The Better Breakfast: Cornflakes or Cardboard?

Aug 27, 2010 by Anna Migeon

When I visited my son at college this spring, I ate in the dining hall several times with him and some of his friends. Let’s just say that the dining hall food is nobody’s favorite thing about college at the University of Dallas.

Noticing that Hannah and Helen were eating cornflakes, I told them about some research that had been done on cornflake-eating rats.

This group of rats was given only cornflakes and water. A second group was given only the box the cornflakes had come in and water. A third group got rat food and water.

The rat food group did fine. The other two all died. But the rats…

How to deal with food tantrums

Aug 25, 2010 by Anna Migeon

Every middle of the night, Tina’s dog woke her up to get a treat. She complained about it, but the dog didn’t speak that language. He understood what she did better than what she said. He listened to the language of the treat. She was giving him what he wanted, and that’s why he kept doing it. He probably thought she liked being woken up in the night. Why else would she give him a treat for doing so? That dog had her well trained.

Along come Tina’s kids. All day, any time they want something she doesn’t want them to have, they scream. If they want candy, they scream. So she gives it to them. She says, “I wish my kids would quit that screaming. I hate that screaming.” But whenever they scream, she scrambles to give…

Why Dessert as a Bribe is a Bad Bargain

Aug 13, 2010 by Anna Migeon

Let’s just say we want to eat ice cream every night as dessert after dinner. We’re grown-ups, so we eat our dinner first. The problem comes when the kids, who don’t care about what’s good for them, just want to eat the ice cream and skip the salad, meat and veggies.

So we make a bargain, for their own good: they have to eat dinner before they can have ice cream. Sometimes it works. Sometimes maybe it’s the only way we can make the children eat their dinner.  It becomes complicated, though: just how much dinner must one eat to get the ice cream? If they won’t eat what we want them to eat, we deny them the ice cream. Then they throw fits. Should we quit eating ice cream? Should we let the kids do what they want? Things are not going well, and no answer to the problem…

Leveraging Dessert to Get Kids to Eat Dinner Every Night

Aug 6, 2010 by Anna Migeon

“We have no problem with my kids eating their dinner,” my friend Ashley told me. “Every night I make dessert. I don’t mind doing it. We all enjoy having it. The kids know that if they don’t eat their dinner they won’t get any dessert, so every night they eat their dinner and they get dessert. We have no fights about it.”

Several other moms told me they have dessert all the time, too, for that very reason: it’s one of the key tools in their toolbox to make their kids eat meals.

Recently, a mom asked me this question: “Our problem is that we like to have ice cream (our junk food of choice) in the summertime…