Grade stage
I feed them to foods I don’t like
As a child, I was a very loud person. (I regularly skipped meals that I cooked in favor of buttered noodles and bowls of canned tuna.) I have come a long way as an adult, but there are still foods I wary of, like fresh tomatoes. When my kids were babies and toddlers, I tried to incorporate foods I disliked into their diets and snacks. But I admit I’ve become lazy. Honestly, I didn’t want to eat those foods myself! And now neither of my kids like fresh tomatoes, they don’t eat other foods that don’t bother them, like eggplants and baked beans.
I’ll put them in the kitchen more
My young child (sometimes unhappy) helps us to cook our Hellofresh meals. And I am motivated to cook when my college students leave campus and are excited to regularly create new recipes I saw at Tiktok. But I wish I had made the standard operating procedures for kitchen jobs with both my boys from a young age. Not only did they build those skills faster, they would also give me a break.
I’ll have them pack their own lunch earlier
Just as I like to give lunchbox ideas on this site, stuffing lunches has ultimately become a chore that fell somewhere between a “scrub shower wall” and “putting a new sheet in the top bank.” After some unsuccessful attempts, I finally packed two kids into independent at ages 9 and 13, but they may have started to get even younger.
Read more: Tell your kids to pack their own lunch in just 5 days
I’ll cook more vegetarian meals
When the boys were younger, I liked my husband and kids the best, so I leaned over a lot of meat and potato meals. In hindsight, I wish I had pushed harder with more meatless meals. Everyone would have become more comfortable with them over time, and that would have been lighter on our budget too. Stir-fried vegetables in tofu bowls and noodles for children.
