Poll: Finish Your Plate!

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

But the idea of making a child eat past when they feel like it seems kind of wrong.

There's where you're coming unstuck, I think. I had the whole 'finish your plate' thing as a kid, but it was never about forcing kids to eat. The logic went like this: if I had genuinely had enough to eat, then fine, I could leave what's left and not have any more. If I was (as kids often do) falsely claiming to be full in order to get past broccoli and carrots so as to leave room for chocolate ice cream then I wasn't really full and should finish my plate. It's not about encouraging unhealthy eating habits - quite the opposite. It's about teaching kids that indulgent foods are a nice treat, but one shouldn't skip healthy food to make room for sugar-laden treats.

At least in my experience anyway.

Some of us were actually forced to eat it literally everything on our plate, at least I was.

I once sat at the kitchen table for nearly five hours staring at the second half of my creamed corn, and I liked creamed corn. My parents actually tried to hold my nose closed so I'd have to open my mouth to breathe so they could force-feed it to me, but it's quite easy to breathe through clenched teeth.

Ouch. Well, yeah, in instances like that I can see how the idea falls down. It never worked like that for me and so I've always seen the policy as a good one. Looking at it from your experience with it, I can't say that the 'clean plate' mentality is even remotely appealing. Your folks actually tried to force feed you? Damn...

 

[Dags90]

There's where you're coming unstuck, I think. I had the whole 'finish your plate' thing as a kid, but it was never about forcing kids to eat. The logic went like this: if I had genuinely had enough to eat, then fine, I could leave what's left and not have any more. If I was (as kids often do) falsely claiming to be full in order to get past broccoli and carrots so as to leave room for chocolate ice cream then I wasn't really full and should finish my plate. It's not about encouraging unhealthy eating habits - quite the opposite. It's about teaching kids that indulgent foods are a nice treat, but one shouldn't skip healthy food to make room for sugar-laden treats.

At least in my experience anyway.

Eh. I think parents come at it different ways. As others have said, for a fair amount of parents/grandparents, the emphasis was on wasting food, not nutrition. I'm also assuming when most people on this forum were growing up, "childhood obesity" wasn't nearly as much of a concern to parents. So almost nobody was thinking about their child's relationship to food or good habits.

 

[Jehovatron]

I'm surprised that no one else seems to have picked up on how widely shared the experience of dinner time child abuse is or, for that matter, taken issue with it.

Particular dishes could make me literally gag, but my parents always forced me to eat whatever fish was on my plate. It often ended in tears.

My parents would whack me until I finished eating.
My older sister and I would spend, I shit you not, hours at the dinner table because our mother would give us really big proportions and expect us to finish it.

"However old you are, that's how many pieces you have to eat".

I was a fussy eater as a kid, to which my parents would answer 'if you don't finish everything on that plate you're going to get slapped'. I only deliberately tested that theory once, and after a few more times I figured out 'but I really don't like it' was never a good enough excuse.

Just in regards to veg. I either ate my veg or I got the belt buckle to the legs. I got the belt a lot .... never did like veg.

My parents actually tried to hold my nose closed so I'd have to open my mouth to breathe so they could force-feed it to me, but it's quite easy to breathe through clenched teeth.

Personally, I can clearly recall being seven years old and having my arm twisted behind my back and my head forced toward the plate by my 250lb father because there was some piece of food that was making me wretch. I used to dread hearing the words "Come and eat."

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

There's where you're coming unstuck, I think. I had the whole 'finish your plate' thing as a kid, but it was never about forcing kids to eat. The logic went like this: if I had genuinely had enough to eat, then fine, I could leave what's left and not have any more. If I was (as kids often do) falsely claiming to be full in order to get past broccoli and carrots so as to leave room for chocolate ice cream then I wasn't really full and should finish my plate. It's not about encouraging unhealthy eating habits - quite the opposite. It's about teaching kids that indulgent foods are a nice treat, but one shouldn't skip healthy food to make room for sugar-laden treats.

At least in my experience anyway.

Eh. I think parents come at it different ways. As others have said, for a fair amount of parents/grandparents, the emphasis was on wasting food, not nutrition. I'm also assuming when most people on this forum were growing up, "childhood obesity" wasn't nearly as much of a concern to parents.

Yeah, as Smeggs pointed out to me above there are wildly different ways of approaching the same philosophy. My parents drilled this mentality into me when I was growing up throughout the 80's, but now I think back on it the older generations of my family - like my two grans - hated waste of any kind. I guess personal/generational values can put pronounced slants on what is at face value the same argument.

 

[Starik20X6]

Encouraged, not forced to. That said, the only time it was ever an issue was when vegetables were on the plate. Or seafood. I refuse to eat seafood to this day.

 

[The .50 Caliber Cow]

Oddly enough I never had this issue as I fucking LOVED my mother's cooking. The rest of my time in that house was hell but the woman could cook.

...

Still not worth going back. Like ever again.

Anyway, to answer the thread: Don't waste food. Instruct them on how to take what they can handle eating. Kids will always be picky eaters so you will have to force them to eat something sometimes but you shouldn't have to do it every night.

Ah, whatever.

[sub][sub]Moo! [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9iIgQN5uZE][/sub][/sub]

 

[Mr Thin]

My mother once told me a story about a couple she knew, when she was younger, who invited her over to dinner one day. She said they were nice, healthy, intelligent people that she'd known for quite some time, and was happy to accept their invitation.

So she got there and had dinner, and everything was mostly fine; except she had to sit and watch as her hosts forced their obese son to finish everything on his plate before he could leave the table.

I think that experience may have turned her off the idea, because although I was encouraged - strongly encouraged when I was a young'un - I was never forced, like some of the people in this thread have been (except when we were visiting at my grandma's house, which may well be another reason my mother never did it to me).

I'd like to criticise the practice as abusive and sadistic... but most people who have it done to them grow up normally, whereas I am dangerously underweight. So I'm not really sure where I stand on the matter.

 

[Ghonzor]

Depends on who was home. My aunt tried to make me when she lived with us, but if there was something particularly horrible (e.g. my aunt's cooking), I could just wait for my mom to come home and I'd be fine.

 

[ElPatron]

snip

Doesn't it feel weird to give medical advice without actually being a doctor? Because I gave you no back story at all and suddenly you claim that he could be fine being skinny.

His energy output was many times larger than the input. Sometimes he outright refused to eat but he was performing demanding amateur sports at school and in his free time.

Despite being born with a heart condition, at age 12 his heart was the size of an adult. When a cardiologist tells you that his heart muscles were so overdeveloped he overcame his heart condition you have an idea how much energy he spent every day. Only recently he has been ingesting enough calories to actually create the muscle he was supposed to gain during puberty.

 

[Littaly]

I really, really hate seeing food go to waste. Unfortunately, the easiest way of preventing that is also the least effective and most unhealthy: by turning into excess food instead. I do my best to avoid ending up in that situation, but despite that I've been known to eat more food than I actually crave for just to avoid seeing go to waste. Sure, it's not much better off going to feed an already full person, but at least it's not being thrown away.

 

[capper42]

I was an incredibly picky eater as a child, to the point where I barely ate anything. This is strange, because I'd try pretty much anything nowadays.

My parents were obviously very frustrated by my eating habits, and always encouraged me to eat as much food as they could get me to. I've become a bit of a hypocrite now though, because I hate fussy eaters to the point where I don't even understand them now.