Tips for Peaceful Family Meals

• Develop a schedule of meals and snacks to make things easier for you to plan and prepare those meals—and easier for your child to learn when it's time to eat.
• Plan meals around food that you enjoy, not just what you think you “ought” to eat.
• Don't short-order cook or make substitutions during dinner. Children will eat what you serve if they are hungry.
• Let your child serve his own plate and eat as much or as little as he wants. Making children feel guilty or encouraging them to eat more—both approaches interfere with their inborn way of eating.
• If you are watching out of the corner of your eye to see what he will eat, your child will know. If you are purposefully scooping more vegetables onto the plate of your overweight son, he will know it. “This is healthy” becomes code for, “You are fat. Eat vegetables so you won’t be so fat.”
• Give each person a chance to tell about his or her day or something interesting that happened. Dinner is not the time to work out stressful situations.
• If there is a TV in the room where you eat, keep it turned off during the meal.
• You'll find many more ideas in the book !

"We prepare the evening meal together as a family and then sit down to enjoy it. This gives us a chance to reconnect with one another and unwind from the day. Cooking together shows our daughter how food is prepared and how to cooperate and clean up and gives her quality time with mommy and daddy. She really looks forward to this 'kitchen time'."

Can I really let my child just choose what he wants to eat?

If he is choosing from mostly single-ingredient foods, yes! Children are born knowing how much food they need for energy each day. It’s important to trust this and not press them to finish the bottle when they are infants or eat a certain amount of bites to earn dessert. If you pressure your children to eat more or to eat less, you can harm their in-born eating patterns. My book shows you how to support your child’s food self-regulation.