Previously: The Paper Bag Princess.
My mother was visiting the Natural History Museum with my son when he was three. She lives a few blocks away and bundled him up in his stroller. She told me she wouldn’t call me unless it was an emergency, so you can imagine the horrific stream of worst-case-scenarios I thought of when the phone rang.
“Hayley, your son will not put on his jacket.”
Apparently, there was a stand-off. She told him they wouldn’t leave the museum until he put the jacket on. He sat down underneath the T-Rex and refused to move.
“Okay, so let him freeze,” I said. “He’ll ask you for the coat after walking one block.”
“It’s 20 degrees out, though!”
This had already happened a few weeks earlier. A random person (a mother?) caught me fighting with him in an icy supermarket parking lot. “When he’s cold, he’ll wear it,” the woman said gently, and tried to explain body temperature and autonomy — which is the topic Robert Munsch tackles in Thomas’s Snowsuit.
Thomas is a little shit boy like mine who won’t wear his snowsuit. “That is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he says to his mother when she brings home his new snowsuit. “If you think that I am going to wear that ugly snowsuit, you are crazy!”
Thomas’ mother does what any parent would do. She forces him to wear it because I’m not going to have all the mothers judge me for not dressing you properly in the winter and do you know how much money I paid for this snowsuit.
So the mother and Thomas have an “enormous fight.” Thomas is strong, but Mommy is bigger and she’s faster. And she will always beat you, Thomas.
Mommy takes a Xanax and sends Thomas to school with the snowsuit on. When it’s time to go outside, Thomas refuses to put on the snowsuit again, screaming “NNNNNNO!” They have an “enormous fight” and magically switch clothes. Thomas is now wearing the teacher’s dress. The teacher is wearing the snowsuit.
You actually might say out loud, “What in the fuck is going on with this book? Who is in control here?” The kid you’re reading it to will stop laughing and stare at you. And you will look at the kid you’re reading it to, hoping that kid can’t read minds. Because what you’re thinking is this: Thomas has a remarkable resemblance to Chucky, the doll possessed by a serial killer.
Thomas
Chucky
Soon enough Dabney Coleman, Thomas’ principal, decides he’s going to take charge because that’s what men do. They take charge. Clearly you women can’t get this kid in a snowsuit, because woman are idiots.
Thomas’s principal
Dabney Coleman
But this story is as much about individuality and the importance of childhood defiance as it is about parental exasperation and hypothermia. Thomas wants to wear his boxer shorts and a Hanes undershirt. He wants to pick his nose and eat it. He wants to snort liquid mac and cheese. He wants to be a chain smoker. Thomas is not wearing the fucking snowsuit because he sweats in it. And when he has to pee he has to take the whole thing off. Plus it’s brown.
He gives the great big NNNNNNO to the teacher and the principal, and this is when Thomas becomes a hero. Thomas is a legend. If this story had a subtitle, it would be: “Thomas: The Kid Who Got Away With Not Listening To Adults.”
Thomas’ antics then cause the principal and the teacher to get into an “enormous fight” and switch clothes. This is where I advise you not to read Thomas’ Snowsuit to a kid before bed, because she’ll want to bounce on her bed, nose-dive off the dresser, and scream Kathleen Hanna songs all night.
Suddenly, one of Thomas’s friends calls him to play. Thomas shelves any of the sensory issues he might have had, “jumped into his snowsuit, got his boots on in two seconds, and ran out the door.” The moral of the story should be: When the kid is ready to put on his coat, he’ll put on his coat. And: You don’t get a cold from cold weather. You get a cold from germs.
But the story isn’t over. Munsch shifts perspectives, because this isn’t about Thomas after all. It’s about the salvation of adults. In the end, Dabney Coleman quits his job as the school principal and “moves to Arizona, where no one ever has to wear a snow suit.” We never hear about the teacher again, but I’m guessing she moved to Los Angeles, because no one lives in New York anymore.
Tags: books, hayley krischer, robert munsch
If I ever have a child who won’t stop singing Kathleen Hanna songs, I’ll take it as a sign that I’ve done something right in my life.
I love this. Also, can I get a what’s-up from parents: kids who don’t eat….will they eventually eat whatever’s on offer when they get sufficiently hungry? Or will they just willfully starve themselves out of spite if you refuse to pay the hot-dog-on-a-soft-bun ransom?
