On Breakfast Bars and Bad Moms
Feeding kids shouldn’t be this complicated.
I keep getting these emails that, in a previous life, I was very excited to sign up for. They meet me where I am emotionally—slightly-to-moderately anxious about being a good parent to two idiosyncratic kids—while stoking even more of that anxiety by dangling tantalizing Mom Projects in front of me.
What they say overtly: “Set up this cute sensory activity / plan this fun-filled outing / make this kid-pleasing meal for your kiddo!”
What they say covertly: “You can master motherhood if you just do this One Additional Thing!”
Lately, the emails that have been *really* getting to me are the ones around food. The five-year-old is a selective eater with very big feelings—so breakfasts, depending on what I serve and what side of the bed she woke up on, can be a minefield. In my experience, there’s very little worse than starting your day with a child screaming at you… especially if it happens day after day, week after week, month after month, ad infinitum.
But there’s an interesting twist. Sometimes, my kid goes downstairs early, before I’m awake, and “makes” herself breakfast. (“Makes” is in quotes because it involves eating cereal directly from the bag.) I love the self-starter nature of this breakfast, and I love that it gives her some quiet alone time in the morning to get into a regulated state of mind. I don’t particularly love the sugar-fest or the sameness of every meal. Part of getting her to eat a wider range of foods is to, well, serve her a wider range of foods.
So, in come the emails. On the *rare* occasion that I’m in bed at night and feeling anxious (ha!), my email will superciliously display to me an email from a Good Mom. “Here’s a HEALTHY breakfast that your child will LOVE,” it promises. Pretty serving trays are filled with homemade oatmeal bars, egg frittatas baked in mini muffin trays, and hidden-veggie muffins that promise nary a hint of zucchini flavor. (Fact: the sensory-sensitive among us can absolutely taste the zucchini.)
And I bake the things! The oatmeal bars get eaten once, maybe twice, before they spark tantrums. The hidden veggie muffins quietly go bad in the fridge over the course of three weeks. The frittatas never get made, because even I am not that delusional to think my kid might try a bite.
The other night, earplugs in, eye mask on, brain pleading with itself to turn off, the thought dawned on me: this doesn’t have to be so hard. Maybe I can just… buy some more foods that my daughter will serve herself in the morning. Foods that are easy to open, legitimately good-tasting, and healthy enough. Maybe I can be okay with one meal a day coming out of a wrapper instead of the oven. Maybe, to achieve my goal expanding my kid’s diet, I can start with what she likes: processed, predictable, sweet foods.
I went on Amazon and bought a bunch of cereals and breakfast bars. They’re not the most nutrient-dense foods on the block—far from it. But they’re also not Pop Tarts and Fruit Loops and the sugar-filled crap I ate incessantly as a kid. They’re… somewhere in the middle.
I think this is my new jam. Call it good-enough parenting. Call it compromise. Call it chilling out a bit. Maybe, as I said to a friend this weekend, we can prioritize calm, happy time with our kids over all the other Shoulds and Musts and “Good Parents Do This” rules that flood our email inboxes each day.
This morning, I came downstairs to find that my daughter had served herself a sizable bowl of “chocolate chip granola.” I cut up some strawberries, which she gobbled down. She was still hungry, so I opened a plastic cup of blueberry flavored yogurt.
Was it an email-worthy breakfast? Not really. But it was fine. And we had a nice morning. I call that a win.
