Family dinners are more than just a meal; they’re an opportunity for bonding, communication, and creating lasting memories. Plus, they’re legitimately good for your kids! Studies have shown that regular family meals can improve children’s academic performance, mental health, and overall well-being.
But getting everyone to the table to enjoy a peaceful meal together can feel impossible, especially when met with the dreaded words, “I don’t like what’s for dinner!”
Picky eating a common challenge. But when you’ve spent time and effort preparing a nutritious meal, you want appreciation. The resistance, complaints, and even tears are frustrating, exhausting, and can leave you feeling like a failure as a parent.
But what if there was a simple solution that could help you navigate these dinner table struggles and ensure that everyone leaves with a full belly and a smile on their face? Enter: the peanut butter toast backup menu.
In this article, I’ll share my family’s story of how we discovered the unexpected savior of our family dinners and how implementing a simple, non-negotiable backup option has transformed our mealtime experience. Along the way, I’ll provide practical tips and insights that you can apply to your own family dinners, helping you find peace and joy at the table once again.
The Challenges We Faced with Family Dinner
Having dinner together as a family is a goal of ours every single night. Even if it’s brief, just being together is important for bonding. And if we can hear about the highlights and lowlights of everyone’s day, it’s a huge success.
The problem is when the kids revolt against the food you’re serving. It could be mac and cheese with the noodle shape they like served in their favorite red bowl. But on that day, it feels good to say, “I hate this dinner.”
After a long day of work, hearing this crushes your soul. And isn’t that just what you and your spouse need to have a nice night together?
Dealing with Hungry Kids Refusing Tonight’s Dinner
You want to teach healthy eating habits. You want full bellies. You want a negotiation-free dinner with your spouse and spawn.
And the struggle to reach these reasonable goals takes a real toll on both us as parents and them as children. Dinners are tense which leads to stressful bedtimes which leads to poor sleep and a vicious cycle all over not wanting to eat the caesar salad and nugs that just last week you professed were your favorite.
What are we supposed to do? Nobody ever taught us how to handle this. Having read books on nutrition and game theory and psychology, we tried the following.
Hard-line stance: What’s for dinner is what’s for dinner. This would teach them to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable. If we were hunters and gatherers, you’d eat what was availble or die.
The problem is they’d usually choose die. And we don’t have the will power to send them to bed hungry knowing there’s food we could give them. With the power to make the whining and crying stop, eat what was served or suffer is a hard line to hold.
Order taking: Letting them come up with their backup dinner. This eventually got them fed. But getting there took brainstorming and negotiating which is exhausting for all. We’d always say, “We can’t do this anymore.”
We needed a better, more sustainable solution. Something that was healthy-ish, would fill them up, and was rarely a better choice than what was actually being served.
The Peanut Butter Toast Solution
The inspiration for peanut butter toast came as a backup came from our time at summer camp. Peanut butter and jelly was always available if you didn’t like what was served. Amazing! Why don’t we do that, too, except remove the thing that’d make this backup option closer to dessert and often way better than tonight’s dinner — the jelly.
Announcing that from henceforth, toast with peanut butter was available as a backup was a huge relief. No more negotiating; just a peaceful dinner where the rules are the rules.
From a practical standpoint, peanut butter toast is great. It’s simple and easy enough to make so we don’t feel like we’re making two dinners. And soon when they’re old enough, they can make their own.
To make sure it’s on the healthier side of things, we focus on two things: The bread and the peanut butter. With the right versions of both of these, their choice of peanut butter toast can be a nutrient-rich meal that well fuels their growing mind and bodies. Get it wrong, and you might as well offer them a candy bar.
Use whole-grain bread. Look for options like Dave’s Killer Bread that list whole grains as the first ingredient and don’t contain added sugars or dairy.
By choosing whole-grain bread, you can significantly boost the nutritional value of your peanut butter toast. Plus, you get the fiber which is crucial for digestive health and regulates blood sugar levels keeping them full and satisfied for longer. Peanut butter toast on refined bread like Wonder which has all the vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants is like serving them cake for dinner.
Choose natural, one-ingredient peanut butter. It’s way better than store-bought, shelf-stable ones with additives, preservatives, and often sugar. Yes, Skippy Peanut Butter has added sugar.
We like making homemade peanut butter for the freshness, taste, cost-savings, and environmental impact. If we’re away from home, we look for one at the store that’s most similar to what we’d make at home.
Now their only and always backup option if they want something besides what was on tonight’s dinner menu is toast with peanut butter. No decisions and no fighting makes dinner a restorative experience instead of a draining one. Plus, kids leave with full bellies which means they’re in a better mood for the rest of the night.
The Ongoing Journey
With peanut butter toast always on the menu, our middle child has taken full advantage. No matter how lovely his well-balanced, hand-crafted dinner looks, he has peanut butter toast every night.
But one of our family rules is “a deal is a deal.” And if we tell them they can always have peanut butter toast if they don’t like dinner, we have to stick with that. To us, having any of them eating and communicating their needs is a small victory in and of itself.
The kids have also wanted to get involved making the peanut butter. This is wonderful, even if it takes forever compared to doing it yourself. We just have to hold a new line about which nut butters are on the dinner menu. “Yes, we can make Monkey Butter, but plain peanut butter is the only thing available for backup dinner.”
Are our dinners like a fairytale now? Not even close. It’s a constant battle to get kids to arrive and stay. But being a parent is a constant learning process. The adaptations are the fun part. You can find joy in the struggle. There’s usually a sweet moment between the two of us when the kids are gone flying around the house and we’re just digging into our meal.
With our peanut butter toast backup menu, everyone leaves with full bellies. And we do not need to discuss what else they can have. It’s brought peace to the dinner table and a little lift of stress for the rest of the night.
Peanut butter toast isn’t the only thing that works on a backup dinner menu. You have to figure out what works for your family. But having something that fits the healthy, easy, quick that’s non-negotiable and rarely superior to what you actually cooked that night might be something to consider bringing into your family’s house rules.