I’ve reached a confusing sticking point with my toddler wherein there is actually a small overlap between our Venn Diagrams of Acceptable Foodstuffs: cashews. But…he needs to eat something other than cashews, right? Even if “thousands of chips” is off the table?
They will eat. They will definitely, definitely eat, esp. if the hot dog never, ever appears. Ever.
Signed, the mom of a three-year-old who doesn’t even know she’s allowed to ask for something else for dinner.
My daughter has literally never eaten, not even once.
Despite what I wrote above, this is also simultaneously true.
Ages 2-4 are the Breatharian Years. For some reason they just don’t need a lot of food and they do not have time to eat. They are fine with a bit of protein (maybe 2 ounces), a lesser bit of fruit (maybe 3 strawberries), and a pint of milk (or non-dairy equivalent).
They’re sustained by an invisible yolk sac. True fact!
When my son was a toddler, we decided either he was a Breatharian, or he was metabolizing dust. As a teenager, he and his friends hoovered up all the food in sight. He is now 27, and a hale and hearty 6 foot 3. Toddlers don’t need to eat, it’s a myth.
I’ll second mmejoy above: they’ll eat, so don’t give them any alternatives. Both of my kids went through phases where they wouldn’t eat, so we said, Fine, you can starve then. Sometimes the younger one still does it. And if they don’t eat? Then they weren’t really hungry, so don’t sweat it.
The boy is 12 now and going through the opposite phase, where he eats every damn thing in the house.
This second phase lasts for some time, I warn you. By the time they are 21 they will eat you out of house and home.
So one ought to reserve one’s entire grocery budget for teen years? Got it.
Lots of parents will say that it’s not worth the effort, and I’m with those parents: do what works for you. If it’s not worth the headache of fighting through your kid refusing to eat anything but mac and cheese, then by all means – whatever you gotta do.
But yeah, in my experience, kids will eat whatever when they are hungry, especially if you haven’t taught them that holding out for half an hour will net them the foodstuff they want. Our house didn’t have options. You ate what was for dinner or you didn’t eat. If you didn’t eat, and you wanted to eat later, your cold dinner would be presented to you. There were no other options. Either you were hungry enough for cold dinner or you waited for breakfast.
But even when I didn’t eat? I didn’t know I could demand something else. I had no idea. It would never have occurred to me to say “I want mac and cheese instead.” That had never existed in our house. You could either eat dinner or not eat dinner – getting something else for dinner in lieu of what was already made was beyond my imagination. You could choose what was for dinner BEFORE it was made, but after it was made it was irrevocable.
My friends have a variety of things they’ve taught their kids, and the kids who know they CAN ask for something else – that it’s an option – will demand to exercise the option. Kids who have no idea that they possess this power might bitch and moan about what’s for dinner and refuse to eat things sometimes and all the rest – food pickiness still happens – but it has never occurred to them that there could be something ELSE for dinner. They don’t ask for substitutions. They don’t know that’s a thing you can do.
I’m wincing in recognition a little as I read this, because intellectually I know that yeah, you don’t want the kids to go on the mac and cheese diet. But when I was growing up, I didn’t know there were options, either. I grew up with food being a power struggle that I always, always lost, and I am trying to figure out how to eat like a grownup now that I, well, am. Theoretically.
The Everyone In This House Eats The Same Dinner, No Exceptions thing fell apart only after I moved away to university and one sibling developed a full-blown eating disorder. :/
I’m also a fan of letting people (mini and otherwise) make food choices, because it’s can be pretty miserable to have a strong aversion to something, but have to power through anyway on account of hunger. It’s doable and in the case of poverty often unavoidable, but it’s just always struck me as a strange thing to do if you don’t have to. Eating things you don’t like doesn’t build moral fiber, and I’m not even sure it makes you a less picky eater down the line. I have friends who grew up with the “my house, my food rules” style of eating and most of them have relaxed into a pizza-only diet that would drive me crazy with boredom.
on the other hand kids are dumb as hell and I would have happily subsisted entirely on candy from ages six to sixteen if there’d been a parent figure around dumb enough to defer to a child’s nutritional expertise
the ‘grown ass man who only eats pizza and hot wings’ thing seems to be pretty tied to whether there was anyone in the house that could cook worth a damn tho. It don’t matter how many nights they stay up with a plate of cold vegetables if the closest thing they’ve seen to palatable until the age of majority was Dominos
I think some of it is just learning to be an adult, too. Like, most kids over-do alcohol initially because woooooo, no one tells me what to do. Most of them sort it out, some of them do not. I definitely ate a lot of crap the first few years of college and eventually figured out that hey, whaddya know, my parents were onto something with this whole “veggies” thing.
