ARE YOU FULL? SHARING
…each child gets their own labeled shelf in the cupboard to keep their food, and gets to write their name on the food that they keep in the refrigerator or freezer. This goes back to feeling secure. A child needs to trust that their special foods are not going to be stolen by siblings.
from Kids, Carrots, and Candy by Jane R. Hirschmann and Lela Zaphiropoulos
In my experience, this practice particularly makes people bristle. It looks like gluttony, selfishness and hoarding. There is doubt that kids will ever stop eating their squirreled away M&Ms or ever learn to share. Add in the amount of privilege my kids already enjoy, and people look like they are ready to pop with disbelief that I allow this in my home.
I am here to tell you that just the opposite is true. If there is any part of this experiment that I wish I had started sooner, it is the personal labeled shelf. With the advent of their own safeguarded food, my girls are so much more willing to share. With each other, with their parents, and with anyone who comes into the house.
Everyone likes control. I think that we as parents and adults forget how much agency we have over our lives. If we finish our favorite loaf of bread we can take our wallets down to the store and get a new one, at our convenience. Children, especially young children, can make very few decisions about their lives. We decide where they will live, what school they will attend, how they spend their time, and what they eat. Having their own shelf allows a small and important amount of control, which, in my experience, helps them to relax about what will be available to them and actually enables them to share more freely and genuinely.
So what does all of this mean when we get to sharing food around a table? It is one of the oldest communal acts we have as humans, gathering around food. What happens when not everyone wants to eat the same thing at the same time? At first glance, self-demand feeding seems to upend the tradition of eating together.
The further I get in to this experiment, I wonder if it is not the other way around. If maybe this way of eating is more suited to our modern lives. We are no longer hunter-gatherers or farmers who share a schedule and a food supply and follow the rhythm of the sun and moon. We work a variety of shifts, night and day, and have access to an incredibly wide variety of foods. For Hirschmann and Zaphiropoulos, it is actually unreasonable to expect that a group of people are all going to be hungry for the same food at the same time.
However, as the chief cook, I am not going to cook multiple meals, and the authors do not expect this of parents either.
I post a dinner menu at the beginning of the week. Dinner is served each night around 6:30 pm. Everyone must be at the table, but no one has to eat. If you choose, you may eat beforehand, or you may prepare your own food to bring to the table. What is important is sharing time together, not what anyone is eating.
When we first began, there was always a hodgepodge of items on the table. For the first two weeks, two of the girls would bring Fruit Loops and milk to the table and eat only that. For the next two weeks, they would bring the Fruit Loops and milk to the table, eat a few bites of dinner, and then eat Fruit Loops for dessert. Three months in, no one brings anything to the table. Generally, they eat what is on the table, without complaint. Occasionally they will bring a loaf of bread and butter or a bottle of ketchup, but mostly, they eat how we eat.
Which, incidentally, is Hirshmann and Zaphiropoulos’s endpoint. They posit that after a period of eating extremes when self-demand feeding is introduced, most kids end up eating like their parents. Does that mean that the bigger concern is how we, as parents are eating? Perhaps that is a subject for another blog…