Two more bites of broccoli, then can you have dessert.
Cookies? No way! You haven’t even finished your dinner.
If you’ve ever battled with your kids about food – especially dessert – you are not alone. Parents today so often worry about their children’s nutrition. And it sets parents and kids up for major battles.
This is why there is no dessert in our house.
No dessert? Are you on some kind of low-sugar diet?
Nope, not at all. There’s no “dessert course” in our house, but we still eat sweet foods. In fact, I eat chocolate every day. But if your kids beg for dessert and it creates constant dinner-time battles, there are ways to cut down on those food struggles. It’s time to stop fighting with your kids about food.
WHAT DOES “NO DESSERT” MEAN?
When I say there’s no dessert in our house, I mean that it’s not a separate course. Sweets don’t have to happen after dinner.
And most importantly, we don’t label sweet foods as “treats” or “dessert.”
First, ask – why does dessert even exist? It largely extends from tradition. Certainly, there are several cultures that do it differently. Some say that Japanese folks don’t typically have dessert after dinner.
In many American households, it’s purely custom. Our parents and grandparents served pie or ice cream after dinner. So, too, do we. It’s often not a thoughtful decision, but simply a tradition.
After all, bread could just as easily occur after dinner. Or a post-dinner cheese course like the French.
In the meantime, the sequence of dessert after dinner now has meaning. Now that it has meaning, it creates dinnertime battles for parents and kids.
THE PROBLEMS WITH KIDS AND DESSERT
The downfalls of dessert may surprise you. It’s not because sugar is evil, even though sugar is popularly demonized by the diet culture industry.
1. Creating a separate dessert course elevates sweet food on a pedestal. It makes it more special, more attractive, by being slightly forbidden. Adults create this separate category for sweets and then quickly block access. Oooh, if you’re really good, you can have some delicious cake. No, you can’t have cake yet! Of course your children will be more interested in it! But really, the mixed messages are confusing.
2. It diminishes children’s hunger and fullness cues. When parents insist that children finish their dinner before dessert, they may eat more than they normally would, simply to achieve the “treat.” But if you truly want your child to have a healthy and peaceful relationship to food, positive body image, and trust their gut intuition, food is an important first step. (Read 10 tips for intuitive eating for kids.)
3. The dessert course usually must be “earned” by completing part of the preceding meal to an adult’s satisfaction. This signals to children that sweet foods must be earned; that they must first accomplish something to eat the cookie. So what happens on the future day that your child simply eats a cookie for enjoyment? They may feel cycles of guilt, craving, and shame. (More about why not to force your children to clean their plates.)
4. The dessert course creates battles between parents and kids. Rules and boundaries in parenting are helpful, if not essential. But as parents know, once you set the boundary, you have to hold the boundary. So when you create a rule about sweets that is somewhat arbitrary and causes more attraction to the sweet, it sets up fights, battles, and negotiations about food that make mealtimes hectic and stressful.
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Stop fighting with your kids about dessert and do this instead:
If you want to cut down on battles with your children, and stop fighting with kids about dessert, try these 4 tips:
First, understand hidden bias and unconscious beliefs you may hold. Lurking underneath parents’ stated concerns about sugar and obesity are often fear of their children having larger bodies or being labeled “fat.” Diet culture is so prevalent that we often don’t realize our hidden beliefs about body size.
Destigmatize food. Even if you’ve learned not to label food “good” or “bad/naughty,” you may use the “sometimes/always” paradox for food. Or even more subtle descriptors, like “healthy” and “treats.” Know that all of these labels stigmatize food and make it into a bigger deal than it needs to be. What would happen if you removed all labels and judgments about food, and instead offered a wide variety of foods?
Serve sweets regularly. This may sound counterintuitive, but one way to ease battles and negotiations between parents and kids is to offer sweets regularly. If children can only have sweets after a certain accomplishment, or only a certain time of week, they begin to revolve their thoughts around that food. It doesn’t need to be every meal or even every day, but normalize sweets by incorporating them regularly.
Finally, serve sweets alongside other food. Eliminate the appeal of cookies and ice cream by including them in a mini-meal, perhaps with a plate of apples, carrot sticks, and graham crackers. Try it during an afternoon snack, between lunch and dinner, to ease up on dinnertime tension.
THE CONNECTION BETWEEN FOOD AND FEMINIST PARENTING
You may ask, what is the connection between dessert and feminist parenting?
At Think or Blue, our main mission is to support parents and educators to raise children free from restrictive gender stereotypes, to be compassionate, inclusive kids who are ready to change the world. This is not a space for individualized nutrition counseling or dietary recommendations.
Instead, we prioritize body image as a major topic of feminist parenting, given the long history of oppression aimed at women and femmes; Black, Indigenous and people of color; and people living in larger bodies. Weight stigma and fat phobia has long been used to marginalize these groups on a spectrum: through outright violence and discrimination to more subtle tactics, such as occupying their valuable headspace.
A peaceful relationship to food is one critical element of a healthy, positive body image. In addition to our relationship to our bodies and our appearance, and our inner confidence, food is a necessary piece of the complicated body image puzzle.
If you want to learn more, grab our free guide for parents to raise children with healthy body image:
Whoops. We have been going about this one all wrong apparently. 🙂 They are limited to one per day, and must eat vegetables (but not all the other food) to get it. We might need to reevaluate…
It’s ok Adriane, that’s so common in many households. But if we send the message that vegetables aren’t enjoyable in themselves, and that dessert must be earned, it can create strange food issues. Definitely share with us how it goes if you decide to tweak things!
It’s so amazing how our self-image of our bodies can extend to how to teach our kids about food, and it’s so important to make sure that what we are passing on about how to view food is positive, not negative.
Agreed!