Fridge regulation for kids?
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Hm well, as a kid my mom definitely watched what I ate, and if she thought I was eating too much (and would get sick) which I would have if it weren't for her because I was a greedy little child xD she would kindly tell me so, and I'd listen to her. So it wasn't really controlling behavior at all, but rather her gentle warnings, which led me to make better choices as I grew up. Now, I take food out of the fridge, and she doesn't say a thing, as she knows my habits are much more improved, and that I eat proper proportions.0
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Do you have certain foods since you started this journey that you don't want to share due to price or something else? my main things are my almond milk and skinny cow ice cream sandwiches. I buy them regular milk and regular ice cream so is it wrong for me to not let them eat my "special" ones..
yes- I have a few things my son always tries to eat-- that are 'mine'. For the first several months of my 'journey' I was using meal replacements thru Kaiser. He had no interest in the 5 shakes a day I drank-- but he LOVED my peppermint cocoa crunch bars (think girl scout cookie flavor, in a bar!) -- my only real FOOD each day -- and he always wanted one. But for me-- it was a meal replacement- not just a snack. Mind you, these WERE meals-- 160 cals, 20% of all the nutrients I needed for the day, and over $2/bar. Not your typical Quaker oatmeal cookies n cream granola bar where a box of 10 costs $2. So I'd always have to 'police' him on those!! Also- now, my Greek yogurts. At about $1 a piece-- I have MY stack of yogurts, and then his stack of regular ones (Yoplait or GoGurts)... about 1/2 the price or less!!
Funny!!0 -
My 7-year-old daughter is in the normal weight range, healthy and active. She has a snack shelf in the pantry stocked with mostly healthy snacks that she can have any time. She can also get milk, yogurt, cheesesticks or pudding cups out of the fridge without asking. She often makes herself a bowl of cereal in the mornings if she gets up first. She is fairly picky and does not eat compulsively, so I'm okay with her eating by her own hunger cues. Most of the time, she gravitates towards her own healthy snacks. She has a basic understanding that healthy food should make up the majority of what we eat and that we should only eat junk and sweets in moderation. She does ask permission to eat chips, cookies or other junk if it happens to be in the house.
I am and have always been a very compulsive eater. Luckily, she seems to exhibit no tendencies towards compulsive eating/overeating and I don't want to mess with her internal cues and/or create sneaky or hoarding-types of food behaviors.0 -
My children have always eaten whatever they want whenever they want, especially "my food" because I have always eaten a wide variety of food. My children are both in excellent shape with good eating habits today 16 and 19 years old.
It bothers me a bit when I see adults eating prime rib and veggies while their children eat hotdogs and French fries.
Having said that though, there is no right or wrong way as long as you are consistent so that they know their boundaries and feel safe within them.0 -
We never had good food as a kid. Everything took forever to make so I guess that was my regulation. Now I definitely regulate what my kids eat. I don't buy $200 worth of groceries to be gone the next day. If they could they would eat 10 packages of fruit snacks, all the granola bars, all the fruit and no way there not doing it. When they have they were never hungry for dinner/lunch.0
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My kids have to ask
I dont want them eating food just before dinner
I want to know how much is left in the fridge so i know if i need to get more
Not only this, but if my mom had let us eat whatever whenever, she'd have been replacing pilfered Pop Tarts, granola bars and fruit snacks several times a week. Living in Mexico where these items were not readily available for several hundred miles and had to be bought every two months on a weekend trip to El Paso, this was huge no-no.
We were allowed into the fridge for fruit, and cupboard for crackers but that was about it. I plan on raising my son similarly. I feel it helps curb the development of unhealthy snack habits.0 -
I was trying to feed three kids on a 50% below poverty income. I sure as hell had rules.
3 kids x 2pcs of fruit a day plus one alternative snack a day of the healthy variety plus breakfast, lunch & dinner...
That's a lot of f'n food. And many times I didn't eat or had one meal a day so they could eat.
Even when my income finally grew if I let my kids eat unhampered my food bill was about $1200/mth. If I kept control over it it was about $700/mth Teenagers are locusts in disguise.0 -
As a kid, I was allowed to eat what I wanted, but it was all healthy. Meaning that I was not allowed to have chocolate, or ice cream, or peanut butter, or cookies, or candy. Only once in a very long time. What eventually happened is that when I got older and my parents stopped regulating that so strictly, I would go out of my way to eat sweets and "rebel", and ended up gaining weight because I didn't understand that it was the bad foods that were contributing to my weight gain.0
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yes! i regulate the fridge and the cupboards! i have 5 kids, and if it were up to them, they would sit around snacking all day. regulation 100%0
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I was trying to feed three kids on a 50% below poverty income. I sure as hell had rules.
3 kids x 2pcs of fruit a day plus one alternative snack a day of the healthy variety plus breakfast, lunch & dinner...
That's a lot of f'n food. And many times I didn't eat or had one meal a day so they could eat.
Even when my income finally grew if I let my kids eat unhampered my food bill was about $1200/mth. If I kept control over it it was about $700/mth Teenagers are locusts in disguise.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is an amazing mother right there. What a perfect example of love and sacrifice for your kids. Bless you for putting first things first, and I certainly hope you are doing better now. :flowerforyou: 0 -
My son (who's 18 now) would sneak into the fridge in the middle of the night and eat just about everything in the fridge and/or pantry. It got so bad that I had to put a bicycle lock around the handles of the side-by-side fridge and a deadbolt on the pantry. He has gotten better about it but he is extremely overweight now and is struggling with trying to lose the extra weight. I finally got him to join MFP this week and I think he is starting to like logging and keeping track of what he eats.0
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My kids always ask before they get something to eat.
