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Tweens and Teens
I don’t experience her that way. I really don’t get you. |
+1 I also don’t want to cook twice the food either. I make enough for our family of 4 and usually have some leftovers. But I’m not doubling the recipe to get even more leftovers. |
what type of person goes to Whole Foods? really, it is very expensive. like throwing money away on Bezos. don't get it. with all the other choices. |
Why? If it gets eaten it’s less work that cooking another meal. If you can afford Whole Foods you can buy another pot. In our house we have “scavenger’s meal” once a week where we all create meals from various leftovers and things in the fridge. It’s actually fun and a way to reduce food waste. I never worry about cooking too much |
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What is truly appalling is not so much this boy’s atrocious behavior.
What’s appalling are these horrible boy-moms defending the little monsters they have created. |
Same- if you have teens hoovering food, there's no such thing as cooking "too much". And nowadays with all the resources online (and in our amazing food forum) you have so many options for "how to use up x". In fact, I cooked too much pasta with broccoli for a dish and I need to jimmy that up today if I don't want to throw it out. I'll probably add pesto and mozzarella and maybe chicken sausage and bake it in a casserole dish, maybe with a bread crumb topping. My teens will eat that right up. Or maybe in honor of OP I'll go purchase smoked mozzarella and make it into pasta salad! 😎😎 |
When you have three kids in the house, and the kids have different favorite meals, if the oldest teenage boy consistently eats all the left overs and his younger brother and sister get upset that they don’t have their favorite during “various leftover day,” is that fair? What lesson is being learned by all the kids? What if one of the kids has autism or allergies or doesn’t like things spicy and that teenage boy ate all of the allergen free or lower spice food. Is that okay? Do the kids learn that whoever has the biggest appetite wins? Or that in a family, you look out after only yourself? Or should they be taught to leave some for others? Families are different and make different choices. |
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I have 2 teen boys who train in endurance type sports. The start of puberty, and the intensity of the hunger, wasn't something either I or my older son was prepared for, and at 13 it was still really new. I knew it was coming in the abstract but not how strongly or suddenly it could come on. My oldest kid and I definitely needed help figuring out how to plan for it, because when it started it seemed like they were blindsided by it.
I needed to figure out what to buy and cook that I was OK with the kids going through in enormous quantities. My kids and I started preparing giant batches of cheap filling food -- breakfast burritos, baked oatmeal, baked pasta, red beans and rice or charro beans, pulled chicken with hamburger buns, hamburger or lentil soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, hard boiled eggs, bagels and cream cheese, gallons of whole milk and yogurt, bananas, frozen waffles, etc . . . that I keep in the fridge at anytime so they can have an extra meal. We figured out systems for labeling things and storing things they couldn't eat. Yes, I want them to have unlimited access to calories, but I also want to be able to make something nice at night for dinner the next day and know that the whole family will be able to get some. We figured out what kids could carry in backpacks so that they aren't walking in the house ravishing after practice or school. We established some guidelines. At home, they eat at the table, rather than standing in front of the fridge. They use plates, rather than eating of the containers. They think of it like an extra meal and take multiple food groups. They take their dishes to the sink when they were done. If they eat the last of something like bananas or milk they put it on the list. If they polish off the baked pasta or the rice and beans, they tell me and often make the next thing. But all of that took time. Those are skills and routines that we had to intentionally build. And blaming a 13 year old because they don't have those skills and routines, and just responded to the hunger isn't fair. |
Then those who really have their eye on something can label things. |
OMG and thus this part of the thread became a circle story and here we are back at the beginning. Now, who wants to call me incompetent for labeling food so the autistic 7 year old gets to eat it and not an older teenage brother so we can keep this circle going? |
Wow. Sounds like you’re raising three entitled kids when it comes to food while lecturing everyone else about their hungry teenage boys. |
You did it - you completed the circle!
Have a great Sunday!!!!! |
Very bizarre that it took time to teach them not to do this. My kids never in a million years stand in front of the fridge and eat or eat directly out of the containers. |
+1 I mean obviously 2 containers of the WF pasta salad was enough for the family when her son was 12. Now that he’s 13, she needs to buy 3 containers so all family members have the amount suited to their hunger. She’s making this about the perception that her son is eating more than his “fair share.” But he is hungrier and has higher caloric needs than other members of the family. The solution isn’t for him to eat 6 different other small things to get full. The solution is to buy or make more food so that he can have an adequate portion of the item to achieve satiety. The shaming and controlling and expecting that everything you cook will be portioned out into equal identical portions for different family members is not helpful or appropriate for handling this situation. This isn’t like he ate all the homemade chocolate chip cookies leaving none for his siblings. Separately, that pasta salad is a main dish in my opinion, not a side dish. I perceive it more like Mac n cheese (although not hot) than macaroni salad. |
How old are your kids? Because my sons never did that until they were 13, coming back from a multiple hour practice starving. And then we did some reteaching. |