Why don't parents feed children what they eat?

[Gruffallowhydidntyouknow]

Twice this week I have had conversations with people that make me wonder why in the UK we are obsessed with children's food and feeing children bland foods.

One friend told me that they were furious at their mother in law, as they had been for Sunday lunch at the weekend and had had to go to Tesco to get food in for their children (5,7, 10) because it was ridiculous that they were being offered the roast beef dinner.

Another friend was bemoaning cooking two different meals as she had to cook something the children would eat and something separate for her and her wife. She laughed and said she couldn't wait until they were old enough to eat curry (8 year old twins).

I despair at the sight of pub menus as it's always beige and chips for the children or a token tomato pasta unless you are in a really nice place. Is that really how people feed children?

I have literally never made separate foods with the exception of not giving my children steak pre teeth.

I'm genuinely intrigued what makes people feed their children separately. Is it that people really believe that children won't eat normal foods? Do people think you "shouldn't" give children spicey foods, or Game/ an olive / duck / stir fry?

Is it that they were weaned on plain things and are now fussy?

I'm not talking about the tiny portion of additional needs selective eaters.

My eldest child was exposed to a very varied diet, ate whatever we cooked and like to choose from the adult menu as a child. He was, and still is as an adult, very adventurous with food. I thought the same as you - children who are exposed to different food will not end up fussy eaters. I too thought it was down to good parenting. I thought I was nailing good parenting. I thought people whose children wouldn’t eat food that was cooked for them were pandering to their children too much. My third child was exposed to the same foods and expectations. We sat round the table every evening. We had tears and arguments at mealtimes for months. He is not SEN - he just didn’t like lots of foods.

When you have a child who behaves the exact way you want them too, it’s very easy to attribute it all to good parenting and to assume that people with children who behave differently to your expectations must be worse at parenting. But, with all due respect, until you’ve had the difficult eater as your child, please stop telling those of us that have, that’s it’s down to poor parenting and that we haven’t tried hard enough.

Sometimes good eating habits can’t be taught if the child is simply unwilling or unable to learn.

Sometimes it comes down to crap cooking too. All the vegetables I thought I hated, I like as an adult, because they taste better when they're not boiled to mush. I didn't realise what a poor cook my mum was until I left home.

My MIL was a truly terrible cook, she boiled everything to oblivion and cooked all meats to a uniform, solid, grey. We could only guess what meat it was if it had horseradish, mint sauce or crackling with it. When I first met my DH he hated every vegetable except frozen peas and had a very limited diet: no casseroles, no gravy, no sauces, no sliced meats.
Gradually he's tried most things and now will eat almost everything, except brassicas and spinach. Even the smell of steaming broccoli or stir-frying cabbage conjures up the visions of yellowy green mush from his childhood and any sort of greens do literally make him retch.
I should add that we've been together for more than 50 years and it took at least half of this for him to be comfortable eating what most of us would regard as a "normal" diet.

Completely this. I have always enjoyed cooking and prepared all sorts of varied and nutritious foods for my DC. Eldest DC is a very adventurous eater - one of her favourite foods are shell-on prawns which she has to pull the heads off. Younger DC has always been exposed to the same foods and likes barely anything. I have to have bread, pasta, rice available to accompany meals so I know she'll eat something. She does eat a few different fruits and vegetables luckily.

I do make sure not to make a huge deal out of the fussy eating. I was verging on an eating disorder as a teen/young adult due to body image and mental health issues and don't want to create battles around food.

I’m pretty sure almost all cultures have some kind of simple bland carb served with most meals, whether that’s bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, whatever, and I suspect dc the world over default to those at times. I also think British food culture has massively changed in a generation or two, from a fairly simple, and again, generally quite bland, diet to a much more multi cultural one, and dc are exposed to a much wider range of foods. Whereas I think possibly some other countries they’re more likely to only be exposed to that cuisine?

I now believe one of the worst things we did was to make such a big deal of it. I’m sure that contributed massively to the fear my son had of trying new foods. He’s now 18 and it’s only in the last couple of years he’s become more adventurous. He was bored with his diet for a long time but couldn’t get past the psychological barrier of putting something unknown into his mouth. Gradually he started adding spices to his plain chicken and now actually has gravy and curries in a sauce. Pasta is still a complete no. But rice is fine. But if I suggest something new, based on something he does like, he says he can’t taste it. It has to come completely from him!!🤷🏻‍♀️
Despite his food issues, he is fit and healthy. Exercises regularly and his (still limited) diet is probably healthier than mine! I just wish so much that I hadn’t battled so hard when he was little and made the situation worse.

I think that is very unusual for DC to not be expected to eat a roast dinner (which is generally pretty plain anyway.) I would say it is more usual for a DC not to like highly spicy food although it can be acceptable if you make it milder by mixing in yogurt or something. Overall my experience with my eldest (16) is that although he was never a fussy eater there were some things he didn't like much which he wouldn't eat, but as he got more mature he would eat them anyway - probably as a super hungry growing teen boy!

My youngest is very fussy due to ASD sensory issues so sometimes I make her something separate so my DS and I can enjoy something she wouldn't eat. The DC in your examples may have ASD. People don't tend to share their DC's diagnosis with everyone.

