Why is it that no matter what I am eating my children must have a bite? I have spent the better part of many days trying to eat something, anything that my children wouldn’t want a bite of or want to steal from me.
I find it hard to believe the pancakes on my plate taste any different than the ones on my 3 year old’s plate. Truly, the only thing I have to do to get my children to try a new vegetable at this point, is pretend I’m going to eat them myself, and refuse to share.
My sweet mother-in-law used to howl at my husband and his four siblings, “It wouldn’t matter if I was eating a plate of dog poop, you’d want a bite!”
Panic ensues if my children think I have something they do not, or cannot have. “Mommy, Mommy…please, I want some. I’m soooo hungry.”
Hungry? After three chicken nuggets, a heaping helping of macaroni and cheese and a pile of steamed broccoli? I think not.
“You aren’t hungry,” I want to scream, “you’re jealous of my food! You can’t stand for me to have something that is mine!” I picture myself running to my room, locking my bedroom door and hiding under my bed to eat in peace…or ordering a pizza and having it delivered to my bedroom window so I don’t have to touch every slice in the box, to find the right match for each child…or going through a drive through and eating while they are locked into place by their five-point harnesses and can’t get to me.
But I don’t do any of these things - I make another plate of food for them. I’ve heard these people who say, “I’m not a short-order cook; I’m only cooking one meal and my kids will eat what I make or be hungry.”
And hey, maybe you are blessed or a better mother than me and all of your kids eat whatever you put in front of them. But I have a picky eater at my house and unless everybody is eating French fries, Easy-Mac, chicken nuggets and Oreos for dinner we aren’t all going to be happily eating the same thing every night.
I don’t fancy myself a short-order cook, either, but I would like for my children to be well fed and eat on their own volition. I have no desire to have a Super Nanny Jo Frost show-down at the kitchen table every time we sit down to eat. If that means I have to make steamed broccoli every single night so they can eat vegetables they like, so be it.
I would rather let my children try something new and say, “No thank you, I don’t care for that,” than have to listening to them sit at the table and cry until they finish their carrots, or what have you.
I can tell you this from experience, there are a lot of things you can make your children do, but putting food in their mouths, chewing and swallowing are not on that list. As evidenced by The Sunday Soup Standoff of 2008, where my oldest child chose to sit in time out for hours over taking one bite of homemade vegetable soup; and further proved by The Green Bean Incident of 1989, when Linda, our next door neighbor, tried to make my sister Blair, eat one green bean. Blair tried without success to convince Linda she did not like green beans. Linda would not be dissuaded and kept on until Blair finally chewed and swallowed a single green bean. But my baby sister firmly proved her point by immediately throwing up.
 I’ll take a “No thank you,” over puking at the dinner table any day…but that’s just me.

(Robin O’Bryant is a Mount Pleasant resident and mother of three. Read her blog at online www.robinschicks.com or e-mail her, zebandrobin@hotmail.com)