EP 32: 4 Ways To Break The Cycle Of Dinnertime Stress

Will family dinner ever feel peaceful again? Dr. Liz Daniels explains how picky eating, parental worry, and pressure can create a stressful cycle at the table. The good news is that parents can help break that cycle without cooking separate meals or forcing one more bite. In this episode, Dr. Daniels shares four practical shifts: trust children to decide how much they eat, create a warm invitation to the table, release expectations about what they must eat, and use calm, objective language. She also offers simple ideas such as mealtime songs, fun table settings, family reading, and involving children in food preparation. These gentle changes can help children feel safe, listen to their hunger cues, and become more open to food over time, while helping parents build happier family memories.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why picky eating and parental pressure can create a stressful cycle
• How to let children decide how much food they need
• How predictable mealtime routines can help children feel safe
• Why lowering expectations can lead to more peaceful family meals
• How calm, objective language can reduce pressure around food

Make mealtime language more fun: Download the Food Mad Lib and practice simple, pressure-free words with your kids while sharing a few laughs at the table. Grab it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qYerozEw_XC0y3OaGxoa9jKiLuglGs-D/view

Episode highlights:
(0:00) Why peaceful dinners can turn into daily battles
(3:39) How picky eating and parental pressure create a cycle
(9:41) Letting children decide how much to eat
(13:14) Creating a welcoming and predictable mealtime
(17:25) Reducing pressure by shifting your attention
(20:00) Involving children in shopping and food preparation
(24:38) Letting go of unrealistic dinner expectations
(28:20) Using calm, objective language around food
(30:49) Modeling hunger and fullness cues
(33:49) Using books and stories to support connection
(35:13) Rewriting difficult family food experiences

NEW COURSE! "Read the Pattern: Feeding Your Baby 0–4 Months" — because a healthy relationship with food starts earlier than most people think. Course Link!

Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only, not medical advice.

NEW COURSE! "Read the Pattern: Feeding Your Baby 0–4 Months" — because a healthy relationship with food starts earlier than most people think. Course Link!

Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only, not medical advice.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Okay, guys, you started solids with grand plans. You did everything right in the first year, and your kid was going to be the veggie eating toddler forever. And now with a couple kids four and under, things have changed. And you've stooped to being the short order cook, snack bargaining, and things you swore you'd never do. And somewhere between the third, just one more bite and the meltdown, you have the thought, are we ever going to have a peaceful dinner again? Here's the thing I need to tell you. Gently, as someone who's had this exact same thought at my own table, some of this is coming from us. And that's actually good news. Because if some of this is coming from us, then some of it's fixable by us. But maybe not in the way you think. Today I'm going to walk you through four ways that you can shift this crazy cycle at the dinner table. And with maybe a little bit less effort than you think in your head it's going to take. Because that internal part of it, the us part of it, is a huge and powerful lever. Stick with me through the end, and I'm going to give you some practical takeaways of things that you can do tonight to make dinner time a little bit easier. Welcome back to the Nutrition for the Earliers podcast with me, your host, Dr. Lewis Daniels. I'm a nutrition-first kinopediatrician, and this podcast is for the parent who's second-guessing their grocery cart, worrying if their kid is going to end up with the same food struggles that they once had. I love getting into the weeds of what kids actually need and then putting it into context of where they're at in growth and development so you can let go of the shame and guilt and focus on what actually moves the needle together. Let's get into it. Okay, welcome back to Nutrition for the Early Years Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Lewis Daniels, your nutrition-focused pediatrician, here to give you guilt-free guidance for feeding your family well. Today I want to tell you exactly where we're headed because it is a little bit different. You know, it's one of those topics where it's easy to feel like you like just need to do this major overhaul for everything to be different. Or you feel like kind of just you don't even want to think about it because it's just so much effort. And probably because you feel like you've already tried a lot of things. Otherwise, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast. So for full disclosure, pause, take a breath. And I'm not asking for you to do any of that. All right, friends. Today I just want to give you a brief overview of what we're gonna talk about. We are gonna go through a little bit of the data as like the chicken or the egg, who influences who. We're gonna talk a little bit about ways that we kind of get in our own way. And it's really not just like all your fault, okay? But the things that you can do because there's a lot of things at the table that feel like they're out of your control. And that's part of the challenge. So we're gonna take that back a little bit and reclaim some of what you do have control over and ways