I don’t like fresh tomatoes, but enjoy them cooked. I’ve always been the same. My DC are the same.

Sounds delicious, though if I ate pasta and pies for dinner I'd be the size of a house sadly as my job involves me sitting on my arse all day. It's lean protein and salad all the way for me and husband.

The kids get the yummy spag bols and pies and curries etc.

And I also cook everything from scratch. It takes blimmin ages to cook different meals but can't figure out another way really.

This! This! A thousand times this!!!

My kids aren't actually fussy eaters (I cook different foods as we have different nutritional needs, they need a zillion billion calories I just don't) but this applies soooo often in parenting doesn't it?

I also think how we accept that different people have say, different eyesight. Some people have great vision, others not so much. Why not with sense of smell / taste? Maybe some people are born with a super strong sense of taste so even pretty bland stuff tastes horribly overpowering to them?

By the way I think I'm the opposite, I've always liked super strong food, I can't really taste subtle flavours. So it stands to reason maybe some people are the opposite.

That's what I'm curious about. I get fussy but I don't get why they ever knew a nugget existed.

I also think a section of society feed nuggets and fish fingers right from the get go without trying children on whole foods first.

Children’s parties, nursery school lunches, play dates, the odd treat trip to McDonald’s? You honestly can’t imagine circumstances in which kids might come across less than ideal food?

@Gruffallowhydidntyouknow I saw what IMO was a very sad clip before the mother said she goes to McDonalds on a Monday buys 10 burgers, freezes them. Then when the 2 kids get home from school they microwave one as an after school snack. Like that is not setting them up well. But she clearly has no idea on what is good food either.

I do like McDonalds but have it probably max 2 times a year

Some people are knackered. Some people work 2 jobs and don’t have time to chop vegetables. Some people work long hours and have kids with childminders who feed them this stuff. Some people are poor and chicken nuggets sadly are a cheaper source of protein than buying and lovingly roasting a whole chicken.

i’m not one of them myself. I work full time and cook literally everything even bread from scratch. But I do have enough empathy to understand that others are not in the same position.

I also think a section of society feed nuggets and fish fingers right from the get go without trying children on whole foods first.

Which ‘section of society’? Do you mean a section that is generally a lot less privileged and poorer?

Yep, the lot that are so feckless they choose to be poor and lack resources…

I posted early on in this thread. Doc advised I keep a food diary for picky child due to his tiredness - we reported back this week and she said his food is much better than most of the child food diaries she sees (inhaler has sorted out most of his tiredness and the rest of it is down to him being a chill child I think!).

He’s also the right size and doing brilliantly at school. So even though he’s not eating our meals, he seems to be ok! Just posting as MN can be so black and white and passionate about doing things absolutely extremely one way or the other and it’s the end of the world if your child won’t eat a cottage pie 😂 clearly it’s not!

Your post is both smug and xenophobic. Well done OP 👏

OP, initially I thought maybe you were genuinely curious. This post now makes me feel that the sole purpose of your original post was actually to ask “why are other people’s expectations lowered than mine.” I’m sure you know the reasons - people either have different expectations, different views, different life experiences, children with different personalities and all manner of other different circumstances that have absolutely zero impact on your own, or your own children’s, lives.
Why do you care so much about what other people feed their children??

My personal experience of this is that feeding my kids the same as the adults was similar to establishing breastfeeding.

It was a challenge, I contemplated giving up at times, and I questioned whether it was worth it. But once we got through the difficult stage, the labour involved at mealtimes became much less than if I hadn’t persisted.

To extend the analogy, some people cannot give their children what the adults eat, in the same way that some mums can’t breastfeed, so empathy is important. And all children are different as so many up thread have articulated.

Another observation is that child friendly ‘safe’ foods like nuggets and chips are getting more expensive. Have you seen the price of oil lately? And this years potato crop is rotting in wet fields which will push prices up for kids meals. The little cafe in my village charges nearly £6 just for a portion of chips.

But how do you know that formula/feeding separate meals is more effort than the alternative, given you haven’t done it and you had a child who would comply with your choices?

No idea, I did, straight after initial weaning from around 6/7 months they ate what we did with minor modifications if required. This included curry, chilli, stir fry etc.

I think I was fortunate to live in a pretty multicultural area and not be closed off to other ways of raising kids - at the time people were spoon feeding purées from 4-6 months then lumpy jarred foods until a year, but on visiting a local Mexican restaurant when dd1 was 6 months the chef/owner's wife who was front of house took a shine to dd and asked if she wanted food, then went and made the food she brought her own children up on, dd loved in, it was far from plain, and buttered tortillas were a hit too (she insisted on sending leftovers home with us and the recipe and didn't charge for any of it) from then onwards it was normal food for dd1, and dd2 from the start. (I took them back there on a visit to the city many years later and they still ran it, she remembered us!)

Children are all different but quite often we make rods for our own backs. I had lots of eating issues with dd1 (autistic) so it wasn't plain sailing but refusing to let them eat specific foods did pay off

Today we ate different things because we wanted different things.

we travelled all over the Far East when my girls were new born up to 6, they ate anything, things I wouldn't try, raw fish, snake, octopus, red hot curry. They are both still very adventurous with food as are their children.