The second child has always been a little more complicated than the first child. Different things motivated her. Different things made her nervous. Different things were a challenge for her. The fact that I had already been a parent for four and a half years before she came along didn’t matter to her. I was clueless all over again.
Now, almost three years after the birth of my third, I’m convinced that the more I parent, the less I know about parenting. (Do I say this in every blog post? I might.) Even by the third child, I’m still just a first-time parent (of that specific child, at least.)
All this is simply to say, this is yet another post about parenting situations I don’t know how to handle. On today’s episode, it’s the classic dilemma of how to parent a picky eater.
Yesterday she came to the table at lunch time, as usual. She sat for a bit, observing her food, fiddling with toys, drinking her milk, picking on her sister, and then abruptly announced she had to pee. This is the standard method of escape, because who is going to deny a preschooler access to the bathroom? So she heads off to use the restroom…. and then refuses to return to the table.
Some days we let her wander off. Some days we battle her back to the table where she further boycotts her food and then suddenly has to pee again. Some days she will eat a few bites, some days her plate goes untouched. Some days we put our foot down on snacking if she doesn’t eat something, some days we are happy just to see her eat a graham cracker because at least it’s something.
Yesterday I tried to put my foot down. I insisted she come back to the table. I explained to her that she needed to eat at meal times, that it wasn’t appropriate to ask for a snack twenty minutes after she refused to eat lunch. She ate three bites of banana, and then, shockingly, had to “pee”.
Thirty minutes later, when the younger kids had settled down for a nap and I had finally reheated my coffee for the fourth time and sat down to drink it, she announced that her “tummy was rumblin'” and could she please have a cracker.
“No you can’t have a cracker. You didn’t eat your lunch. THIS is why we eat lunch, so that our tummy isn’t rumbling twenty minutes after I threw the meal I made for you in the trash.”
She quietly went back to playing.
I sat drinking my coffee, feeling like a monster.
This girl’s brain works in ways I don’t always understand. One of the things I do know is that meal time has always been… complicated for her. There is a lot of energy around a table, a lot of people’s eyes looking at each other, a lot of sensory foods and talking, and that there have been times that I’ve been aware of how overwhelming that can be for her. Maybe she is just being a picky eater. Maybe she’s pushed boundaries and gotten away with leaving the table and snacking and she just knows she can. And maybe it’s more complicated than that.
The point is, I don’t really know. I don’t know what the situation is for her. I don’t know the right way to handle it. Do I worry about her getting enough calories and proper nutrition? Yes. Do I worry that I’m creating a monster by not holding firm on rules like snacking between meals and staying in your seat at the table for an allotted amount of time? Yes.
There is a lot I don’t know. But yesterday, sitting there watching her play quietly after lecturing her about her eating choices, I knew that I didn’t like how I felt in that moment. I didn’t like how I was talking to her, and I didn’t like that the rule felt more important than my relationship with her.
So I went to the kitchen and made up a plate of fruit, peanut butter, and a few crackers and brought it to her. And she promptly ate the entire plate full.
There are moments in parenting where I feel like I have to “hold the line”, even when it’s hard. There are moments in parenting where I feel like the child, the relationship, is more important than the line. Maybe the only thing I can do is to trust that, whatever feels like the right thing to do in the moment, will be the right thing to do.
What else can you do?