The Better Breakfast: Cornflakes or Cardboard?

Aug 27, 2010 by

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…

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How to deal with food tantrums

Aug 25, 2010 by

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…

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Six ways to insure kids eat dinner whether there's dessert or not

Aug 22, 2010 by

Are you using dessert to get your kids to eat meals?

It’s not normal for a child not to want to eat dinner.  If they don’t, something’s gone wrong.  They can and should be hungry for real food at dinner time. If they’re not, maybe they’re not feeling well.

More likely, either they aren’t hungry because they’ve had untimely access to food or they are ignoring their hunger and refusing to eat because of some other reason. Maybe they want to jerk their parents around, or maybe they’ve dug in their heels about the dinner that’s served because you’ve forced them to eat it in the past. Maybe they’ve been pushed to eat so…

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Why Dessert as a Bribe is a Bad Bargain

Aug 13, 2010 by

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…

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