12: Tips to Make Dinner Time More Enjoyable

In this episode, Sarah shares practical tips for making mealtime more enjoyable for families, especially with young children. To make family meals more fun, we discuss the importance of predictability and allowing kids to serve themselves to foster autonomy. Sarah also touches on providing empathy when dealing with picky eaters, avoiding pressure, and creating rituals to enhance family bonding during meals. This is a great and quick episode to listen to for school pick up, while doing the dishes, or en route to soccer practice!

takeaways

• Mealtime can still be enjoyable even when chaotic.
• Predictable meal times help reduce meltdowns.
• Avoid screens during meals to enhance connection.
• Allow kids to serve themselves to encourage autonomy.
• Involving kids in meal prep increases their willingness to try new foods.
• Avoid pressuring kids to eat; it can backfire in the long run.
• Start with small portions to make meals less intimidating.
• Creating family rituals can strengthen bonds during meals.
• Make food fun to engage children in the dining experience.
• Model calmness and enjoyment to positively influence kids' attitudes towards food.

keywords

mealtime tips, family meals, parenting, picky eating, mealtime chaos, enjoyable dining, kids and food, family style meals, mealtime rituals, calm parenting

Transcript

Hello, hello. I wanted to do a quick solo bonus episode this week and we're going to talk all about making mealtime more pleasant. Deep breath. So with little kids, I am assuming that most of us can agree that mealtime is not always what we would call pleasant. It might feel chaotic. It might feel rushed. It might feel loud. It might feel messy. And I would

also guess that more often than not, we're not describing it as pleasant, but I will argue that it can still be enjoyable even if it is all of those things. And I've rounded up 10 tips to try to make mealtime more pleasant. And some of these are kind of like obvious and they might be things that you're already doing, which is great, but

some of these other things are a little bit more out of the box and things that may be worth trying and you might see success with them. So without further ado, let's get right into it. This is meant to be just a short bonus episode that you can listen to while you're cleaning the dishes or doing carpool line or anything like that. number one, be predictable. Obviously if you have super hungry kids, they may not be able to control

themselves, their attitudes if they're hungry. So have a predictable meal time, whether that's having a snack a couple hours before dinner or having dinner at five o'clock every night. Just make sure that again, with that predictability, you're not giving kids too many snacks right before dinner. They are spaced out. There is like this trending movement.

of doing a three o'clock or three thirty dinner after school when kids are their hungriest and I'm totally on board for that. I really think just do what works best for your family, but be predictable because kids thrive on routines and predictability and this can actually reduce surprise meltdowns. And again, we want them to be hungry. We don't want them to be overly hungry, but hungry enough to eat a meal. So you can use a visual or a verbal reminder.

Sarah Schlichter (02:16.556)
let kids know that the meal is coming soon or set a timer. We do a lot of timer in our kitchen. Secondly is avoid the screens if you can during meals. And this is predominantly when you're eating at home. I feel like it is

very beneficial to put the phones away, to put iPads away, to have the TV off because let's be honest, if they're on, kids are gonna be looking, they're gonna be listening, they're not really gonna be paying attention to you. So we do want our attention to be on them, but we want their attention to be on us. And we want the meal to be more enjoyable. So playing soft music in the background can actually be nice if that's something that you do or that calms your kids.

But either way, I do think getting rid of the screens can help. The third one that I'd like to do, and I talk about this a lot, is just doing meals family style, so letting kids serve themselves. So just think about for a minute, if you were a kid and your parents just put everything on your plate, maybe it's a bunch of new foods at once, so that's already pretty intimidating.

but they're telling you how much you should eat. They're saying you need to sit and you need to eat everything on your plate. And maybe it's a lot more than you're hungry for and you feel pressure and you feel forced to eat it. Whereas if your parents say, here's our meal, you see a bowl of salad in the middle of the table. You see some roasted sweet potatoes. You see a bowl of black beans and a tortilla and you can add as many as you would like. First of all, it's already,

more entertaining for a kid because they're going to do it themselves. They're participating more and it just allows them to first of all practice a lot of oral or hand-eye coordination things and just participate in the meal as a big kid. But allowing them to decide how much they want to put on their plate encourages autonomy and it can really reduce that power struggle where

Sarah Schlichter (04:26.89)
A parent is saying you have to eat X, Y, giving the kid the option to, they can always add more to their plate, but let them start small and let them just see where it takes to. Get your kids involved. So this is another big one to letting them help. And this, this is going to look different for every family and every stage of life and ages of kids. All of that plays in here.

But letting them get involved in some way or another, it can be as simple as, you know, that morning giving them an option. Would you like the chicken pasta tonight or would you prefer tacos with shrimp? Already they're having some agency if they're able to pick what's for the meal. You can also obviously take them to the grocery store with you. You can have them pick out an ingredient that they want to try or something that they want to make a meal out of.

