Feeding Kids is Hard

Mine eats only three beige foods....oh the shame!

Photo by qi bin on Unsplash

Feeding young kids isn’t easy. When they’re babies there is all the pressure to make them baby food from scratch, purees and chopped things. With my first kid I did all of this, convinced he wouldn’t grow, wouldn’t learn, would never learn the joys of food if I didn’t invest ten hours a week to food preparation.

He’s my worst eater, by far.

With the next two kids I was way more relaxed, mostly because I had no choice. I was busy chasing after a toddler who wouldn’t eat anything but beige foods. And my second kid will eat ANYTHING (we went to a revolving sushi restaurant yesterday and she loooooooved it.)

In the past three years the number of Instagram accounts dedicated to how we feed our children has exploded. I talk about it on this week’s first episode of Under the Influence with the incredible writer Virginia Sole-Smith.

You’ve probably seen these accounts. The ones with the rainbow Bento Boxes and the sandwiches cut into the shape of hearts. These kid food influencers often fill me with shame and guilt for putting leftover dino nuggets, a stick of string cheese and a half eaten brownie (I ate the other half) in my kids lunches.

Not all of them do this. Some are incredibly inspiring, and I do use them for inspiration for my four year old. I never would have thought of buying canned salmon on my own, or tofu, both of which she is totally into. The accounts that make lunch easy are the ones I like to follow. The accounts that simply add more labor and shame you because your kids aren’t eating the rainbow can go straight to hell.

Virginia Sole-Smith, author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture and the substacker of Burnt Toast worries that these accounts are even more nefarious than just making us feel mom shame. She also worries that they are perpetuating the concept of diet culture for children from a very young age. That’s what we talked about on the podcast this week and I can’t say enough how much I loved this episode. Here’s an abbreviated transcript of our interview with the best of the chats.

Jo: I want to pick your brain about what you’re seeing on the socials when it comes to kids and food.

Virginia: Yeah, there is a lot of good information. There is also a lot of damaging information. Mostly, I think there's a lot of confusing information, which is ultimately damaging, because it's, this is not an area of parenting where anyone feels great being confused.

Feeding kids is fucking hard. So, so hard, whether you have one of those like happy sushi loving toddlers or you have the kid who only eats three beige foods like it is so much work, right?

Jo: I have a three beige fooder and yet somehow he manages to grow.

Virginia: Yeah, they do. I've got some of those, too. And they definitely do grow and thrive, but the judgment and the stigma around it can feel like you're constantly failing.

And I think what I am seeing on kid food instagram, or with kid food influencers in general, is this rhetoric of, we know how hard it is, it's not your fault, mama, we got you, we're gonna make this easier.

That’s combined with advice and images that actually make it much, much, much more complicated. Because they're showing us the bento boxes with the rainbow produce, like six types of produce in a lunch for a four year old, and things cut into cute shapes and arranged and plated in certain ways and a lot of stuff to buy along with it

And if that is your bliss, then great. I want that for you. But if you are someone who already feels like feeding your kids is hard and you try to cut their food into shapes and they still didn’t eat it then you wonder what you are doing wrong and the kid food influencers are making it even harder.

Jo: I agree. I've gotten some good ideas from the kid food influencers for my kid that eats. So, you know, just to make life fun for her.

But a rainbow is not going to make my six year old, who eats no foods that are not beige, eat food. He’s not gonna be tricked by a fucking rainbow. He's gonna be stressed out by it.

I try. I've tried all the things. And some kids just don't want to eat certain foods. They just don't. And I do feel like a failure, but I don't need to be reminded that I'm a failure.