that you can make a strong influence. It doesn't have to be everything. You don't have to change everything at the table. We're not talking about that. We're talking about one little thing that you can try out. Think of it like an experiment and learn from it. And then we come back to the drawing board. Maybe you come back and listen to this again after you try that and then try a different thing. And really, cool. Like I would love to know what works for you. Because I have these conversations all the time in my office, and I learn so much from the families around me who come back and tell me what they've tried and what didn't work. And then we go back at it again because we're always iterating, and your family is unique to you. So buckle up, here we go. Is it really your fault or is it your kids' fault? Or is it somebody else who's not even at the table with you? I've talked about that before, but you know, we come to the dinner time with a lot of pressure. I'm gonna give you a little example. Okay. So I have a family who I love dearly, and you know, they shared, okay, when my son was, you know, little, like two and even three, we thought we were doing everything great because he ate everything. He would like eat all the fruit and, you know, really did pretty good with veggies. So we were cool with that and things were fun. And then somewhere along the way, all of a sudden, he started getting a lot more selective. And I just didn't want, these were the parents' words, like I just didn't want them to feel like I didn't want to give them options or I didn't want them to feel like it was a thing and I was creating more struggle than it was worth. I know that I don't want pressure to be at the table. Like that kind of kills it. So instead of providing more pressure or saying we've got to eat more, you've got to really do this, I just kind of tried to be sneaky. And then that became not doing anything at all. And before you know it, we're having the same four meals on repeat. And I'm often offering a snack afterward because I feel guilty if he's hungry. And I know that's probably going against it, but like he's also pretty thin, and I worry that he's not getting enough nutrition. And at the end of the day, like, I'm still responsible for him. So what am I supposed to do? And that's where we end up. Okay. If this is you, you are not alone, and the story is not written. Okay. You're like in chapter one. It may feel like chapter 12, but let me tell you, it's chapter one, and there are a lot of pages to turn, and there are some beautiful things coming. Okay. So, where I want to go back to is when things changed for this particular family. I'm going to reference a study that's actually in the psychology literature. So it's not really a nutrition study, and it was a study in the Netherlands published in 2017. And in this particular study, it was a longitudinal study. So it took several years and they compared families, um, and it was a questionnaire-based one. So we're looking at not mechanism, we're not looking at, you know, randomized double blind control trial. We're not doing that. We're looking at observational data. The question is, what's influencing what? How are behaviors changing? So it's a behavioral kind of study. And at the end of the day, the point here is that families were asked about what we call food fussiness. And they used a tool to, which has now been, I think, updated. Really, there's a better tool than what was used in this particular study. So, you know, there's a limitation. But in this particular study, they looked at um fussiness at age three and parental pressure at age three. And then again, in those same families at age four and then at six. And what they found was, you know, really at the end of the day, is that when kids became avoidant with particular foods, it led to an increase in parental pressure. And that increase in parental pressure was actually predictive of persisting avoidance later on, meaning it's a cycle and a feedback loop. We are a dyad with our children. So it's nobody's fault. We are connected to our children and it's more of a cycle. Now, the question becomes how do you interrupt it? Because it doesn't really matter whose fault it is. The question is, how do we break that cycle, right? And that is not something that the study really gets into. And that's not the purpose of it. The takeaway from the study is that it's not one person's fault. We are a dyad, which means that we can influence that dyad on our own terms. And the one thing that doesn't seem to help is more pressure. So today the invitation is how can we pull that back? Because you know in your head, okay, I don't need to tell them to do more food, eat more food, or I don't want to be a part of the clean plate club, but how do you actually do it? How do you actually release that pressure and not stress out, especially when you see your kid not eating veggies, even though you've offered it 20 times, like the books say, I've done the repeated offerings and it's not working, Dr. Daniels. What am I supposed to do? Those are the questions I get. Okay. So, you know, sometimes I hear the phrase, and I actually like the phrase, the thank you bite. I mean, it serves some families well. I have plenty of families who are like, you know what, we just tried offering that, and after a while, it worked and it does work for some kids. But there's a spectrum for fussiness at the table, for food fussiness or for pickiness. We can measure your blood pressure, we can measure your height and your weight, but we can't measure pickiness. That's subjective. And sometimes by changing that subjective impression, we change the