Or if that's all in the past and you're preparing for dinner, you can really just pull out a cutting board and kid-friendly knives and let them just chop something. Even if it doesn't necessarily go with the meal, like watermelon, for instance, like we just eat a lot of watermelon in the summer, it's just out on the counter a lot, have them chop some watermelon up and just keep a bowl of it on the table for dinner.

This can obviously entice them to eat it, but they can put it on their plate and it's already a safe food, especially if they played a role in preparing it. We do know through lots and lots of research that kids are more likely to try food that they helped prepare. Some other ways that you can involve them, they can set the table, they can stir things. So if you're making like a sauce or a smoothie or something, I don't know.

They can pour it out, they can stir it, they can pick the veggies out. I like to let them add butter to rolls. We do a lot of rolls and we eat a lot of butter. So adding the butter is fun. And automatically, like when I ask my kids who wants to do this, even if it's not the most fun task in the world, all three of them say me, me, me. And then it's almost another power struggle because then I have to find jobs for each of them. But they just wanna help. Kids just wanna be...

Sarah Schlichter (06:42.092)
relied upon and this is just a great way to actually help the meal get on the table faster, but also keep them engaged and more invested in the meal.

Another thing that helps us, especially if kids are having meltdowns, is kind of just having some conversation starters. again, like it could be, what did you learn at school today? But it could also be just something different, like open-ended questions. What made you laugh today? If you had a superpower, what would it be? Do you think Spider-Man eats broccoli for lunch?

It can be, I mean, you can actually tie it into dinner, especially with characters that they like. My son's really into Paw Patrol right now. Which of the Paw Patrol do you think would like this chicken pasta more? Do you think they would add tomatoes or broccoli? So I think sometimes giving them that imaginary aspect can also just lead to positive, honestly positive acceptance in anything.

Sarah Schlichter (07:55.469)
Picky eating. So again, this is a hard topic to cover in a quick bonus episode, but if you tuned into last week with Sally, when we talked about her picky eating journey growing up and still having some selective eating preferences as an adult and a dietitian, I think it, first of all, it definitely taught me to have a little bit more empathy.

for what kids are going through because they really, really may have a fear of the combination of textures or colors or flavor, know, whatever it is. There could be a lot of reasons kids aren't choosing to eat something. So being empathetic and being understanding about it doesn't mean you stop offering it, but I think doing it that way can go a long way. And when you are being empathetic, you're probably not pressuring them.

So avoiding any sort of pressure at the table, it may seem counterintuitive in the short term because kids may not be eating, you know, tonight, tomorrow night when you really have this meal that you want them to eat and you know if you did apply a little pressure or you gave them an ultimatum or if you said you'll get XYZ for dessert if you finish your meal. In the long term, it's not doing much. I'll be honest, it's not helping at all. They are learning.

to first of all appease you and placate you. Obviously kids do want to make us proud, but also they're learning that food can be a reward and that can also distinguish into good and bad foods and just it's going down a road that we don't want to go down. So I think we want to set the precedence to not provide that pressure at the table. Avoid, avoid bribing if you can trust your child just

Give them a chance to, when you're practicing some of these other tips, give them a chance to see what they say about the food. And if they choose not to eat that food that one day, it's not the end of the world, right? You can re-offer it in a later meal, but you could ask them why. What is it about, you know, the parsnips that you don't want to try? Or what doesn't seem appetizing? Is it the texture? Does it smell funny? Are you not sure how to eat it?

Sarah Schlichter (10:14.84)
So I think that can go a long way. So all that to say, just try to avoid the pressure. Keep the portion small. So this kind of ties into the serving family style and letting kids serve themselves. But when we plate a child's plate and we just put so much food on, or we treat a child like they're an adult, like they're going to eat all of this, it really sets the bar high. It's hard for a child. First of all, they're little humans, right?

definitely don't need as much as us. But it's also very intimidating for them to look at a plate of food, a large plate or a lot of food on a small plate and say, wow, I have to eat all of that. So what I prefer to do is just start small. And this could even be like two baby carrots at a time or a quarter cup of orzo pasta, something really small.

But again, you're serving meals family style, so the rest is right in front of them. And if they want more, they'll tell you. They won't be afraid to ask for more. Allow them to keep eating until they learn what that fullness feels like. Another reason that I don't love to plate a ton of food on my kids' plates is that they might just waste it. I mean, they might touch it, they might play with it. Playing with food can be good, but also this might just create more food waste. Whereas if you start small,

It's less intimidating for them. It can kind of get the wheels rolling for them to try something or be more likely to try something. And especially younger kids, kids who haven't seen these foods before. So keep your expectations low too. I mean, I think it's silly even with my kids now being seven, four, and two. Like we're not going to have clean plates every night. We're not going to have meltdown free dinners. It's...

It still happens and I have to have that mindset like expected. just, they're kids, like they still have a lot of emotions they're going through. They can bring that to the table. They don't really know how to separate like something bad or hard that happened at school with, processing things at the table. So kind of, they just bring their whole selves, their authentic selves and that's how they are. So I think we have to give them that grace, have that empathy.

