The Single Best Thing I Ever Did to Make Feeding My Kids Easier and Better
Welcome to Stuff Kids Eat* (*maybe, sometimes?) — Cubby’s limited-run email series on family meals — where today we’re talking about feeding kids and why so many parents … feel so bad about it!!
After a kid food meltdown a few weeks ago, I asked my husband, who handles dinners in our family, how he feels about feeding our 6- and 8-year-old kids. “NOT GREAT!” he said, then fluently and unexpectedly recited a John Cusack bit from the iconic 1989 movie Say Anything, “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything … I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.”
Yeah, not that.
What does boombox-boyfriend Lloyd Dobler have to do with kid dinners? Lloyd, of all people, gave me an aha moment as to why meals feel like such a struggle.
Today I’m going to give you my take on why we and other caregivers of small-to-medium children find feeding kids one of the hardest parts of parenthood. I’ll offer a small but powerful technique that was transformative for our family meals and my own mental health. I hope it can be for you too. It will take you about 15 minutes, and I promise it has absolutely nothing to do with meal planning!
If you are here for meal planning too, great! We have tons of hands-on ideas for you in this email series, from recipes to dinner hacks. But do this one thing first and it will make everything else easier — I promise.
Ready to feel better about how your kids eat? Let’s get into it!
Family Food Has a “Bad Feeling About This” Problem
This convo with my husband took place in the car, on the way back from a family hike that ended with a child’s meltdown over pizza slices cut into the wrong shape. (We live in Ohio, where square-cut pies are just a hazard of life, I guess?!!)
“I just want to feel good about what I’m putting on their plates,” my husband said, which is an earnest, familiar sentiment I’ve heard many times from many parents; but it suddenly hit different. He didn’t feel good.
What does it mean to actually “feel good” about what our kids eat? Does anyone actually feel good about it? (They do, and we’ll get into that!)
I realized that my husband actually had BIG feelings about something we really had never talked about.
AUTHORIAL ASIDE: We’re into big feelings now, which may be your first clue that I have lured you here to do some INNER WORK. If you’re like, “I’m just here for the recipes, lady!” scroll down to the end — recipes and good ideas galore await you! But I really think that this little side trip into feelings is worth it, if you’ve got five minutes to spare.
My husband had a previously unnamed, unexamined value about processed food. When he feeds our kids “processed” food he’s violating a value that says it’s simply not good, and it causes him subconscious distress, leading to a tendency to quote ’80s movie teen idealists.
I asked him what he meant by “processed food” and whether he could be more nutritionally specific about what was problematic for him. Too much salt? White flour? Food dye? He couldn’t define it more specifically. It was just the sense that takeout pizza and mac and cheese from a box FELT BAD.
Instead of debating this “processed food” problem with my husband (which is complex, actually; I refer you to Jessica Wilson for starters!) I considered Lloyd’s ideals, and my husband’s, and I had to ask: Is this actually about processed food?
Good or Bad, Our Feelings Matter
I’m not trivializing his feelings. Feelings are powerful indicators of our internal reality. They flash red when something feels off, and there are a million things that make parents feel rightly uneasy about food. What’s actually healthy? Can nutrition science give us a clear answer for once? Can I trust big food companies? Is organic food important? Is plastic a problem? What about antibiotics in chicken? Will my kid grow up with bad eating habits?
The Real-Life Challenges of Feeding a Family
And of course there are hard-edged realities that make food hard, regardless of how we feel:
The dramatically rising costs of food
The burdens of food allergies (which affected about 11% of the U.S. in 2021)
The intensity of food preferences for neurodivergent kids
Parents’ own physical and mental health (1 in 4 Americans have some sort of disability)
The reduced energy and budget of single parents
The often unevenly distributed drudgery of the three-meals-plus-snack routine
And many other realities that make parenting hard and food one of the hardest parts!!
If you experience one or more of these realities, add them into the equation. But our feelings are often due to more than these. We also carry around often-unnamed internal values and expectations.
I believe that much of life’s internal distress arises when we have unexamined values in tension with one another. My husband wants to feed our kids (A VALUE) with food they enjoy and welcome without complaining (A VALUE); he needs to do it in a way that doesn’t tap out his own daily capacity as a working parent (A VALUE); and yet he also wants to do it without resorting to “processed” food (A VALUE). All valid, defensible values.
