Don’t Make Your Kids Clean their Plates

“You may not get up from the table until you’ve finished half your chicken and the rest of those green beans!”

“You can’t have dessert until you eat all of your dinner.”

Sound familiar?

If you’re the parent of young children, you probably have at least one picky eater or a child who is going through a picky stage.

It’s tempting to make bargains with them to finish their food. Or to at least make them eat more than three bites. How else will they get their nutrition?!

If you feel that way, it’s understandable. But the “clean your plate” mentality used by previous generations needs to end.

Here’s why you should ditch the clean plate mentality and stop forcing kids to eat.

First, let’s get to the root of the problem.

WHY exactly do you want your children to finish their food?

To change your approach, you need to understand your current state of mind. You may fit into one of these situations:

1. You have family, culture, or childhood influences. Your parents, like theirs before them, didn’t want to waste food and insisted that YOU clean your plate at every meal. Or maybe you had food insecurity and didn’t know when your next meal would come, or how much would be left for you.
2. You have your own food challenges. Perhaps you had disordered eating patterns and family members would often monitor and comment on your choices and portions.
3. You’re freaked out about your child’s nutrition. Not surprising, given the profuse articles and medical advice that make you doubt if your child gets enough Vitamin K and iron. Are they eating enough (any) leafy greens? Protein? Is it organic? Which milk is the best? It all makes you anxious.
4. You’re using it as a path to a reward. There’s a longstanding rule that children need to finish their dinners before getting dessert. And you’ve never questioned it. After all, how will you know whether they’re entitled to sweets?

Before we dive into HOW to avoid the Clean Plate Club, let’s discuss WHY you shouldn’t make your children finish their food.

Why a Clean Plate Mentality Doesn’t Work

• It robs them of intuitive eating skills. When you force your kids to eat, it denies their hunger and fullness cues in favor of an arbitrary standard. Read more here about intuitive eating and how you can help your child acknowledge when they are hungry and full, so that they can develop a healthy relationship to food.
• If the completion of food is a prerequisite to other activities – screen time, playing, dessert – it creates a weird relationship with food. Kids then start to look at food as another achievement or barometer of success. Read more here about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and how to support your child’s inherent desire to grow and develop without a system of rewards and punishments.
• A clean plate mentality is out of sync with feminist parenting. Bodily autonomy and agency are critical tenets of feminist parenting. To support your child’s control over her own body, you must give her authority over what she does with her body, who touches it, and what goes into it. (There are always exceptions; for example, certain medical treatments.) For a free guide about consent go here:

Here are 6 ways to ditch the clean plate mentality once and for all:

Stop freaking out about nutrition.

Most kids are picky for a while. Your kid will be fine. (Barring any medical issues they have.) Certainly, it’s an excellent goal to consistently offer your children a variety of foods, even when they only seem to like three things. But they don’t have to get all the nutrients at each sitting. Try to think about their daily and weekly intake more comprehensively.

Also, remember that bigger forces are at play. This episode of the Comfort Food Podcast discusses “performative feeding.” If you feel the need to post on social media about your kids’ star-shaped pineapple and organic homemade granola bar, take a step back. You don’t have to justify your food decisions to anyone, and it won’t make you a better parent.

Let go of guilt about waste.

Wasted food makes me very sad, too. But there are options! Buy a bunch of kid-size reusable containers so that you can turn their leftover dinner into tomorrow’s lunch. Or start composting! Then you’ll have a great place for those kitchen scraps.

Find self-compassion for your childhood issues.

Be kind to yourself. Journal about the issues that make you anxious about clean plates or serving sizes. Talk to friend or therapist; food issues that stem from childhood or our parents’ beliefs can take years to undo and transform.

Try to create a mantra that embraces the food philosophy you aspire to, even if you’re still working on it. For example, “in our house we eat until we’re full” or “my body, my choice.” Repeat it and hang it in the kitchen.

Pick a different time for “dessert.”

Parents are astonished by this simple solution. Dessert doesn’t have to follow dinner. It doesn’t have to be predicated on a clean plate. Offer sweets at snack time if that minimizes arguments with the kids.

Erase dessert as a course.

Better yet, don’t even call it dessert. We don’t have “dessert” in our house. That doesn’t mean my kid doesn’t have sweets – she does – we just don’t categorize them as a different course or put them on a pedestal.

If you were planning to offer cookies after dinner as a reward for eating dinner, offer a cookie along with some carrots and hummus during afternoon snack. It destigmatizes the cookie when you include it with other food.

Make a pact with your partner.

If you need help to ditch the clean plate mentality (or your partner does), promise to remind each other before meals to stop fussing about your kid’s eating habits.

If you remember the how, why, and what of letting your children make decisions about their own plate, it will get easier every day! Share below: which tip will you try first? What still seems hard?

In the meantime, be sure to download our free body image guide for parents: “How to Nurture Healthy Body Image in Kids.”