Sarah Schlichter (12:34.776)
but still have those boundaries in place. I think this goes back to the prior episode where I talked about the division of responsibility. When we say that as parents, it's our job to decide when to feed kids and what to feed kids, but it's kids' jobs to decide how much they want to eat. So if it's five o'clock and it's dinner in our house, then we stand by that and we serve what we're serving. But again, we can't...

provide pressure, we can't make our kids eat it. Creating rituals is another one that I think can go a long way because they can build connection, they can provide, you know, expectations, routine, again, kids like knowing what to expect. I don't know if your kids ask for the same story night after night, but I'm kind of like, don't you know this by heart by now? No, I want to hear it again. They they like when they know what to expect.

So creating these rituals can be really, really powerful. And the highs and lows of the day is a really easy way to get started. That's what I grew up doing. And I don't necessarily think you always want to talk about the lows of the day at dinner or you have to, but at the same time as kids get older, I think it's important to recognize that not every day is going to be the best day ever. And maybe it helps unpack or process that a little bit more because

Family meals aren't just about the food, right? We're bonding, we're connecting, we're being together, and there's so much value there. For kids, a good way to get started with this is just something like gratitude and teaching them to think about gratitude in a way of something that they have that they're thankful for. You can do a prayer, you can do a song.

before your meal and this again is setting the stage for kids familiarity knowing what to expect. I was doing some crowd sourcing for some other rituals that families could do because of course like different cultures might have different rituals or things that they grew up doing. One that I really liked was a table topics jar. So it's just keeping a jar on the table whether it be physical or

Sarah Schlichter (14:53.92)
somewhere else, but this jar that has conversation starters that could be fun, silly, or thoughtful. I think we can tie this back to if you're doing like imaginary ones. what? And if Spider-Man and Batman were both eating soup, which one do you think would finish first? Or what do you think Batman would like with this soup? Do you think he would like a roll? Or do think he would like some vegetables, a glass of milk?

You know, you can kind of take this wherever it takes you. I didn't expect to be talking about Batman and Superman here on this podcast, but here we are. The conversation starters can just kind of be fun, silly prompts, but I think the other benefit of this is that it loosens kids and even adults up. Even if we are coming to the table with big feelings, we want to really respect this family meal time together and...

try to leave other things, leave work, leave big things we're processing behind and focus on kids and family and ritual and all of that. So if you are a fun or silly family, these could be really helpful for you. Speaking of fun, we can make food fun. And this is something that I'll try to do when I have the energy or maybe it's like a lighter work day or I have a little bit more time as I'm prepping.

meals to do something a little different. So occasionally I will grab a piece of paper and pretend I'm a waitress. So I will go up to the kids and you know give them a couple options for their sides or what would you like for your drink tonight? We have milk, we have chocolate milk, we have orange juice, we have bubbly water and I can serve it in a fancy glass or something like this or I'll invite them to come to the table in their fancy

outfit like a dress up costume or something like that. That is just fun for kids. And honestly, sometimes it's fun for grownups too. You want to have those experiences that see that prompt joy and elicit laughter and smiles. And I really think having fun to dinner with things like that can can be great.

Sarah Schlichter (17:12.492)
You can also like just switch up the way you're serving food to make it more fun. Serve it in a bento box rather than a plate. Serve a snack board dinner. Serve dessert with dinner. And then of course theme nights like taco night, breakfast for dinner. Serve your meals on like a picnic blanket. Like we'll do that sometimes for Friday movie night is just eat on our floor while we're watching a movie. It's fun. It's different.

And this, again, you're still getting the benefits of family meals together, but it just looks a little bit different. And then the last one is just be a calm role model. Easier said than done, right? I'm sure many of you are kind of like, yeah, how do I stay calm when kids are throwing food and yelling and I need to get them up to start bath and bedtime routine? I get it. I think this just is something that we're all...

trying to practice, myself included, reminding ourselves that we're all here together. We're so fortunate to have this opportunity to sit down and enjoy this food. And if the kids are helping with the food or the meal, sometimes that helps me remain more calm because I'm thankful that they are helping. But I think the staying calm part also relates back to the pressure.

and not pressuring our kids to eat everything on their plate or try a food that's very intimidating to them. They are always watching us as models and of course they're watching what we eat and how we eat, but they're also watching our demeanor and how we talk to each other as adults and the words we use. And oftentimes if I'm talking to my husband, my oldest will be like, what does that mean mom? Or what did you just say? What happened? And

It's a side adult conversation that we're trying to have, but kids are listening. So just modeling curiosity, enjoyment of the food yourself can go a long way with kids. So that's all I have today. I just kind of wanted to share these little tips to make mealtime more enjoyable. And if you give any of these a try, please tag us over on managing mealtime badness on social media.

Sarah Schlichter (19:29.326)
We have a review on the podcast. really, really would love to know what you think and what topics you want us to cover. And I hope you're able to enjoy some family meal time success this week.