pressure. Where I'm going with this is that the myth of if I can just get them to try to eat more, to finish their plate, to eat one more bite, they'll come around with enough practice and exposure, they're gonna end up liking it eventually. But I would argue that that's really not gonna happen that way. It actually happens in a little bit kind of backwards way. By pressuring to try something new and by pushing, it's a delicate balance in all in how you deliver the message. Okay. And I'm not saying this to set you up for feeling like I don't know what to say or I'm gonna do it wrong, but rather that you don't have to do anything at all. It's more about how you feel about that response. Right? So here's here's what I mean. Number one, let them be in charge of how much to eat. This goes back to the division of responsibility that Ellen Satter proposed a long time ago. Love it, and I'm a big fan. But I'm gonna break this down a little bit kind of more specifics. You know, when your babies come out of the womb, they are kind of trusted. We struggle to trust them, but they're trustworthy. And over the course of the first year, you see they're growing well, things are going, you know, just right. You eventually learn how much they need from their breast milk or their bottles, you learn how much they need with eating solids, and there's some give and take, but you get a lot of practice along the way. And your babies continue to grow. It's biologic, and they're driven to do that, and they do it beautifully. So here's the next step of things is that all of a sudden they become a little bit more developed and have more autonomy, and suddenly we can't trust them. And that's where the logic breaks down because they have already by that point. I'm just gonna throw it out there. If your kid's about 18 months or two years, they've spent somewhere between five to six or 700 days proving that they know when they're hungry. And so even though that they're smarter, they didn't lose that skill. They know when they're hungry. We struggle in trusting them even more because we see avoidance or what we think is avoidance. And this is a callback to some former podcasts that I've done where we talk about kind of appetite and how much do kids actually need? And surprisingly, a lot of toddlers need a lot less than you might think in terms of volume. And we forget because a lot of times they're eating bites, not sitting down at a table, but walking around the house or running around outside. And we don't tally those up in our head. And it's honestly not our job to do that anyway. Your job is to offer it and to provide structure. Be predictable even when they are not. They are trustworthy. If your kid is struggling on the growth curve, full disclaimer, that's a conversation with your pediatrician, that's a conversation to dig in deeper. And then there's more to be discovered there. I'm talking about kiddos who are growing and they come in for the checkups and we look and we say, gosh, their growth is going really well. And parents are like, gosh, they're really picky. And I say, okay, that's okay. We'll work on that, we'll work on you. But they are getting enough. They know when they're hungry, you need to back off on the pressure because the more they're trusted, the more they will trust themselves. And eventually, that's the long view that we want. We want kids to know what their hunger cues are. We want kids to trust that they know what hunger is, what thirst is. And when we provide external input between saying, you need one more bite, you need one more bite, they fail to remember what they actually are saying on the inside. And that's breaking down the actual long-term goal that we have. We don't want to interrupt that process. Let them. If they want to come to the table and they want to eat two bites at dinner and then go down and play, let them. More on that, stick with me. And I'm not saying that we don't have expectations at all, but rather that our expectation about hunger and appetite is not our responsibility when our kids are growing. The more you do that job for them, the more you're gonna continue to pay for it. So please know that I say this in love, but let them be in charge of how much they need to eat. Your responsibility is on what comes onto the table and your structure of the meal time, which leads me to point number two, which is focus. This is something I say forever. And if anybody steals it, you got to give me credit, but you can take it. Focus on your invitation. And number three, let go of your expectation. You have to know what both of those are in order to do it, though. So here's what I mean: to focus on your invitation. Okay, this means think about what you are doing to cultivate that structure at the mealtime. When they're really little, here's a quick little idea. And I think it worked really well for us. Um, but I'm remembering the good days, not all the bad days, okay? So, but for little ones, songs are really great. We learn wheels on the bus, we learn head, shoulders, knees, toes. And right when they're learning all those songs is a great time to start cueing in for a meal time. We can bring a song to the table, just like we bring a song to our bedtime. Let it be part of your rhythm because it does two things. Number one, it slows your heart rate down to seeing. I am not a singer, but I love singing to my kids because it helped me lower my heart rate. It helped me just kind of cue in and they enjoyed it. They did it with me. We had eye contact and it was kind of just a delight. So start your mealtimes with a song. It doesn't have to be a song about food. It can be a wheels on the bus song, but I tend to