It’s a cruel trick played on __parents nightly: After a long, exhausting day of adulting, you come home to have yet another fight ahead of you, and it happens like clockwork around 6:00 PM. I’m talking, of course, about dinnertime. Bunmi Laditan, the hilarious mom behind The Honest Toddler and author of Toddlers are A**holes: It’s Not Your Fault knows the hellacious dinnertime struggle all too well, and recently wrote a viral rant about it that’s resonating with __parents everywhere.
In her post, Laditan describes the daily resistance and lack of appreciation for whatever food (a.k.a. essential nutrients to CONTINUE LIVING) she places in front of her children. And she laments that this problem is unique to “human children.”
She writes:
“You don’t see baby koalas and buffalo rejecting their bamboo and savanna grass do you? You don’t see little toddler alligators talking about, ‘Mama, this gazelle is too stringy. It’s hot. Mama the blood is hot. It’s hot, mama. