to refuse to make dc more food if they don't eat their dinner?

[glasgal]

Hi, this is a slight divergence from another thread. If your dcs don't eat the (healthy) dinner you have cooked for them do you

a) cook them another meal
b) make them sit at the table until it's eaten
c) send them to bed
d) allow them a snack they get themselves

I refuse to make them anything else. They are allowed water and milk and are not supposed to have anything else but in reality ds usually manages to sneak some bread (wholemeal) from the kitchen later on.

its just so much easier and they are miraculously so less fussy if they are really hungry

so if i know its a possibly contentious meal then i get em really hungry first. works here every time

d)Bread and butter, yoghurt, that sort of thing.

And I try to make something they'll like teh next night.

if dd (2.5) doesnt eat her dinner she is only ever offered wholemeal toast and marmite and a stick of cheddar. she always gets pudding regardless of whether shes eaten anything for her main course, fruit or yog or choc mousse usually.

unfortunately she LOVES toast and marmite and she is really testing boundaries at the mo, so she is having it a bit more often than I would like

my dd (3.6) didn't eat her sunday lunch today. so she got hungry about an hour later and raided the fruit bowl - 2 satsumas and an apple. i made sure she had some protein and carbs for dinner.

dont cook alternative meal.offer fruit/yoghurt.if declined nothing else.dont want to make food an issue.they are great eaters, so uncharacteristic to decline at all

as a child i ate what was offered.if i declined no alternative.no faffing about trying to convince to eat.plus if i didn't eat it someone else would

e) sit at the table until others are finished but dont get anything else

This was the guidance from dd2s dietician. She is allowed fruit to snakc on in between and cereal type things in long gaps between meals.

If mine refuse their dinner, I wait a while and then offer brown bread and butter or a bowl of cereal (shreddies or weetabix, we don't have sugary cereals).

They're both a bit fussy at times. DS (21 months) because he is just going through that 'reject everything green' phase, which I am sure he will grow out of. DD because she is just a sparrow who flits about and survives on fresh air most of the time.

Thanks to this thread my DD ate all her tea tonight!

She started on her usual I don't want it, I'm not hungry. So instead of trying to coerce her (I NEVER cook another meal but usually end up trying to persuade her to eat more), and because she was messing around, I just took her cutlery away.

She asked for it back and I said very calmly 'no don't worry, you don't don't need cutlery because you're not going to eat your dinner'. She was so shocked that I wasn't going to try to press gang her into eating that she said she was going to eat her dinner, had the cutlery back and proceeded to eat the lot for the first time in ages! I think it must have been my nonchalent tone of voice which was brought on by some of the chilled out posts on this thread!

milk and fruit only...

if they do not want dinner they aint to hungry

Congrats Undercovamutha!

Min have free access to the fruit bowl, so they can always top up on fruit later if they're hungry.

Other than the obvious tactic of not giving them things you know they won't like, and making sure that at least part of the meal is something you know they do, if they still choose not to eat then so be it - no other special treatment. They're allowed days when they're not particularly hungry, just as much as I am, and it always balances out with them earting more the next day anyway.

I certainly don't do what was done to me as a child and insist on them staying at the table until either it's all eaten or it's bedtime, and then serve the same rejected plate of food - cold - up again at every meal until it's unil it's eaten even once it's started growing mould!

Undercovamutha Well done!

I use a "don't sweat the small stuff" for power battles which I think most of the food battles are, after all they want to control what goes into their bodies, which is fair enough.

By doing this when you do need to pull rank over something really important DS knows that I mean it.

Another one here raised to eat absoluteley everything on my plate to the point of vomit.

Have never forced dd to finish her dinner. If she didn't eat it, fine. She is now a 14 year old who eats most things. Think it os very impirtant to realise that like adults most children will have times when they are not really that hungry, don't fancy what is cooked, whatever.

I, howevr, still hoover up everything on my plate.

I take a halfway position on finishing what's on your plate. If I dished it up and misjudged the quantities, then clearly that is my fault. But I take a dim view of a child that piles his own plate up with loads of food and then leaves half of it on the side. I do not approve of waste.

None of the options! Always had 2 choices in this house - take it or leave it. No fruit/pudding if you haven't finished your first course. They eat pretty much most things.

DS2 doesn't like sweet potato or butternut squash so gets a tiny piece to 'try' and we do stick an ordinary potato in for him with the sweet potato. None of them are that keen on aubergine or mushrooms but we usually have those in a veggie sauce with pasta, so they can pick some out, if they want. Would still expect them to try a bit. Your tastes can change!

DH manages to eat liver, which he doesn't like, because everyone else does, so I expect everyone else to do the same. I thought I didn't like chickpeas until DS1 cooked a cauliflower and chickpea curry - it was fantastic! No one likes butter beans so thankfully that isn't a problem! Bleugh.