Teach Your Kids How to Eat

One thing I didn’t expect to have to teach my kids was how to eat. I guess I figured that since it is the first and only thing they know how to do when they are born, that it is overall a pretty instinctual process. Well, it’s not. A kid’s eating instincts are limited to getting a thing in (or at least pretty near) to their mouth, and chewing. Which, yeah, that will get the job done in terms of getting the food into the body. But there is a big difference in how you get into the body, say, soup and ribs.

I wouldn’t say my kids are any messier eaters than any other kids. Which is to say they are pretty messy eaters. At any given moment there is probably chocolate on my son’s face. I’m not sure if that says more about his eating habits or my cooking habits, but either way, a chocolate face is normal. A clean face is the exception. But beyond just being messy when they eat, they really do struggle with how to eat certain kinds food, and I have to blame myself. I was so focused on teaching them how to walk, talk, and read, I didn’t put in the effort to teach them how to consume a meal like normal human person. Doughnut by doughnut, teachable moments went by, and now my kids eat like weirdos.

How to Eat a Doughnut

The first time I noticed my kids’ inability to eat a food normally was seeing how they eat doughnuts. They will occasionally go for a Long John (custard filled, not cream. They may not know how to eat but at least they have good taste), but for the most part they are suckers for the classic chocolate frosting with sprinkles. So what do they eat? The frosting and the sprinkles. They treat the bottom two thirds of the doughnut as if it were some kind of crust that is there to hold and discard after eating the good part. I have eaten many abandoned doughnut bottoms soggy with kid spit and stripped of its sugary toppings.

Clearly I should have showed them the proper way. Taught them to appreciate the exquisite combination of cake and frosting – truly one of life’s great pleasures. Or at least to just take a normal bite like a normal person. But I get it, they are in it for the frosting and sprinkles, and I can respect that. What I can’t respect is how my son eats a hot dog.

How to Eat a Hot Dog

Let me start by saying that this is not a judgement on toppings, more often, lack thereof. My two daughters eat theirs plain, and my son has his with just ketchup. He’s four, so he has plenty of time left to realize that mustard is the vastly superior condiment. Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, my daughter previously awkwardly struggled with the right way to eat a hot dog, but she has gotten over that and now eats it in a way that doesn’t make it impossible for me to make eye contact with her at the dinner table. My son however, has applied the same top-down method he eats a doughnut with to his hot dogs.

We recently went camping, so we naturally cooked hot dogs on the fire. His hot dog was cooked perfectly when I put it into his bun, but it all went downhill from there. We let him put his own ketchup on, so naturally he put about 800% too much on there. Then, he proceeded to eat the ketchup slathered top layer of dog. All the way from end to end. What kind of animal eats a hot dog like that? Pretty sure even an actual animal would bite the end of it. Unless its like a really small animal, like a chipmunk or something. My son is not a chipmunk. He’s a boy who was apparently never taught how to eat a hot dog. I prefer mustard on my hot dog, but clearly mine is topped with parental failure.

How to Eat a Taco

Top down strikes again. I mean, I get it, eating a taco is kind of unnatural. The way to hold it so stuff doesn’t fall out and the head tilt so you can get a good bite isn’t instinctual. But he has seen now literally everybody else he’s ever seen eat a taco eats a taco, right? I guess he wasn’t paying attention, because little fella chomped right in at the top of the curve. Ate down until he had a little cheese and peppers filled tortilla canoe. Maybe he has accidentally stumbled onto something. Could taco bottoms be the next muffin tops? I think so.

How to Eat Anything Filled with Cheese

A substantial amount of my kids’ diets consists of things with cheese. Naturally, there is grilled cheese, but they also take their tacos, quesadillas, omelettes, and pizza with just cheese. While they have started to expand their pizza toppings pallet, grilled cheese and plain cheese quesadillas are staple. But do they just bite them? Of course not. They are in the habit of peeling them open and eating the cheese out from the inside. I think I may have brought this on myself by trying to sneak some veggies in there from time to time, so now they’ll open them up to double check I’m not trying to smuggle anything healthy in their cheese and bread.

I get that there is a certain amount of enjoyment in revealing the cheesy innards of your food. However, they then proceed to pick the food apart, eat said cheesy innards, and once again leave an uneaten husk of a sandwich. I’ll crush a doughnut that has been scalped of its chocolaty top all day long, but I refuse to eat the carcass of what used to be a grilled cheese sandwich that my children’s picked clean of all the best bits.

They have started to age out of some of these eating habits. My oldest daughter eats pizza with toppings, bites her hot dog from one end to the other, and more often than not uses a fork to eat pasta. The more foods they are exposed to, they more they will know how to eat. It is currently cherry season, so they have probably had more cherries in the last few weeks then they’ve had in their lives up to this point. Learning how to eat something that small yet still with a pit in the middle has been a work in progress. My younger daughter eats it like a tiny peach. Nibbling around the equator until she reaches the center and leaving the fruit at the top and bottom. We’ll get there.

But how can I help them? Clearly modeling the behavior and thinking they would pick it up didn’t work. Perhaps we’ll have tutorials as part of meals with food’s they’ve not yet mastered. We took the time to show them how to use chop sticks or twirl spaghetti, I might as well take the time to breakdown the right way to eat a pea pod. If you’re wondering, they take the time to pop out each tiny little pea in the snap peas. I think they think they are really small edamame, which they actually do know how to eat. Seems we’ve tried so hard to expose our kids to different food than we had growing up, that we’ve skipped over the basics. To be safe I better get a dozen doughnuts every weekend for tutorials and quizzes. Seems the parentally responsible thing to do.