Cookies for Breakfast!

You know by now that we don't label foods as "good" or "bad" in our household. You know that I let my daughter choose to eat a cupcake for dinner a few months ago, which resulted in her eating two+ servings of broccoli instead. Well, I thought I'd report in on another similar story.

We made chocolate and peanut-butter chip cookies a few weeks ago (Santa needed something to eat while delivering our gifts!). Our daughter enjoyed dumping flour into the bowl and helping us mix all the ingredients together. When it came time to sample the cookies, she ate about a half of a cookie and then wanted to play. 

The next morning, when I asked her what she wanted for breakfast, she said, "Cheerios." When she saw the tupperware filled with homemade cookies a moment later, she said, "and a small cookie." (No idea why she wanted a small one.)

"Okay, Cheerios and a cookie it is," I said.

I got out the cookie for her as I poured Cheerios and milk in a bowl, and she took a bite immediately. A teeny-tiny bite. She then sat down at the table and took another bite. A teeny-tiny-nother-bite. Then she began eating Cheerios and milk. She kept her cookie by her side throughout breakfast, and eventually declared "All done," with her entire cookie-minus-two-teeny-tiny-bites still intact. That was the end of her interest in cookies for the rest of the week.

Don't get me wrong -- my daughter has her fair share of toddler-inspired "preferences" with food, and while most of the time she doesn't want to try new foods, sometimes the excitement of a new and yummy food gets the best of her, especially when it's wrapped in a shiny gold package such as Hanukkah gelt wrappers!

At a Hanukkah dinner last month at which my daughter ate next to nothing at the actual dinner table, she discovered gelt with the older kids after the meal. She ate probably 8+ pieces of it, which resulted in a tummy-ache at bedtime. The next morning we had a conversation about how eating a lot of chocolate all at once can give us tummy-aches, especially when we have nothing else in our tummies. About a week later, at another Hanukkah party, she ate one bite of one piece of gelt and that was it. I sense that she learned--by listening to her body--that too much gelt gave her a tummy-ache, though she did want to at least unwrap one of those shiny coins.

My daughter is also in a phase of declaring all foods unfamiliar to her as "YUCKY!" Like many parents, I find these preferences highly frustrating at times, mainly due to the unpredictability of them. 

And while I'm grappling with how I might help her discover the joys of trying new foods, I do firmly believe that allowing her to choose her own foods--even if that means Hanukkah gelt for dinner--is sort of a game-changer. Sometimes she wants only bread for dinner, sometimes she wants broccoli for dinner, or cantaloupe and yogurt for lunch. That's what toddlers do.

And while I can't predict what my child will want to eat at any given meal, I can tell quite clearly that she views a homemade cookie and Cheerios with exactly the same emotional pull. Why did she choose the Cheerios over the cookie for breakfast (when given both)? I have no idea, but I do think it's probably because her two-year-old intuition told her that Cheerios would be most satisfying to her body first thing in the morning.

Toddlers really do know a thing or two. Can you imagine taking these two teeny-tiny bites out of a cookie and leaving the rest on your plate? How come?

Comments

[Karen Rusch]

When my oldest son was around the same age as your daughter, I offered him a choice of a leftover chicken drumstick or a chocolate chip cookie for a snack. To my surprise he chose the piece of chicken. That was quite enlightening for me. I learned that we should not assume that young children prefer sweet treats.