There was an amusing story on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday about the reporter’s battles to get her three-year-old son to eat vegetables. An excerpt:
“I only want mac and cheese! Not peas!” he said to me recently when I tried to tempt him with something green.
I replied, “Do you want to grow up to be a big boy or a little tiny boy your whole life?” But when you find yourself pleading with your 3-year-old, stoking fears of dwarfism, it’s perhaps time to call for help.
The story features kid-and-food expert Ellyn Satter, whose mantra is that it’s the parents’ responsibility to decide what is served and where and how it is eaten, but the child’s sole responsibility to decide whether to eat and how much.
In other words: hands off.
Not everything Satter says works for me, but that core thesis has always resonated and I’ve tried my best to use it with my own kids. Yet I’ve learned since starting TLT that there are readers who are quite anti-Satter, a topic I’ll revisit in a future post.
You can hear/read the whole NPR story here.