Oh my god you have described my childhood. I didn’t know vegetables could be roasted until I was OUT OF COLLEGE.
Yes! My husband and I were having this conversation about what cooking technique would be the most versatile to pass down, and we decided on roasting, because there are millions of things that can be roasted to good effect with minimal effort.
“because there are millions of things that can be roasted to good effect with minimal effort”
My mom taught me how to make omelets, which was interesting because the people in my life I’ve made omelets for see it as a sign of great culinary skill when for years it was the only thing I knew how to make.
This whole thread about food choices and family food rules and personal autonomy is just… gah. Food is one of those things that I so badly wish had been easier as a kid, but my family’s cooking skills skipped a generation (my grandmother went overboard in trying to be healthy and did things like cut out all salt from recipes), and my mom was a single mother with no time and money. At one point in high school she enlisted me to make her breakfast every morning (to help her? to teach me new skills?) and a ton of burnt and microwaved food ensued.
The lovely thing about omelets is that they’re really versatile too: the “baked potato” omelete is my personal favorite. Hashbrowns or home fries, sour cream, and green onions. Incredibly tasty and not particularly elaborate, depending on how you cook up the fries.
It can be so hard though to develop those cooking skills, especially when both time and money are scarce.
“Eating things you don’t like doesn’t build moral fiber…”
I like the way you put this, and I agree.
I also worry about allergies – a number of friends, and my brother, had reactions that ranged from multiple daily vomit sessions to dizzily crawling to the couch and being unable to move to wanting to claw out of their skin. These all started when they were too young to articulate exactly what was going on with them. (“I thought everyone felt angry and panicky and confused after eating spinach,” one friend said. “I thought that was why in cartoons no one wants to eat spinach.”) Their friends’ parents criticized their so-called picky eating, but really they were protecting themselves, and props to their (and my) parents for recognizing that.
Oh, they weren’t monsters about it. In fact they figured out brother and sister had wheat and dairy allergies because they kept leaving those portions of their meals uneaten and refusing to eat them even though they said they were hungry. It did not take long for them to go to the doctor and get that checked out. They also didn’t serve us stuff we were too young to find palatable – like, I didn’t see a brussels sprout until I was 12 – so it wasn’t like we were forced to eat a plate of things we hated.
If you think there might be a reason why your kid won’t eat something, then it makes sense to figure out what that reason is, and to accommodate individual tastes, but there’s a difference between a kid not liking something the first time they eat it and not liking it over time.
The trick, really, is that the house eats the same dinner, but there are still options within that framework. Parents should involve their small children in the planning/shopping/preparing. Otherwise, what? You sit at the table and wait for some random meal to emerge from the kitchen? That would be awful! Who on earth could learn about food or learn to enjoy it in that context!
I’m sorry your family did that to you and your siblings.
That or you do what my mom did: we are having X for dinner. You can eat whatever portion of X you want, or you can eat the side dishes, or you can sit here while the rest of us eat X and then you can have a PBJ, but nobody is making you a separate dinner.
Which I think is a good way to go. I know too many people who are just pure hell to try and eat out with.
Oh, yes – Clean Plate Club is the worst thing to teach a little kid, esp. one who doesn’t serve him/herself yet. “Here, eat this because this is how hungry I thought you were tonight!”
If we try my kid out on something new and it’s a major failure (she really doesn’t like it or we acknowledge that it wasn’t one of our finest kitchen moments), she can have some cereal/toast/yogurt after giving it a try. No point in going to bed on an empty stomach because those peanut noodles (that we all should have enjoyed) were terrible for some reason.
Yeah. I think the moral lesson of mealtimes, if any, is largely about being polite about your preferences and not expecting them to dictate other people’s actions, or, in my mom’s words, I Am Not Running a Restaurant Here. Actually eating things–eh, they’ll figure it out to whatever extent suits them, I suspect. And if not, that’s what vitamin supplements are for.
Or to enforce on teenagers! By the time I was in high school, my mother was simultaneously angry at me for gaining weight and forcing me to finish my plate every night, which was portioned entirely based on making sure we didn’t have leftovers. It took me many more years than it probably should have to realize how fucked up that was.