like songs that are just kind of specific for mealtime. So we did a couple that were sort of became our mantras over the years, and they change depending on the age of the kid, but they can be something that Alexa does for you, or they can be a song that you sing. And I love singing songs at the table because it really is a fun way to start the mealtime so that their body learns that cue. Oh, we're eating now. And it sort of becomes a subliminal message of we're gonna calm down and we're gonna center this time. As you get older, you can ditch the song if you want and put other things in there to sort of initiate the invitation. When you go out to a nice dinner, what do they have? If it's a really nice dinner, they have candles, they have beautiful serveware, the lights are down low because they're trying to get you to kind of settle in. You can do that too. When our kids were little, we had these truck forks and spoons, and we had some with cars on them. We had all kinds of fun little um serveware. There are chopsticks that are really fun to play with for kids that have a little bridge on them so that you can, you know, pick up food easily. And, you know, I just think there's a lot of fun ways to do that. One of the things that my son loves now, my oldest, I think about he's 15, he loves geography and flags. And I recall that that started at our mealtime because we had a placemat that had all the different countries' flags on it. And he loved to trace with his finger um all the countries and and all of the places, and we would talk about that kind of stuff. You know, I mean, that created conversation for us. It created a pattern and a regular thing. Once breakfast or lunch or dinner was done, we wipe the placemats down, we put them away, and then they come back and they're out there because it signals, it's these external cues that this is our mealtime. Those things seem silly. They really do, but over time, they create pattern and predictability. They create a culture and a confidence in what to expect. And that stays the same even when the food changes. It stays the same when we grow and we change. And this can be one of the areas where you talk about holidays. When our kids were almost school age, we did a lot of practice on, you know, having different dollar store centerpieces that were related to the holiday that was happening so that we could have dialogue about the holiday that was coming up. It gave us conversation about who we were gonna go see or things we were gonna go do. And why am I spending so much time about conversation? Because, because my friend, the more that you invite them at the table, the more welcome they're gonna feel to explore what's on the table. And really, that's the key as they get bigger. So you can even break this up if it's, you know, I would kind of deviate a little bit. Like I think a lot of times we really like to say sitting down at the table or sitting down in the kitchen without distractions, without screens. Yes. And I'm gonna deviate a little bit from what we typically say about that. We want a distraction-free dinner time, except that sometimes we need a little bit of a distraction as a parent to reduce the pressure for ourselves. And that's really what I had to do for myself because it became easy to just kind of nitpick or look at things or feel like, oh, we have all these other things to do today. You better eat up because we're not going to come back. Or I would feel this sort of limitation that I was not able to trust my kid in the process. And where I would go with this is that we struggle with this. And we we do, we look at the plate, we look at what they don't eat because we are thinking about the next step. You're thinking about what's coming later and the consequence of if they don't do that. But that's your learned experience. It's not theirs. And when you focus on that piece, you take the opportunity away from them to learn what it feels like to be hungry, what it feels like to think about, oh, this is my mealtime. And again, I tell you, if you can create structure and predictability there, then it instills in them that another mealtime is coming and we'll get that opportunity again. And it's not until they've gone through that challenge of being hungry, knowing that they need to wait for that next mealtime, that they actually will focus on the mealtime. Like that process and that cycle doesn't come without consequence and experience. You have to go through that experience for those kids to sometimes learn that they need to eat at the table. And you can't do that on the outside. Like you can't put that on them or tell them to do that. They don't have the logic, skills, and the capability to understand that. Experience is the better teacher here. And experience will be the teacher when you give them the space to do that. And the way that they do that is without pressure, with a calm environment. And the way that I had to do that as a parent, and the way that I see a lot of parents need to do that, is by giving ourselves enough distraction at the mealtime for us to enjoy our time with our kids instead of feeling like we have to be an accountant of food. Okay. So I see all that to say that focus on your invitation, how you sculpt that sitting down part. Just think about that. If you need to give yourself a task, that can be your task, the sitting down part. Like, how do you make it fun to sit down at the table? And then once you're at the table, let go of what you expect them to do. Just think about what you're there for. Okay, so one other little practical that I think can be really helpful in the invitation piece is a little bit of preparation. Now, you