between passing an NG tube to get fluid in or encouraging him to drink whatever he would the hospital staff strangely pushed for getting him to drink whatever he would. we had bottles of different juices and pops everywhere to convince him so we could go home. Better option than dehydration!

Swerving off topic but I find it weird that your SIL rather than your own sibling is contacting you about their children's dietary requirements.

Of course YANBU, OP.

If child refuses all fluids would you offer coffee, Coca Cola or my G&T...

Dont be so foolish.Im lucky mine eat most things,but its awful if a child refuses food.Its better they eat McDonalds than nothing at all.

Ugh, I can hear the soppy whiny tone in the SIL's text...she has totally forgotten that the event is about the OP's birthday and not about her kids.

I think her initial response and her text were both quite rude, really.

"Ooh yes, we'd love to see you, thank you for inviting us, the kids will be excited" was the correct response, while she privately worked out what was best to do: arrive at restaurant and order the most likely thing from the menu, but have a cheese sandwich in her bag if they didn't eat it and let them eat desert / feed them before leaving home, and let them have a drink and talk and play and nibble nachos while the adults ate and then let them choose a desert...anything but ask if the restaurant could be changed. Self centred and rude.

I am a parent of kids who went through fussy periods - no way should an adults celebration birthday meal have been set at a level to accommodate their restricted menu!

It's this sort of pathetic response that gives parents a bad name!

I am ranting because I can hear my own SIL's whiny baby tone in talking about her kids in the text

A child has no idea what McDonald's is though unless someone buys it for them, weird for them to recommend buying one. Unless they'd had it before I suppose. But then again to eat food that is literally constructed and made to make us want more isn't really a surprise that a lot of fussy eaters will eat it.

I worked with someone who spent time working for McDs in the US (head office type job). She said that the food was purposely made to be like catnip for children - salty and fatty. Another colleague used to work in environmental health in Australia. All I can say is ... don’t have the fish 🤢

We held off giving the dc McDonald’s because we were worried what might happen. Ds1 and 2 are obsessive about things. It’s totally consuming whichever it is, so food, cartoons, clothes etc. When they find something they like it pushes everything they previously liked out and everything from before is refused. We took ds1 to the coast when he was 2 and we had fish n chips on the beach - his first taste of them. For six months after that he ate only fish n chips every single day or dry bread. Then he went off chips so only ate the fish every day for 3 more months. Then he refused that and we had weeks of dry bread and water, trying to reintroduce everything we could think of. We are now in the pizza every day zone, but I’m dreading the day he takes one look and says he doesn’t like it anymore. Like he has done with every food previously.

@Temp123999 I wasn't the poster with the paediatrician.

You're making it sound like we went from toast and yogurt to MCdonalds. I didn't. I kept trying her with the foods we ate and the food she previously ate and new things.Again and again and again. Dealt with the tears,tantrums,food thrown,retching ,throwing up and days of barely any food. At home and when eating out. It just happened that we fancied MCDonalds one day so we got her a happy meal as well. We didn't even expect her to eat it but she did.

Funnily enough she won't eat just any nuggets or fish fingers either, she can sense differences in tastes and textures. She's not living on happy meals either.

She eats most of her school dinners, bar the ones with tomato sauce in . She stopped eating the jacket potatoes though because they changed the cheese and she could tell. She won't eat the roast potatoes either because they're not seasoned and mine are. she still doesn't eat much or feels particularly hungry.

It's not fun trust me, but we make the most of it and I'm still trying and introducing new foods to her. She eats okish now , but still not a fan of veg and hates anything tomato based including ketchup.

Her aversions are both to healthy and unhealthy things. No ham,no pizza, no sausage rolls, no fizzy drinks , no ketchup ,no mayo, no burgers,no hot dogs, certain sweets /cakes etc.

Fruit is the only group where we have the least issues.

Sirzy, exactly same happened for my dc. I had to go get some different kinds of juice from nearby supermarket so he would drink something. It was so difficult, he would drink apple juice but only clear ones not cloudy one, or he would drink white grape juice but not purple one, etc.

What the nutritionists tend to advise is trying things which are calorie dense and easy for them to eat. Strangely enough I was advised to focus on high calorie foods rather than things like fruit and veg. Because if your child only eats 5 things, you really don’t want them to be 5 things with few calories in them. You can give a child vitamins in a syringe, but you can’t give them calories. And that’s what they need at that age, their body will turn it into energy to grow no matter where the calories come from.

Your birthday, your choice! Tell her she's welcome to either leave them with a babysitter, or feed them before they come!

After seeing 5 pages of this thread I assumed the birthday happened in the meantime and there was an interesting development 👀