Why?
because I have 5, and if it was a free-for-all we'd never have grocries or money for bills.
also so I can keep an eye on thier nutrion. I have 5 very different nutrional needs to attend to.0 -
My children have always eaten whatever they want whenever they want, especially "my food" because I have always eaten a wide variety of food. My children are both in excellent shape with good eating habits today 16 and 19 years old.
It bothers me a bit when I see adults eating prime rib and veggies while their children eat hotdogs and French fries.
Having said that though, there is no right or wrong way as long as you are consistent so that they know their boundaries and feel safe within them.
this doesn't bother me because when we do eat out my kids would never have the prime rib..not because I won't let them but because the hot dog or pizza appeals to them more..0 -
I was trying to feed three kids on a 50% below poverty income. I sure as hell had rules.
3 kids x 2pcs of fruit a day plus one alternative snack a day of the healthy variety plus breakfast, lunch & dinner...
That's a lot of f'n food. And many times I didn't eat or had one meal a day so they could eat.
Even when my income finally grew if I let my kids eat unhampered my food bill was about $1200/mth. If I kept control over it it was about $700/mth Teenagers are locusts in disguise. That, ladies and gentlemen, is an amazing mother right there. What a perfect example of love and sacrifice for your kids. Bless you for putting first things first, and I certainly hope you are doing better now. :flowerforyou:
Aww... Thanks. :blushing:
Oh yeah. New job about 6yrs ago. Much better. now all my kids are young adults with my youngest being 17! And not one of them has an eating or weight issue. :happy:0 -
My daughter is 5 and can get some of her own snacks, but she pretty much always asks first and shows me what she picked out. We keep a fairly "clean" pantry and fridge, so 99% of the choices I am going to say yes to. When she gets candy at birthday parties, Easter basket, etc, she gets to eat a couple pieces then and the rest goes into a box and she can pick something after school. Amazing how long the candy lasts, and even more amazing that she is trustworthy even though she can reach the box herself! Now, the hotdogs on the other hand... LOL I buy the Jennie-O turkey hotdogs for her, only about 70 cals apiece, but she likes them cold right out of the package :sick: ....and I have on occasion discovered she has eaten about 5 of them at a sitting!!! I try not to hassle her too much about food, mainly she cannot have dessert (on the rare occasion we have a dessert in the house) if she has only picked at her dinner. She is more of a "grazer" than one to eat a whole meal at a sitting, so I just serve small portions at mealtime and go with what works for her... She is very tall and slender and active all day long.
Yes, I do have foods just for me, like my Ghiradelli Twilight dark chocolate squares!! And also food just for her, and food that is for "us". She loves salads and salmon because I let her try what I am eating. Unfortunately I let her try my tuna sashimi once and she loved it... Ain't nobody can afford to have a child who loves sushi LOL!!!
I also have a friend with 3 kids and agree with what several of you posted - you've got to keep a rein on it or they will eat all the groceries in a day! She has specific snacks for them, and they each get their pick of 1 healthy and 1 "junk" snack per day.0 -
As a kid we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If we had a snack it was rare. There were 5 kids...I'm sure the budget was tight. Fruit was apples or oranges...nothing else.
As an adult...my kids (7 of them) usually ask. If they are hungry they will ask for a snack. They know that snack choices are string cheese, milk, nuts, veggies, or fruit. That is all. Once in a while we will have dessert. The dessert might be a tablespoon of M&Ms, or a cookie, or a small bowl of ice cream. My oldest is in college. She will make sure that what she eats isn't something I'm going to use for a meal.
There are a few things that are off limits. They cannot have my almond milk...they have regular milk. They cannot have my cereal...I make sure they have Life cereal or something similar. I make sure they have a fruit with every meal, a veggie with lunch and dinner, milk with breakfast, good protein, and whole grains on a daily basis.0 -
As kids we always had to ask for snacks if we wanted them. My mom didn't always keep stuff like that in the house, you ate what she fixed you at meal times and she fixed one meal for all of us. Ice cream, chips and soda were things that were only bought for birthdays or special occaisions, not kept on hand like in so many homes today. Every once and a while she would buy a pack or two of Little Debbie Oatmeal Pies or Swiss Rolls. We had to ask to get drinks and we knew that the iced tea was our parents and the Kool Aid was ours.
Now I have an only child and I have a cabinet that has just her favorite things in it (snacks, soups, cereals). Most of the time she's pretty good about not gobbling something up as soon as I buy it. But I also have a drawer in the fridge that I put my "healthier" choices in that for some reason is what she wants to eat lately so we have to battle. She's trying to make me feel guilty for having things for just me after all the years that I've bought things for just her (kids can be brats sometimes).0 -
The lower section of the door of the fridge is everything my daughter can have without asking...UNLESS I am making dinner! If I'm making dinner (or lunch) she can wait. Anything else she has to ask. I was pretty relaxed on this until I caught her sitting on the couch digging into the cream cheese I needed for something...with her fingers!
She's super skinny though so its not for weight issues as much as for "she's five and doesn't need free access" issue.0 -
For now I am lucky I have a two year old. However the other day I was on the phone and I look over and he had gotten a Capri sun roaring waters out of the fridge for himself no asking just cause he wanted one. Well he had just had one maybe 30-45 mins prior so that's a "no" you already had one. I then had to start the conversation of "you don't go in the fridge without asking". I know he will not get the whole point but it is the start of the conversation he will get to know well. My mom left when I was 10 after that I gained A LOT of weight and was overweight up until now, it was because I wasn't being monitored. I think it is important to regulate the fridge most of us ended up here because of overeating do you want your next friend request to be from your child?0
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My DD always asks before she wants to eat something. Like any other kid, she'll ask for ice cream, chips, etc. I limit how much junk is in the house so it's usually not an issue. There is way more good food in the house than bad.
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