Do you eat your evening meal with your toddler?

[TotallyCommitted]

We have always given our 2 year olds her evening meal about 5pm then we eat a separate meal together once she's in bed. She won't eat anything we eat and won't really sit at a table for more than two minutes before running off to play so we have prioritised a nice relaxing dinner together each night - although it's creeping later these days.

Does anyone else do this? She's a fussy eater and I'm starting to think we should all eat together to try and improve her eating habits.

Same as you OP.

The children eat at 5 here and go to bed at 6:30 (they're 2 and 5). We eat separately around 8pm.

This started because DH pre-Covid was out of the house 7-7 every weekday. He now WFH so we could eat earlier but I would hate to have my dinner at 5pm now (and would be snacking all evening I expect!).

Sometimes at the weekend I will make a big dinner like a roast or we'll have a bbq in the summer and we all eat together at 5pm but it's not often.

We do all have breakfast together and I have lunch with them every day. DH joins us for lunch now if he's not on a call.

Once they get older and have a later bedtime we will adjust our mealtime so that we all eat together I think it nice once they're bigger. But at this age I'm not bothered.

No, always ate together at around 6.30, I would give the kids a substantial snack at 4pm when we got in from preschool/toddler programme. Eating together helps them eat a wider range of foods, past a year they don't need special meals

Yes, we've always eaten together.

It gets asked a lot on MN though, and you always get people incredulous that other families might do things differently from them.

Ps as toddlers my kids favourite foods were curries, they loved the local Indian restaurant too and no I didn't make it mild. Both are adventurous eaters now (though dd1 hates vegetables)

We have always eaten together. I think it's important to have meals as a family in order to spend quality time together each day. It's also easier to only have to cook one meal.

No, we never did. Both in ft jobs, I had an arsenic a commute, wasn't back until 1930 just in time to put them into bed.

Now we all eat together around 1830, but they are obviously older now. I wouldn't want to eat dinner at 1700 and the kids wouldn't have waited until 1830.

Meant to add we always had Saturday and Sunday lunch together

We've eaten dinner together as a family since they could eat. We tend to eat at about 6/6.15 and this suits us all.
She's a very good eater and tries lots of foods and has the patience to sit at the table with us.
People get aggravated when I point out I believe there's a strong correlation between modelling good food habits by eating together and the fact I've got a very good eater (I say people, I mean Mumsnet on threads like this ;)

My husband doesn't get home til 6.30/7pm. My children couldn't wait til then to eat, they'd be hungry and tired! They are 6 and 3, eat around 5pm, then we eat later at 7/7.30 ish.
We do eat together at the weekends though. Saturday family tea and Sunday roast.
It all depends on what works for you and your family, but it's not worth forcing children to eat later and making bedtime harder.

We all eat together at about 6pm after we’ve finished work and collected her from nursery, have been doing that for the last few months and finding it much easier. DH won’t be able to join us after he goes back to the office but I’ll keep eating with her rather than wait for him. I’ve found she’s a lot more willing to try things if she sees us eating them and I’ve been surprised at the things she will eat e.g. this week she’s had goat curry, fish stew, and tuna steak with cous cous, still can’t get her to eat broccoli though.

We all eat together at 6ish. Like a previous poster I find that they will try things if they think I'm eating it. The children are 2 and 6.

Sometimes. Not every night. 3 days a week she has nursery & never wants anymore than a snack at home. Usually just a banana or slice of toast. Then on Thursdays, I work until 7pm, so it’s just not feasible. Fri, Sat, Sun we do. My DD is fussy. Eating together didn’t make a remote bit of difference until she turned 3. I think it tied in with a bit of brain maturity, we did start to see her trying a few new things, she’s still not great but we’ve recently added tomato pasta (actually lentils & hidden veg), so that’s a big win. That was after YEARS of her watching us wolf down pasta at least twice a week!

DD does sit pretty happily at the table for quite a while before getting restless. Again, this has come as she’s got a bit older. She was terrible at 2. We resorted to TV quite a lot 🙈 but it hasn’t done any harm. She has good manners, uses cutlery well, doesn’t need TV anymore, we sit & chat now!

