End the Breakfast Battles

I am always starving when I wake up but my six-year-old son Cash doesn't seem to care about breakfast at all. Actually, he doesn't much care for lunch either. It seems like he is a bit of a food camel because he survives on literally almost nothing all day and then he usually will eat a hearty dinner. But that doesn't stop me from trying to cram something down his throat in the morning.

Because he often says he wants a certain thing and then rejects it when it is placed before him: "I didn't say I wanted THAT! You misunderstood," I decided to make up a menu. Now, every morning, I place the laminated menu before him and make him choose from the eight items. Most of them are things he sort of likes (he doesn't REALLY like any food), but I also put a few "trying" items on the list. I figure it can't hurt for him to at least see it on the menu. Of course, I'm not talking real adventurous stuff here. His trying list includes cereal and milk. He'll eat cereal dry and he loves milk but he literally runs from the room when you try to combine the two.

Anyway, my experiment seems to be working pretty well. He now eats at least part of one of his menu items most mornings.

Read on for Cash's Breakfast Menu

Here's my list. I titled it:

Cash's Breakfast Menu

1. Dinosaur oatmeal (Quaker instant oatmeal with hatching dinosaur eggs)

2. Frog in the hole (fried egg in a hole made in the center of a piece of bread)

3. Peaches, yogurt and cereal

4. Cereal and milk

-- chocolate or plain milk

-- chocolate puffs, Gorilla Munch

5. Toast with Peanut Butter

6. Scrambled or boiled egg

7. Pancakes with syrup (I make a batch on the weekends and keep them in the fridge)

8. French toast strips with syrup (I cut up Trader Joe's's french toast into dipping strips).

Parents Magazine recently had a bunch of great ideas for enticing breakfast items for kids too, including a toast puzzle that you make by first cutting a shape out of the center and then slicing up the rest of the pieces. I also liked the checkerboard toast, made with four squares, two with peanut butter and two with Nutella. I could not find the link but it is in the October 2009 issue of Parents.

Comments

[Cheryl Arkison]

Our oldest eats like that too. Most days I don't sweat it, unless we have school.
But I love this menu idea! I'm not a fan of making food silly and fun just to get kids to eat it, for myself. But we all do what we have to, right?