don't have to do this all the time, but if you have a particularly, you know, conscientious child or a child who's like really squeamish about what you offer at the table when they previously would eat the meatloaf or the things that you used to make, invite them in the process. And it doesn't have to be just at the table, but it can be well before the table. Meaning you can get a bunch of cookbooks and let them look at pictures of food so they know what things are. They can pick things out, they can be a part of the, you know, initial preparation part of it, taking them to the grocery store, involving them in picking out food in the grocery store. But then there's the process. Okay, so think about this raw meat looks really different than cooked meat. Fruits and veggies that are, you know, on the outside look very different from the fruits and veggies on the inside. And they aren't part of that whole process. So when they're playing, they come to the table and they see something, if it looks a little different, they're not able to put that in their whole, you know, mental encyclopedia of what food looks like at each of the stages of preparation. They haven't done it. They don't have that experience. And so if you build that experience for them and invite them into the process of the food preparation, this doesn't necessarily mean they have to be with you in the kitchen the whole time. But it can be as simple as leaving the ends of your cucumber out. Instead of cleaning up the kitchen perfectly while you're cooking, which I do like to do, let them play with those little ends of the cucumber. Let them see what the meat looks like when it's raw versus cooked. It changes from red to brown. Again, you don't have to talk about, you know, oxygenation of hemoglobin or anything like that. But really, what we want to prepare them with is the understanding that food can change in the cooking process. And it can look different when it's prepared in different ways. Same kind of concept is true when chicken is baked versus fried versus, you know, Know, grilled, it's all gonna have different textures. And the more that they're aware about those parts of the process, they're invited into understanding how it changes. And if they're allowed to taste things along the way, when it's safe to do so, of course, they're invited into building an encyclopedia of texture, of color, of flavor all throughout the process. And you get to see the reaction. And that builds confidence for kids in knowing that when something's on the table, they can still trust it because it's not so completely unfamiliar, even though you said it was the same grilled cheese that you made yesterday. Like they don't really know this. And so be patient with that process. Be patient with yourself and know that this is part of the invitation process and it takes years to build that, right? So you're not gonna get that all in one day. And if they reject the same grilled cheese that you made for the last three days, okay, well, they did. And you know what? Yes, it's frustrating that it was wasted food. Yes, it's frustrating that now they want to eat something different, and they are allowed to have boundaries there. That's another topic. But inviting into the process is really what I would love for you to put your attention towards. And in the expectation piece, the lower it is, the happier you'll be. Same truth for marriage, too, by the way. I'm joking, but but really and truly, you know, this can be like just very simple. Here's another example. When you go to Costco, you want to try everything, don't you? Part of the reason is because you are not expected to purchase it. The expectation is you are just trying it. And that somehow makes it delicious. You can even borrow the same paper cup and toothpick idea. It's okay. But like, think about that, right? Like your expectation very much influences your decision to try it. If we all went to Costco and we were expected to purchase after we tasted, we wouldn't try it, would we? You wouldn't. If the expectation was that you were gonna stay and have to talk to that person and now not be able to go shop, you also wouldn't, right? So don't necessarily make the conversation just this big expectation either. Like that can feel a lot of pressure. But what I'm what I'm communicating, what I want to really drive home here is that the mealtime is kind of not about the food sometimes. And especially at dinner time, the more we make it about the food, sometimes the less fun it is. And I don't know about you, but kids are really drawn towards fun. So here's the other thing that I love about our expectations. This is really where you can kind of shift things. This is the internal piece. And honestly, this is probably where the most of the work needs to be done. If you were to step back and ask yourself, what is it that you are expecting at the table? You might surprise yourself. It might actually be something that you don't really expect, but you just kind of feel this like pressure. Well, they know that they need their veggies, I know that they need the meat, I know that they need fill in the blank. And then ask yourself who's giving you that expectation? Because it might not even be something that you truly believe. And if so, let it go. Okay. We're gonna talk in another podcast about what vegetables really offer versus why maybe we feel this pressure for them. But and I think that'll help a little bit with this. But really, you know, the direction here would be to say instead of worrying about what they're not doing, let's shift our attention to what they're actually eating. How does their body seem to feel at the table? Are they