We were definitely involved in shopping and preparing, and planning, to an extent–I don’t want to imply I grew up in the Food Dungeon! I know my parents loved us and did their best, but they grew up with the “it’s food, you’ll eat it, end of discussion” ethos themselves and they thought that was best. (And we’ve all struggled with weight/eating to some degree, so they weren’t immune to the bad effects of the “eat it or else/doesn’t matter if it tastes bad as long as it’s good for you” mentality)
Being an adult and buying groceries has reinforced, too, that a lot of the choices they made had some sort of budgetary or convenience factor involved. I have not eaten green beans (especially canned) in years because they just taste like frustration–but when you’re juggling jobs and activities and kids and bills, what’s easier and more cost-effective to put on the table, canned green beans and fish sticks or roasted asparagus and salmon?
I’m working all this stuff out. And I’m not a parent–I don’t know how I would handle this if I had a kid who just wanted to live on grilled cheese sandwiches or something. Hats off to the people who wrangle this one every day.
My parents handled that by providing choices from within the set of Things That Are on The Table. “There are three vegetables on the table, and you have to eat two of them.” “You can have milk or juice, but not pop with your dinner” (except for pizza night, obv). So we had options of how to participate in family dinners, but we had to participate.
Yes. This. You are so right. When asked for advice (only when asked), I usually lead with “Who told her she had a choice?” Then go on to suggest limiting choices is part of a parent’s job.
I got both sides of this coin as a kid – mine was a “what’s on the table is what’s for dinner” house but my parents also wanted us to have input into meals/develop varied tastes. Two separate battle stories:
1. When I was about 5 we were having leftover turkey noodle soup for lunch, and leftover pie for dessert. I just wanted the pie, but I had to eat (at least some) soup first. I refused, and didn’t eat anything for about 6 hours at which point I finally broke down and ate some soup. And then I also got pie.
2. Whenever my parents would ask my brother and me what we wanted for dinner, we would always say spaghetti. So my parents started making spaghetti for every single dinner (with some salads/veg on the side). After 3 weeks, I finally wised up and asked for something other than spaghetti, but my parents wanted to see if my brother (age 5?) would figure out what was going on/get tired of spaghetti. Two weeks later my parents finally broke down and straight up asked my brother if he was tired of spaghetti yet – he wasn’t. They broke down and we started eating other food for dinner.
So yeah, moral of the story is, kids can be stubborn little shits.
#1, oh man. I sat for hours staring at a bowl of increasingly cold and congealed bean soup once. I don’t even remember there being a dessert incentive–I just had to finish before leaving the table. I remember holding out until nearly bedtime.
I held out until MIDNIGHT. It was canned spinach and this horrible noodle and beef thing and I was NOT going to eat it. And I didn’t. It was a school night. My mother finally surrendered.
I don’t think she ever served either again.
Not a parent (I work with kids, for what thats worth), but as a picky eater, I’d say they’ll eat what’s on offer if they’re hungry enough, and making an alternative makes them a tyrant. I picked up even a small kid that if I cried long enough, I wouldn’t have to eat my vegetables and I’m now 31, and pretty much haven’t touched anything green since.
I think you have to do what works for you. My kid went through a phase of only eating Cheerios and milk for dinner.
There are two different kinds of issue here. If the kid’s not hungry, don’t make them eat, ever. If the kid doesn’t want to eat what you’ve served, that’s a different thing. Yes, some parents are pushovers and their kids manipulate them, but that’s not every case. My mom went the ‘you eat what I serve and that’s all’ route, partly from poverty, and I went hungry many nights because I could not eat what she cooked. Sneaking into the kitchen at midnight to steal bread and butter so my stomach would quit hurting and I could sleep was unfortunately pretty common for me growing up. People often commented on how skinny I was, often as praise. Thinking about food and planning meals still agitates me a little. And yet when I had kids of my own, I also felt that irrational anger and frustration when they wouldn’t eat something. When I finally sat down and picked it apart, it was feelings of rejection, of fear that I was parenting wrong, and of just stubborn defensiveness: I said you will, and you won’t prove me wrong. That’s a terrible, bullshit tangle of feelings to blame on a kid just because they don’t like some food. And looking back I could see the evidence of those motivations in my family’s attempts to force me to eat things. So I went the twin routes of involving the kids in planning, shopping and cooking as much as possible, and encouraging them to try things, but if they just couldn’t eat it, they could make themselves peanut butter sandwiches or apples. And I pushed pretty hard on my family to back off on me and my kids about food issues if they wanted to spend time with us. This has worked pretty well for us. Most of the things I refused to eat as a kid I have tried as an adult and confirmed an allergy or sensitivity, but my family never believed me, because I didn’t break out in big hives, I just felt sick and weird.
