food boot camp

[manhattansunset]

Do your kids wake up during the night/ in the early am to eat?
I am talking 2 and 3 year olds?

At what age do you say: "this is dinner, no more food after this."

And what do you do with a crying hungry toddler at 3.30am if you try to get him to eat his dinner and not rely on night time snacks?

Do they eat dinner?

On behalf of your kids, can I say, please let them have their snacks? I still do this and I'm nearly 40. I can go straight back to sleep afterwards. I just get hungry every 4 or so hours. (I'm skinny, so it hadn't led to morbid obesity or I anything!)

I wouldn't give them anything to eat in the night. A drink of water, then make it clear that it's back to sleep straight away.

We have times when food is on offer - breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner. It's becoming a bit more flexible now that my dcs are older but I can't stand that constant asking for food so that they're not hungry for meals. I would be flexible in that I would cook things I knew they liked when they were little, but with 3 dcs within 4 years I couldn't be catering to individual tastes all that much.

I would say this approach has really paid off - they now eat almost anything and they know that they don't have to eat dinner but there will be nothing else until breakfast. We did this from roughly age 2. Really, a 2 year old will not come to any harm by missing a meal and you are making things easier for yourself in the long run.

Also, don't "try to get him to eat his dinner". Cook the food, put it in front of him, sit down with him and eat yours. Give the attitude that you don't mind if he eats it or not. After 20 minutes, if he's not eating, take the food away with a breezy "ok, you're not hungry." Don't give it back if he cries, he probably won't eat it, but he might well eat dinner the next day!

I take DD a slice of bread and butter and a cup of milk if she says she is hungry - she's more of a grazer than a big meal eater, and so am I. I'd rather just give her something to eat - at the moment I think she is too young (2.7) to quite 'get' the if you don't eat your dinner you'll be hungry message. I can usually predict when she will say she is hungry - when she hasn't eaten much for dinner.