Family Feeding

The holiday season is certainly in full swing and a long break from school is fast approaching. Feeding children can take a lot of effort when things are in a “normal routine.” Traveling or having family visit can be an added challenge with feeding, especially with picky eaters. Then, you add in irregular meal times, erratic sleep schedules, lots of exciting yummy foods, new challenging foods, and a man entering the house in the middle of the night and leaving presents! This can certainly be a recipe for lots of fun, but also lots of stress around kids’ eating.

The Scenario

I imagine you’ve been there or can relate: You’re at a holiday dinner. There are appetizers out and your child is hungry because she hasn’t eaten since lunchtime, because you’ve been at various holiday events. (Not to mention that she hasn’t napped in 4 days). She fills up on pre-dinner snacks and then it’s time to sit down to dinner.  Your extended family member tells your child she needs to eat or she won’t get cookies later. You cringe inside. (You’ve been reading Sunny Side Up Nutrition and haven’t been using food as rewards.) The family member then looks at you and says they can make your child something different since she isn’t eating. You’re thinking, “She just ate pretzels, cheese and crackers and mixed nuts, she’s full.”  You want everyone to go back to eating and chatting and take the focus off of your child’s eating. That pressure can feel overwhelming and sometimes feel like a judgment of your parenting, even if that’s not the intention. …

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Gift Guides

I don’t know about you, but I love gift guides.  They give me new ideas and they’re just fun to read.   We’re on a gift list roll right now!  This is our 4th and final gift list in our series.  Click these links to read the previous guides if you missed them or want to revisit them: 13 Favorite Kitchen Essentials That Make Great Gifts, Nutrition and Body Books for Parents and Kids and 7 Nutrition and Body Books for Adults.  We hope ours have helped you find some great gifts for loved ones or for yourself.

Cookbook Love

Anyone who has been to my house has seen my shelves of cookbooks (and there are even more on shelves in the basement). I absolutely love cookbooks! I read them like novels. There’s always a stack next to my bed sitting amidst the other books I’m reading. A babysitter gave me my first cookbook when I was 9 or 10. I still have it! 

You can always learn something new when you open up a cookbook. A great cookbook will teach you to cook with easy to follow instructions and a reasonable number of easy to find ingredients. (There are great cookbooks that teach challenging techniques that include recipes with lots of ingredients, but that’s not what this guide is about). A cookbook can also offer a trip to new parts of the world, history lessons, and even some science. Cookbooks offer opportunities for creativity – combining taste, texture, and colors in new or different ways. In great cookbooks, each author’s writing style and the photography or drawings also pull you in. Wonderful cookbooks will make you feel inspired and empowered to cook.

Our Current Favorite Cookbooks

For this post, I decided to stick with just a few recommendations for cookbooks that make cooking accessible. I’ve also included a few that delve into cooking that’s not quite as simple, but fun for anyone who enjoys cooking. It was hard to narrow them down!

Cookbooks for the New or Experienced Cook

 Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat

This book is the first on the list, because it’s my current favorite.  I love everything about this book!  The first half of the book is divided into 4 sections that correspond to the 4 words of the title. You’ll learn how each element works and how to use them in your cooking. The illustrations are more intricate than those you find in most cookbooks. In “How to Use This Book,” Nosrat writes that the choice to use illustrations instead of photos is to prevent you from feeling like there’s only one way for a dish to look.  If you’re interested in food and the science of cooking and want to learn the essential elements, get this book!   Most of the recipes are easy to follow with just a few ingredients.

If you haven’t had a chance to watch the Netflix episodes, (you can watch the trailer here) make sure you put this at the top of your list.  This 4 part series warms my heart.  I know that might seem hard to believe, but it’s such a pleasure to watch.  

How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman

This is one of Anna and her husband, Dan’s, go-to cookbooks. Anna loves the book because everything is explained in a straightforward way. The recipes are simple and have just a few ingredients. Dan likes the book because the recipes don’t require buying unusual ingredients that are only used once and then end up sitting in the refrigerator for ages.  

How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman

I love this book because it’s filled with easy to follow techniques and a ton of ideas for vegetarian meals.  Throughout the book, Bittman provides lists like “39 Vegetable and Legume Dishes That Can be Tossed with Pasta” and “39 Dishes That Can Be Stir-Fried with Asian Noodles” and the page numbers where you can find these easy recipes. These are just 2 of the many useful lists that direct you to recipes throughout the book. If you want to own only one cookbook about basic vegetarian cooking you can’t go wrong with this one. …

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We know family meals are important. They are a strong predictor of kids’ nutrition, happiness, self esteem, and even success.   Research suggests that the modeling that happens at family meals helps increase kids’ food acceptance.  Family meals do not need to be complicated and it’s okay to rely on convenience foods to get dinner on the table.  The benefits of family meals are not necessarily about what one is eating, they are about the family time together and the communication that happens over food. I believe if we are too black and white about what a family meal is, we can fall into a routine of not eating as a family very often, because the bar is set too high. When working with families, I’ll hear this dichotomous thinking of either cooking with recipes or having take out in front of the TV.  There is a lot of grey area between these two scenarios in which family meals can happen. 

Meal Make Up

Like many of us, I’m often coming in from work or a kid’s activity right before dinnertime and, therefore, I rely on convenience or quick prep foods to get dinner on the table.  I use a basic template for our meals of providing at least a protein, starch and fruit or vegetable.  Providing this structure and offering different foods without pressure helps kids learn to eat different foods overtime.  However, again, it doesn’t need to be complicated or gourmet. Sometimes, I need the fruit or vegetable to be quick and easy. 

Go-To Fruit and Vegetable Sides

Here are 6 of my convenient go-to fruit and vegetable side dishes that I rely on to round out family meals: …

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I am often asked about how to raise children that have positive relationships with food and their bodies. One factor that comes to mind is to consider the messages your children receive about their body from their physician. I recently wrote a post about talking to teachers and coaches about weight-neutral and age appropriate approaches to nutrition and feeding children in school. This post got me thinking about what resources I have collected for pediatricians and that the information I give pediatricians is different than what I give teachers. Pediatric visits may not necessarily be able to be completely weight-neutral, but they can certainly do no harm.

In 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a new statement  stating that providers should not focus on weight when talking with young patients. The statement highlights the potential harm that can be caused when pediatricians focus on weight when talking with children and adolescents. However, it is standard practice for a well child visit at the pediatrician’s office to include a review of growth charts. Childhood is a time of growth and development and because of this a health assessment of a child can’t truly be as weight neutral as it can with an adult. It’s important for children’s weight and height to be monitored so that if something is interfering with growth and development it can be addressed, if needed. As parents, how can we advocate for our children to not be harmed by talk about weight and at the same time have these important vitals monitored as part of the health assessment?

Talk with your pediatrician about how weight is discussed in front of your child. 

As a parent, I think it’s important to support my child in having a positive experience at the pediatrician’s office that does no harm and is free of diet talk. Of course, I’m supportive of each parent handling things how they are most comfortable. Something I have done, when my child reach a certain age, is ask my pediatrician to put a note in their chart to not review growth charts in front of the child.  The first time I asked this of my pediatrician, she said “What’s wrong with your child’s weight?”  I said, “Nothing is, and I don’t want her ever to think there is.” I asked her to give me the print …

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