But it’s tough, maybe even impossible, to make them happen all together all the time.
It’s Hard to Feel Good When You’re Not Living Your Values
Like Lloyd Dobler, flush with love for Diane Court and a dream of living high on shared ideals, as parents we come into parenthood with a ton of dreams. But our values as parents often aren’t any better defined than Lloyd and his deeply vague, deeply teenage sense of buying, selling, and processing. WHY not boxed mac and cheese? It ain’t kickboxing, that’s for sure.
Parenthood is a constant crash of values against a reality that has almost nothing to do with our internal wishes. As Lloyd says, “I am looking for a dare to be great situation.” But every dare-to-be-great vision of dinner table harmony has a corresponding crash into a kindergartener screaming, “I DIDN’T ASK FOR THIS!!!” (True story.) And these meal situations are just so numerous that we have those crashes of values and reality over, and over, and over. Three times a day. Plus snacks. Almost 20,000 meals from birth to 18.
It’s a lot of moments to feel … not great about.
80% of Parents Agree: You’re Not Alone in Your Feelings
In a highly unscientific study, I asked a whole bunch of fellow parents on Instagram how they feel about feeding their kids. And 80% of my respondents were … conflicted at best, and often outright OVER it.
I asked what feels good / bad / nuts / complicated, and heard so many vibes. There were way too many responses to share here, but here’s a taste (usernames hidden to protect the innocent).
You see how parents have SO MANY values they’re just accumulating and living with. All this stuff is heaped up on dinner — desire for connection, anxiety over nutrition, pressure to vary the menu, a desire to cook just ONE meal, a longing to break generational patterns in body image and food consumption. VEGETABLES.
It’s too much! Virginia Sole-Smith (whom I will link to extensively at the end of this newsletter) talks about the performative myth where “family dinner is this all-important cornerstone of the day, where we have to provide a certain kind of meal. And that it is only successful if our children eat the meal. If they participate in, and enjoy the meal.”
What’s Different for Parents Who Actually Feel Good?
So what about that enviable 20% who said, “Yes, I think we’re great.” These parents have a few things in common. They tended to be parents of older kids, and also parents with a pretty solid grounding in food and cooking.
But what else do they know that I don’t? Their advice was in lockstep with one another. I found that they almost inevitably shared two other qualities: perspective and values awareness.
Perspective (aka Playing the Long Game)
They get that one family meal is only .005% of the nearly 20,000 meals your kids will eat at home over 18ish years (and no, that number obviously doesn’t include the snacks).
One friend said, “It’s about getting balanced foods over the course of a day and a week, not every meal.”
Another mom with kids in their late teens had almost identical advice: “Play the long game. Not hyper-focusing on each meal, or even each day.”
Values Awareness
These parents also made it clear that they had arrived, after a journey, to a sense of their values. One wise and experienced parent I’ve looked to for years for good advice gave me so much insight into her values and the freedom she finds in giving freedom back to her kids.
“Don’t stress, don’t push, don’t restrict. Make what most ppl will eat and ok if one eats pb&j.”
A Quick Experiment
To check how much of your personal food stress is caused by feelings or values conflicts, I challenge you to an experiment: Imagine the one thing that would make dinner SO EASY. Imagine that you never fight it again. Maybe it’s your kid eating ice cream every night. Maybe it’s that your kid gets to eat exactly the meal they want, the dinner that makes life easy for you, every single day from now until they change their mind. Boxed mac and cheese and a handful of grapes. McDonald’s chicken nuggets, fries, and one apple slice. Your kid eats this and ONLY this for dinner from now until high school. How does that make you feel? What would your life be like?
I don’t know about you, but I feel a guilty flood of relief — how easy would THAT be?! – and then I cringe. I wouldn’t be a good parent if I did that, right? Let’s name the values, beliefs, and fears that my own personal cringe betrays.
Value: I must expand my kids’ food tastes.
Belief: If I don’t TAKE ACTION they’ll never try new stuff.
Fear: What would their grandparents think?
