It’s 5:30 p.m. and you’re staring at an open fridge, wondering what to make for dinner.
One kid’s on a plain pasta jag. Another won’t eat anything green. Your spouse requests something protein-heavy. You just want a family dinner without whining, complaining, and barely touched plates.
If you’re feeding a family with different food preferences, you know that particular exhaustion of trying to please everyone around the dinner table, the frustration when your kids make that face, the impulse to just nuke some nuggets, slap together a PBJ, and call it a night.
Not to mention the sinking feeling that you’re doing this whole feeding-your-family thing wrong.
I’m here to assure you: You’re not doing anything wrong. You’re just dealing with one of the most universal challenges of feeding a family.
The good news is that there’s a middle path between being a short-order cook and a tough love “you’ll eat what I make and like it” approach. I know this not only as a registered dietitian, but also as someone who’s been on both sides of this table.
I was an extremely picky eater as a kid, largely existing on buttered noodles and canned tuna. My husband was finicky too and wouldn’t go near a vegetable. Thankfully, by the time we were parents, we’d grown out of much of that and wanted our kids to be more confident eaters than we were.
I tried a lot of different strategies over the years, but here are the ones that worked.