We do the “Parents decide when you eat and what and kids decide how much.” Then I make sure to serve three meals every day with variety, always including something I call a “sure bet” (cup of yogurt, berries, something with peanut butter, etc.) We try and limit snacks as much as possible and that helps. If she’s hungry between meals, milk or a piece of fruit is always an option.
So glad this is a safe space where we can call children “little shit boys” because let’s face it, sometimes they are. It reminds me of the time my former roommate was nannying for this baby who would only sleep if you were holding him WHILST bouncing on an exercise ball. “This baby’s kind of a dick,” she explained.
My kids are adopted from China and were school-aged when they moved to the US. They had established food preferences— they preferred food. 😉 They ate everything (with lots of hot sauce). For about six months.
Then it suddenly occurred to them that there were choices in life (maybe because of school lunch), and they started saying, “I really don’t like X” (where X was usually a dairy product they’d never eaten in China) and we had to decide what to do.
My solution: “Take one bite, please. I know you didn’t like it last time, but tastes change over time. You might like it this time. Give it a try. If you still don’t like it, you can fix yourself something else healthy.” (“Healthy,” in this context, means “you must have a source of vitamins and fiber with your hot dog and/or ramen noodles.”)
The net result (they are both in college now) is that they are both willing to try a wide variety of foods, but neither likes dairy products much, especially cheese. They are also both pretty good at fixing reasonably healthy meals from scratch, and it’s safe to send either of them to the store with some cash and say “buy groceries, please.”
True, we had unpredictable amounts of leftovers for years, but I count that a reasonable cost for not constantly fighting about food. Different strategies work for different families, though.
This is how my parents did it. “Try at least one bite, maybe you will like it now”. Which is how we went from only eating friend rice at Thai restaurants to full blown loving everything (as well as with other foods).
I still don’t like raw tomatoes though.
I am totally on board the “do what works for you” train. I am a single mom who works full-time. I have a straight 50/50 custody split. Long story short, I am the 100% on parent the 50% of the time when I have her; there is no other adult who is routinely there. I chose not to make food a thing because I just didn’t have the energy for it most days. So from the ages of 2-5, I made two dinners – the kid dinner consisting of hot dogs, mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, fish sticks, and either broccoli and carrots or fruit and my dinner. But from the age of 3 forward, we always ate together, and she would want to try some of what I was having. And now I make one family dinner, which is often a compromise (her palate leans toward the (sickeningly) sweet, mine doesn’t; I like spicy, she doesn’t), but I try for vaguely healthy and always include some kind of vegetable and she is a more adventurous eater than a lot of other kids her age (almost 9). She’ll try almost anything and likes some surprising stuff.
I won’t cook two meals anymore, but when I know I have wildly misjudged in expecting her to eat a particular meal (I like to cook so am always trying new recipes), I let her have pb&j. Which she likes bc she can’t have it at school.
Tl; dr – do what works for you, but I would recommend eating dinner together, even if it’s different dinners, because it usually gets them curious enough about what you’re eating to try it.
I live in Flagstaff, Arizona and kids definitely wear snowsuits here…
Or to enforce on teenagers! By the time I was in high school, my mother was simultaneously angry at me for gaining weight and forcing me to finish my plate every night, which was portioned entirely based on making sure we didn't have leftovers. It took me many more years than it probably should have to realize how fucked up that was.
Why can I not have this 2 year old? My absolutely tiny 2 year old eats her own weight in fruit, a huge serving of pasta, cheerios or crackers, all the cheese she can get her hangs on and a cup of frozen peas three times a day in addition to multiple snacks that day care feeds her. And if goodness forbid she goes a mere two hours without a gigantic amount of food she has a complete and utter loss of mood control. Oh, and have I mentioned the three+ cups of whole milk? She's 25 pounds, I have no idea where it all goes.
I’m so glad someone else has heard of this book. I read it as a kid and then later read it to kids I baby sat, who I think mostly liked the fact that I did all the voices.