How do parents with infants or toddlers get dinner on the table?
Getting food on the table at meal time can be a huge challenge when your little one is hungry. Here are some tips to make meal time easier and happier.
I have a 20 month old son, and getting food on the table can be a huge challenge. This is especially true when I'm doing meal time solo, and also especially true at dinner time when my son tends to be fussier. This isn't a new problem for me. It was just about as hard when my son was 6 months old. In fact, my struggles in these situations were a big part of the reason I started working on MealAppeal.
Different families probably experience these struggles differently, but I think the challenge itself is very common. The moment my son sees me preparing food he wants to be picked up or, if that fails, tries to wedge himself between my legs and the cabinet. Preparing food under these circumstances is really tough.
Make modifying food faster
The reality of putting together a meal for an infant or a toddler is that it takes a lot more effort than doing the same for an adult. Why? Because an adult can have things on their plate that aren't yet ready to be eaten. An adult expects to see things on their plate like a whole grilled chicken breast or an entire baked potato, and they will happily use their utensils to chow down appropriately. Your little one just doesn't have access to that level of dexterity and understanding yet, so you have to get the food on their level. In other words, all the work (to be honest, it's actually more work than that) you do at the table for yourself needs to be done for your child before their food reaches the table.
But modifying food for your little one is more complicated than doing it for yourself. For yourself, the goal is more or less to get the food small enough to fit in your mouth and chew. For your little one, you need to make sure that the food is safe for their age and stage. This adds an entirely new mental dimension to food preparation. You might ask yourself questions like
- “How do I cut up this shrimp for my baby?”
- “What do I need to do with blueberries again?”
- “Are peas safe unmodified at this age, or do I still need to flatten them?”
You might remember the answer to some of these questions, and you might need to spend time looking up the answer to others. The more complicated the food, the more burdensome this process becomes. Family-approved dishes like pot roast, stir fry, and fried rice often mean needing to look up a lot of information
There are tools to make this process easier. None of the existing tools, however, were quite convenient enough to make this process truly seamless and efficient for me. I wanted something that would take on more of the mental load. That is what prompted me to build MealAppeal, the meal planner designed for parents doing baby-led weaning. MealAppeal puts at your fingertips the information about food modifications you need for your own family, with as little unnecessary information as possible. Try it free for 1 week, no credit card required.
Meal prepping
Once you've made modifying food fast and easy, the next step is to have the food prepared in advance. This can make a tremendous difference when you’re scrambling to get food on the table after work at 5:45pm. My wife and I rarely cook right before we serve a meal (the main exception is when we cook fish, which really benefits from being freshly made). Instead, we do almost all of our cooking when it’s not time to serve a meal.
This approach has several advantages:
- When it is meal time, the preparation takes significantly less time. This means that there is a lot less to do while your infant or toddler is fussily waiting for their food. Even better, the things that remain to be done, like putting food on a plate and cutting it into smaller pieces, tends to be much easier than actually cooking. When I'm doing meal time solo, I often also modify the food for my son in advance and put it in a container. Then getting a meal ready just means dumping a container onto a plate and heating it up.
- You can choose when to actually do the cooking. Frying something on the stove that might make the kitchen a dangerous place for a baby? You can cook it during their nap, when they are at daycare, or at any other convenient time. Chopping up some fruit for easier snacking later? You can choose to do it at a time when your child can watch or participate, which can be a fun family activity and is a good learning experience for little ones. Now that my son is old enough for a toddler tower, he loves working in the kitchen with his parents.
- This part isn’t specific to having infants or toddlers, but it is still highly relevant to parents. Cooking in advance gives you the opportunity to cook multiple dishes at once. This can allow some reuse of knives, cutting boards, and other kitchen tools meaning there is less clean up to do afterwards. Parents have a lot of chores, so anything that reduces that burden can meaningfully improve life.
Conclusion
If you make modifying food faster and cook meals in advance, then the period when a meal is being prepared can be much smoother for the whole family. With less stress involved in getting a meal on the table, everyone sits down in a happier mood. This makes the meal itself go better and should make your family feel more balanced and harmonious.
Try out some of these techniques and spend more quality time with your family.