Reader Question:  I have five kids and I make dinner every night and every night, whatever it is, one of my kids complains and doesn’t want to eat it.  I used to say “Don’t eat it then,” and I also used to put out an assortment of food. Now dinnertime has become a nightmare that I dread. I've stopped cooking and now I’m just grabbing pre-made food. How do I get to a place where my kids eat what I serve?

MOM: She basically has to start from scratch now. She has to sit her five children down for a family conference and say: “Things are not going well at dinnertime in this household. This is not good for anybody, so this is the way we're going to do it from now on: I’m going to cook a regular meal at dinnertime for everybody.  And everybody has to take at least 3 bites from each of the foods before they say if they are going to eat it or not. If you decide that you don't want to eat what is served, then you’ll have to wait until the next morning at breakfast to have food. We have too many people here to do it any differently.”

And then she has to stick with it to the letter. So when the first child looks at dinner and says, “I don’t want that,” she needs to say to the child, in a very calm way: “The rule in the family is that you have to try three bites of each food that is served. If you still don’t want it after that, you don’t have to eat it. You can just eat the other food on the table for dinner because I’m not making anything special for anybody. I cannot do that anymore. We have a large family and there is a lot of food on the table, so if you can't find anything you like you’ll just have to wait until breakfast to eat.”

She needs to do this in a very calm and very consistent way.

MOLLY: We have the same problem where my 5-year old daughter will only eat a little bit of her dinner but then, after she goes to bed, she’ll get up and come downstairs complaining that she’s hungry.

MOM: That’s not a good pattern.

MOLLY: I tell her the kitchen is “Closed,” but it’s often a discussion between my husband and me and he's a softie –she tugs at his heart strings. He doesn’t want her to go to bed hungry.

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