Throwing my hands up in despair, I asked my four-year-old daughter what I could possibly do to get her to eat dinner. It was a general question – not specifically related to the meal we’d had (or not had, in her case) that evening. I figured she might have the answer.
“Cook nicer dinners” she said.
You wouldn’t want to be thin-skinned around kids.
And the thing is, she meant it helpfully – she wasn’t trying to be smart. She really felt she was making a good suggestion. Of course, her idea of “nicer dinners” would be having either plain pasta or pizza every single night. So I’m still searching for a solution, but in the meantime, this is an article I wrote for eumom.ie about mealtime battles in our house, and some practical tips that I’ve had some success with over the years: The dinnertime wars