wiggling a lot? Are they, you know, smiling? Are they wanting to tell you about their day? Are they wanting to tell you about what their sister did that was mean to them that they shouldn't have done? And, you know, are they starting a fight at the table? What are they doing instead of eating? What do they need? Because sometimes when we're at the dinner time, that's our point of connection with our kids. And they have all these other things on their mind that they are looking for from us that are not about food. And we have two different agendas, right? And I think it's important to know like, what is it that is in their agenda? What are they expecting to get out of this experience? Get curious because curiosity is the bridge between their expectation and yours. And it's the key to creating connection, which is really what you want. Because there's a lot of literature that says when kids are at the table and we are connecting, that is really a big key to them feeling safe to try new things, safe to explore. They need safety, and it's not physical safety, it's emotional and like kind of this intangible vibe safety. Okay. This is why candles helped us in our household. Plus, at the end of the meal, they all got to, they got to rotate who got to blow out the candles, and that was like always the highlight. So they all stuck around to see who it was going to be because that was a surprise. So, you know, think about this like zoom out. What do you actually want dinner to be building long term? See the forest through the trees. Because for me, like it was really conversational skills. We focused on veggies a different time of the day. So that wasn't an expectation for us. And I think I can tell you now, with kids that are in the stage of like, we're getting, we're in high school now. And I see that that consistency of just having it out there, having it available and focusing on something else made it really more accessible, especially if we never talked about it really. It just wasn't a thing. And name that expectation out loud before dinner starts tonight. Like just to yourself. Say tonight I'm hoping for one minute of a peaceful dinner. Maybe two minutes. And then you lengthen that. See how long you can get that happiness there. The pleasure of just smiling and laughing with your kids. That can be the goal. It doesn't have to be vegetables. Okay. But give yourself the same grace you're trying to give them. And you know, it's okay. Like it's really okay because you're not failing at dinner. You're just holding this like scoreboard that may not belong to you. Okay. My last and final point here, which is keep your mouth for chewing or reading. What I mean is that when you use your language at the table, this is the easiest place for pressure to come in. I mean, it can be how we carry our body, it can be a sigh, it can be an eye rolling, it can be some of those body language things, but you know, you know not to put pressure on the table. It's just that we don't know what to say. And sometimes it bubbles out of us like, you gotta eat one more bite. You're gonna be so hungry. Like, and you don't want to say that. So, like, here's some tips that you can bring to the table to direct your energy and your words in a different direction. Okay. I know, I know. So describe your food objectively. So when we use words like yummy or yucky, or you know, you liked this or you don't like this, this is gray. And it's subjective, which kind of invites this ambiguity and this instinctive feeling of like a verdict is coming. There's some judgment about something because there's possibility for it. When there's objective language, it's really not. It's more definitive. And that feels much safer when your kid isn't really sure how they feel. And objectively, this includes words about texture, our preparation, the color, the table itself. So, for example, this can be crunchy, sweet, salty, sour, yellow, blue. Like you can provide all of those very objective words at the table. And sometimes this can be kind of silly, kind of fun. In fact, I'm gonna be including in the show notes for you two little things. One of them is an objective food list for you. So you can kind of see some lists and some vocabulary, and along with some phrases that you can sort of practice if you wanted to. If this is helpful for you, if you're somebody like me who kind of benefits from a little bit of a script ahead of time in my head so that it kind of flows naturally, then by all means, feel free to take that download. The other is just for fun. It's a mad lib that I made, and it's kind of just a fun little way for you to practice some of the objective words, or maybe have your kids practice some of the objective words, because mad libs are silly. And you know, the objective language of the table really helps it stay safe, especially when we are exploring foods, because we're just practicing it. We're just describing, and it's true for you and them. Okay. The other thing is to talk about you, yourself, not them, not the sister, not the husband, not the spouse, not the it's you. This is an opportunity for you to model how you're feeling and model how you talk about your own body, your health, your day. And this can be in things like satiety signals. For example, I noticed that after about four bites, I'm actually kind of feeling, you know, half full. You can describe fullness at the table. And there are ways to discuss satiety that it can be kind of simple, but like our belly is on, you know, zero. There's nothing in our belly. We're so hungry, and then we're so full, we're gonna pop. That's all the way up to a 10. And then you can kind of give a little bit