I do think people are lucky to work jobs that allows them time to cook & eat all together at 5/6pm. Sadly we both work long hours Mon-Thurs.. maybe that’ll change when the kids get older and later bedtimes. It’s even worse when we are in the office! But I don’t beat myself up about it. It’s for them & it gives me a day off on Friday (I squash full time into 4 days). It works for our family.

We do this too and our DD is 4. In normal times we get home from work at 7pm as we commute so we’re used to eating late. We occasionally have a Sunday dinner together at the table but in normal times we’d have dinner out twice a week at the weekend so we’d eat with her then. She has good eating habits so nothing I’m worried about. Just do what’s right for you, I find parents today are a little obsessed with ‘eating together as a family’ when to be honest we want our dinner in peace (even not talking to each other while we watch our own shows on tv/iPad 😂)

As a PP said too, it depends on work locations too, if you work a few mins from home you could probably eat together but if you have a long commute then you can’t.

We usually ate around 7-7.30pm, all together from a very early age, but we were not fussed about getting child to bed early. Obviously the little one had some tea earlier than that but sat with us for dinner. It was nice and worked out well.

Yes, we did give dc1 an earlier meal for maybe the first 18 months or so (leftovers from our later dinner the night before unless it wasn't suitable). But since then and since weaning with dc2, we always had dinner together as a family. We eat later and they go to bed later (has always been about 6:30-7pm for dinner and 8-8:30 for bedtime) and we only do one meal. This is because we work until 5, so it's impossible to make dinner any earlier and then dh and I also often work in the evenings too, so no time for us to eat separately later. It works well, I think it's much simpler, and they've adjusted fine to the later meal and bedtime as it's just what they've always known.

We eat all together every evening (one toddler and one school age child), between 5 and 6 usually. That time altogether as a family is important to me, plus learning to sit at table nicely rather than running off to play mid-meal.

DS has just turned 2 and he eats at 5pm and we eat later. Mainly because I don’t want to eat at 5pm. He generally has for tea whatever we ate the night before.

He has a little table and chair in the living room that he sits at when he’s eating on his own, and he has a couple of toys he plays with, or One of us sits with him with some books.

On a weekend, we eat lunch together (at 11, so it’s brunch for us!) and on a Sunday we also have a roast together with him at 5pm. I try to make sure we eat with him some of the time, in the dining room, and he sits in his high chair.

I also have breakfast with him on the days he’s not at nursery.

I think it does help to eat with him sometimes. Nursery has also helped with his sitting still and feeding himself, and variety.

It was around that age I started eating with DS at 5pm.

I realised DS rarely saw us eat with a knife and fork so how was he going to learn? At lunch we tended to have sandwiches or cheese on toast. At a push, pasta that I'd just eat with a fork.

Me and the kids eat at 5pm. Pre Covid DH would have his meal reheated, now he's working from home so eats with us.

I've always liked an early tea though. Even if DH and I go out I book a table for 7.30pm.

Same here. I like the theory of a family evening meal but in reality, I don’t want to eat at 5pm and I enjoy a quiet dinner when the kids are in bed. We sometimes eat together on a Sunday with a roast or something which is nice. And meals out, pre Covid. I expect as the kids get older and bedtime later, we’ll eat together more.

We do this occasionally, maybe once a week or often less. Otherwise we all eat together about 6pm and always have done since we started weaning her, she's nearly 3 now. She's also a fussy eater and always has been but I won't make her a different meal, I make dinner and she eats what she likes of it or leaves it.

This thread inspired me to eat tea with my kids today... yup defo not for me!!!!

We do not eat with the children as our table isn't big enough for all of us (we have 5 kids), they are pretty good and all eat well. If I'm doing a 1 pot meal we all eat at the same time but some meals the kids food takes up all space in the oven so I cook mine/ours after.
When we had fewer children or the twins were still in highchairs we would all eat at the table together.
When we just had the one she had a little table and chair in the living room which she ate all her meals at as I/we ate later.

Have our meal together at 4pm. Have 4DC so we always eat together round the dining table. Light supper later on if anyone is still hungry. Requires little clearing up. Job done.