Feeding Your Toddler in the Foodie Era Doesn't Have to Be a Struggle

When I was pregnant with my first, I received a cookbook for babies. I would flip through it and imagine my future child, choosing artfully between crudités, lamb curry, sashimi, and pomegranate smoothies. Then I had that baby. When she began solids, I tried out several recipes only to have them emphatically rejected. I felt ridiculous for trying to cook for my child — in short, it felt like a waste, because it wasn't food I wanted to eat either.

I know a lot of mothers who agonize over the foods their children eat. They'll rattle off a list, practically groaning with guilt. But mostly they express frustration, because it is incredibly frustrating to be responsible for a person's diet when that person has unpredictable — or simply immature — eating habits. What makes me feel for these mothers is that the list is usually pretty long. It will include fruits, breads, cereals, a dairy, and at least one or two vegetables. The kid generally accepts eggs or chicken or hot dogs or fish. The kid is not fed only white things, or only graham crackers and Mountain Dew.

Sometimes I want to hug the anxious mothers and have them repeat with me, "Children do not eat like adults." So what if your kid doesn't eat cheese! If they eat milk or yogurt, they'll probably make it. As long as their diet isn't solely Pirate's Booty and Cocoa Puffs, they will continue to grow. They could reject vegetables all the way through high school, but who knows, at some point, they may fall in love with dandelion greens. (Perhaps when they experience the delicious bitterness of coffee or beer).

Another parental anxiety is often expressed defiantly: "I never feed my kids kid food." Also: "I'm not a short order cook." I wholly agree. No one wants to run a catering service for their kids, but your success may simply reflect the kid you got — thankfully, you got a kid that eats what you make and eats what you like to cook. Not all kids do. We are usually talking about 2- to 5-year-olds. They are not necessarily masters of their taste buds or their moods. They are relatively close to their days on a liquid diet.

Sometimes I hear conversations in which a parent casually mentions that her kid ate, like squid eggs, and then another parent practically foams with jealousy, "Wow, your kid ate squid eggs? My kids eat squid egg casserole, but they never eat squid eggs, just, crudo." "Squid eggs" is often something slightly annoying, show-offy, or on trend — something adults relish like sushi or Indian food or grilled kimchi.

With young children, there are many obstacles to getting them to eat what you'd prefer, but a big one is timing. Their days are shorter, their dinners earlier. Often my daughter's hunger for dinner has come and gone before my partner gets home from work. Kids need to be fed when they have an appetite (I think almost all of our breakdowns could be blamed on "hangry").

It doesn't make much sense to feed them in the 30 minutes before they go to bed. If her afternoon snack turns out to be a meal, she's not even hungry when we sit down for dinner. Some days, she'll have a sandwich for dinner. She'll have macaroni and cheese out of a box (she prefers Pirate's Booty, which entails many conversations about the word "booty"). She'll have a cooked egg and some fruit or a hot dog or a bowl of yogurt. I have revised my notions of the plated dinner. It no longer has to look like my dinner. As she grows, she is eating more of my stews. She likes chili. She loves salmon. She is not a picky eater. She eats well. But I feed her kid food, and I do it happily.

Our current culture has taken the notion of good food to new extremes — the healthier, the greener, the best organic, and the deliciously local. None of this goodness has to exclude the immature eater, but there is also no reason that children need to eat haute cuisine. We're overexposed to categorically faddish and restrictive diets, like the Paleos, these invented "historic" diets. But the historic diet wasn't varied. It didn't include citrus season or produce from California. It didn't include olive bars or green smoothies or nut butters or raw fish wrapped up in seaweed and large doses of soy product. Chances are your kid eats a varied diet. It just doesn't seem that way to you, given the sheer number of choices at the store these days.

I love to cook. But I love to cook a lot of things I don't expect my kid to eat. I love making spicy posoles, risottos, chilis, and garlic soup. I tend to double the garlic in recipes. But I admit: I really, really hate it when my kids reject my cuisine, if I made it just for them. It is a terrible feeling, that rejection. So over the years, I've developed a dual strategy. I cook for us. But I also feed them food they like, the kind that is still fresh, takes me zero stress to make, and is less wasteful. Since having a family, I have learned to grow my cuisine, both to feed more of us for several sittings but also to discover the simply irresistible things like roast chickens and carnitas and pastas with pesto or ragù. We offer and share our food. We ask her to try things, but I no longer stress if she rejects it. In this way, I am still cooking for my own pleasure.

Eating is not a race or a club or a job. It is a relationship as well as an experience. Allow your child to develop taste over many years, not simply in the first years of life, and allow yourself to enjoy eating with — or without — children.