Dinner could theoretically be quite easy, which fits my own personal value of keeping evenings as open as possible for family time together, but that would be in tension with other beliefs and fears, which just … showed up for the ride. Do I really want any of these? Does SHE EVEN GO HERE?
Do You Even Want These Values?
I don’t even believe these things, to be honest. I have worked with way too many brilliant food writers who were horribly picky eaters as children; I was too. I grew out of it at roughly 24 years old with exactly zero coaxing from my parents. I want my kids to find their own way to what they love, without coercion from me. And let’s not bring FOPO (fear of what other people think) into things at all.
My question to you: What values and beliefs about food are packed in the back of the Malibu with YOU, whining when you ignore them?
Naming and Prioritizing Our Values Was a GAME-CHANGER
That day in the car, I asked my husband what our food values actually ARE. We realized we had never actually talked about them, instead doing meal after meal in slightly guilty exasperation, feeling defeated by values we don’t even know we had.
It does not have to be like this. In fact, let me tell you what I think most of us need to hear and probably believe: It does not do you or your kid good to FEEL BAD about food or anything else. Feeling bad doesn’t get you ANYTHING of value. It doesn’t serve you. It doesn’t produce change or growth or anything worth having. As a lifelong recovering FEEL BAD-ER, this is my hill — I’m gonna run up it AND I’ll die on it. Feeling bad is just … so bad for you!!
I’m not saying that we do all things perfectly all the time. I have a ton of things I’d love to learn and do better. But productive growth happens in security and curiosity, not in fear and feeling bad.
My husband and I started a values exercise right there on the spot. We decided to choose a few central values that seem to make sense right now, so that we could say goodbye to the rest (for now). It felt so freeing.
My Own Family’s Personal Food Values & Priorities (for Now)
I’ll share where we ended up, given other values and our stage of life.
We value our kids’ autonomy, so we fill their plates but do not nag them to eat more or less.
We value fresh fruit and vegetables, so we offer produce at every meal.
We value personal responsibility, so each person clears their place at every meal.
There’s our three. Minimal, basic. Unobjectionable, right? But look at what these priorities mean we DON’T PRIORITIZE RIGHT NOW — it honestly feels a little scary for me to put this out into the world!
We don’t usually eat dinner together as a family. This is a priority I could totally see changing as they get older, but for right now this is best for us. We have other, better, moments for conversation and connection with our kids.
We don’t make our kids try new things. If they want the same meal several nights in a row, that’s their call. I had to let go of my core value of “Be Fun and Try!!” (iykyk) and place this on a “when it works” list. It’s not top priority right now.
We’re not actively avoiding “processed” food. Same for my husband, who has acknowledged but set aside his value of avoiding “processed” food. Keeping our routine and connection time is more important right now than giving up boxed or frozen meal solutions.
We don’t make them eat what a relative offers them. We encourage them to try something at a family dinner, but if nothing suits, we’ll feed them a preferred meal later without shame.
It’s not that I don’t want these other values at our table; when time and stress levels allow, they can still fit! But when they don’t, I am able to tell my inner critic: “Shhh. That’s not the top priority right now.”
The goal is to find freedom from aiming for the impossible every day.
Having said that, it’s not like I have it all figured out. Our three prioritized values and expressions feel pretty good for us right now and have brought me a lot of relief from performative parental self-flagellation. But that could change tomorrow; I just believe that this values exercise is a super helpful tool in working through it.
You CAN feel just fine about your kids’ food. Some may call it lowering your standards. I prefer to call it PICKING YOUR VALUES.
How to Do Your Own “Pick Three” Values Exercise
We have a printable values exercise linked below. This owes a lot to exercises I’ve done in personal coaching, as well as to Brene Brown’s model for life values.
There’s a list in there of possible family food values. Add your own, if you don’t see the right statements for your situation. But keep them as specific as possible. Think about the underlying belief that drives what makes you determined, or makes you anxious. This could be a value of togetherness, eating most dinners together as a family. It could be one of the value of home cooking, expressed with a desire to cook most meals from scratch. Or one of a specific nutritional value that is really important for your family’s well-being.
Then the exercise invites you to choose just three to prioritize for right now. This doesn’t mean that you don’t care if your kids don’t eat vegetables; maybe it’s just not the thing to focus on right now. Remember: twenty thousand meals. Work on one (or two, max three) things at a time.