of a barometer there with that, meaning that some kids struggle with understanding what satiety is, but we can provide language for that at the table. And you, this is a really good example because if you did number one, where you let them be in charge, especially if you were to say, let them serve their own meal, like their own plate. As young as three, kids really can pick out how much they want on their plate. How we use our words at the table can be really empowering in giving them autonomy to trust their bodies, that we know that they are trustworthy. And you can create some structure there that you still feel good about. So I know I've talked about a lot of things, but what I want to invite you to do is yes, we want to ease up on the pressure at the table. That is essential, especially when our kids get more avoidant around foods that we really feel like they need to eat or we want them to try. But telling you just don't have pressure at the table doesn't work. You need clear ways to do that. So I hope today I've left you with a lot of ideas. And if you think even just one of them will work, just try one of them. And don't think about everything, just have an experiment. Keep it low pressure for yourself. Try one that you feel like works for you, experiment with it, and then come back and listen to it again and try a different thing. Because the more that you play around with this and feel like you can explore what mealtime looks like as a family, what feels fun, the better. I know that in my head, I had this expectation and example that we were gonna have this like quiet dinner where music would be in the background and my children would want to have conversation and it would be lovely. And I basically pictured a tea party, but I have three boys. And so the reality is I had to step back and embrace because the nights that were the most fun were the nights where I cooked and my husband led the conversation, and inevitably we always ended up on poop and fart jokes and Minecraft. And I would get a little bit annoyed because I was like, we didn't talk about what I wanted to talk about. But when we kind of let it go and we got to do the conversation that really everybody else wanted to have, it was so much more pleasurable. And now that my kids are older, we get to have more of that. Now, one last thing I want to leave you with is the reading. Cause you're like, wait a minute, your point number four didn't have anything to do with reading. There were times where reading can be really helpful. I love literacy. And, you know, so much of my platform is all about nutrition, but I think literacy is a really important, important part of our health and development that is just a gateway. So at the dinner time, the other thing that really helped take pressure off of us is to read. So we did family reading time at the table. And honestly, Shell Silverstein was one of the best things that ever happened to our family. We got his audio tapes or his CDs and listened to them in the background while we were eating. And his the way he would read his poetry was just so funny that it really captured our attention and it opened up the door for us to, you know, build on other literature and other fun stories at the table. And it created and cultivated a lifelong love of books in our household. And we started it pretty young. And it was kind of, I mean, intentional, but not really intentional for this purpose. And at the end of the day, what it did was created a gateway and an opportunity for conversation about a lot of other things, especially because some of his poetry ended up talking about kids and behaviors and things that they did and even eating. And so, you know, I invite you to think outside the box when it comes to cultivating a warm and comfortable place at the table. And, you know, I just want you to know that like I don't come at you with all of this because I'm perfect. I want to share with you that in my household growing up, a little vulnerable, but it was not fun at the dinner time a lot of the time. It was kind of hard. And I'll spare you all the details, but I just want you to know that it wasn't always a we're gonna sit at the table and have this really beautiful, fun thing. There was pressure, there was expectation, there was commentary that honestly and truly I don't think was intended to create challenge or difficulty, but it really did set up a lot of problems for me. And and I love these conversations because this is my opportunity as a parent to rewrite that story at the table for my kids. It's your invitation. And I share that story with you, I share that vulnerability with you because so many parents I talk to have the same experience where they say, I love my parents and I love what they did. They did the best they could, but I don't want it to be like that. I don't want diet culture influencing things. I don't want to be compared to my siblings, the way that my parents compared us at the table and what we ate or didn't eat. I don't want some of the grief that I had. And this is the opportunity. This is the work that you get to do to shift from this crazy cycle at the dinner table. Because it's not just that it's a lot of mental effort to think about planning a meal and preparation and all of the things. It's not just that. It's the expectation that we have. It's some of the challenges that we grew up with that are holding us back. This is your opportunity to explore and have fun. So thanks so much for listening. We'll see you back next week, and we're gonna talk some more about vegetables, multivitamins, and why we get so worried about if our kids are eating broccoli or not. See you guys next week.