Today was Bento Day on TLT, which means we saw some adorable bento lunches that three talented moms prepare for their kids regularly, and then I interviewed those moms to find out more about bento. But now I want to ask an overarching question: what do you all think, generally, about making kids’ food cute? [...]
{ 16 comments }
Yesterday I expressed some minor disagreement with the goals of a new website, Zisboombah, which claims that it will end “kid friendly meal battles” in your house by allowing “children to take control of meal time, and pick their own chow!” Kids play a game to come up with menus which are then sent to the [...]
{ 12 comments }
I just learned about an interesting new kid-and-food web site called Zisboombah which is designed to “help parents create kid friendly dinners with the help of their children.” Kids play a game called Pick Chow! to create a dinner they’d like to eat, and this meal is then sent to their parents. Kids have to [...]
{ 5 comments }
Last week I mentioned that kid-and-food expert Ellyn Satter, known for her emphasis on not pressuring children at meal times, included in her definition of “pressure” keeping after your child to use her silverware or napkin. At my request, she went on to clarify that this advice has to do with making eating unpleasant. Children [...]
{ 14 comments }
We have a joke in my house that I could save a lot of effort by creating a tape-recording to use at the dinner table. One click of the Play button and there would be an endless loop of “Napkins on laps. . . I shouldn’t be seeing your knees above the table. . [...]
{ 8 comments }
Lunch Tray readers may remember my post back in June in which I confessed that one of my children hates vegetables and (with a very few exceptions) will not try them no matter how many times or in what forms they’re presented. I believe in the principle articulated by Ellyn Satter, a well respected [...]
{ 15 comments }
We’ve all probably done it at one time or another. A little carrot baby food surreptitiously stirred into the spaghetti sauce, some butternut squash mixed into the mac-n-cheese when no one’s looking. Or maybe you’ve moved beyond the stuff of amateurs, regularly taking on such high-wire challenges as putting chick peas into your chocolate chip [...]
{ 31 comments }
A reader recently wrote in: I’m the ultimate short order cook – my two picky ones often eating something different from everyone else. It just didn’t seem like a battle worth fighting at the time, but years later, it seems like such a pain and my picky eaters aren’t getting any better. So once you [...]
{ 12 comments }
When my children were little I was greatly influenced by the writings of Ellyn Satter, a well-credentialed dietician and the author of many books on kids and food. Satter’s basic proposition, in a nutshell, is that when it comes to food, parents and children should operate within well defined boundaries: “parents are responsible for the what, when and where [...]
{ 19 comments }