TLDR: You have to decide what’s important for your family RIGHT NOW, then drop the rest OFF A CLIFF.
We invite you to spend some time imagining how you feel when you live out these values, and what might trigger you to worry about something that isn’t a priority.
Revisit as often as needed; these values will rarely stay the same over long periods of time as your family grows and changes. The goal is to find freedom from aiming for the impossible every day.
Invite Your Kid to Do a Fun MadLibs Food Wishlist Too!
We also included a lighter exercise for kids to fill in food likes/dislikes, Mad Libs-style, so they can share their own values (and favorite meals) with you. Hang this up, next to your values list.
I hope this tool / values exercise is helpful in showing you a way to find some relief and rest too. And if you have another way of feeling good about how your family eats, I would LOVE to hear from you. Shoot me your thoughts right here any time you like.
Welcome to Stuff Kids Eat: 10 Days of Meal Ideas (and Reassuring Reads)
All right, inner work done — I get that some of you may have come here with the understanding that THERE WOULD BE RECIPES and meal ideas and such, so here we go to the super-practical part. For the remaining nine days of this series, you’re going to receive an email from Cubby with loads of feel-good meal ideas. Dinner, lunch, breakfast. There will be snacks. All stuff your kid MAY eat (no promises!). Every email will also include a “Reassuring Read” — a bit of compassionate, values-driven advice to help you hold perspective in the long game of feeding your kids to adulthood.
To get you started, here’s a sneak peek at some favorite meals and ideas.
My Dad’s 1-Ingredient Trick for the “Best Scrambled Eggs of Your Life” (He Does It Every Morning)
The 4-Ingredient, 10-Minute Dinner That Never Leaves My Rotation (I Make It Almost Every Week)
The Restaurant Trick for Making Roasted Broccoli Taste Ridiculously Good
I hope that this series (sign up for the full thing here!) has new ideas that will fit with your freshly prioritized values that feel good for you and your family. Only you can decide what feel-good food means for you and yours, but we’re here to support you in whatever it means.
Even square pizza slices … if you’re into that kind of thing.
A Few Shout-Outs & Influences
I want to call out a few people who you are going to hear a lot from in this Stuff Kids Eat* (*maybe, sometimes?) series. Many of these pieces are curated from our sister site, The Kitchn, where they have been useful and well-read for a long time. We have had some really amazing parent writers and recipe developers who have contributed so much, and I’d love to invite you to follow them directly. You’ll hear from the following:
Meghan Splawn: Food writer extraordinaire, and also the cohost of the fantastic family food podcast Didn’t I Just Feed You.
Patty Catalano: A brilliant food writer, deeply resourceful mom, and the queen of Costco cooking.
Anjali Prasertong: The author of Antiracist Dietitian, Anjali writes highly informed, values-driven pieces that invite me to examine my own values in ways large and small.
Kelli Foster: Kelli, the Dinner Therapist, is a quiet superstar of smart, delicious, and healthy family cooking, from lunch box to dinnertime.
Amy Palanjian: You almost certainly know Amy from Yummy Toddler Food, her blockbuster social media and blog resource!
I also want to acknowledge and link to a few people I mentioned above and who have been really influential and helpful for me in feeding my kids.
Virginia Sole-Smith: Sole-Smith is the author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and she has a newsletter and podcast I HIGHLY recommend. I love this one on how Health Is More than Food, and this one on raising an intuitive eater. Her dissection of the whole idea of processed food is a great read.
Jessica Wilson, MS. RD. : Wilson and her podcast, Making It Awkward, is a voice I respect so much in the health and nutrition space, deconstructing our assumptions around everything from processed foods to how eating disorders are represented.
Ellyn Satter: If you’ve ever said, “I decide what goes on the plate, and my child decides what they eat,” then you know Satter’s work. She wrote a deeply influential book called Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense that sensitively looks at childhood nutrition from a perspective that considers attachment and social development as well.
Further Reading
We Tested 5 Ways to Get Slime Out of a Carpet and the Winner Left No Trace
I Tried 8 Baby Food and Kids’ Meal Delivery Services — Here Are the Best of the Bunch
This $16 Find Is One of the Best Purchases I've Ever Made at IKEA
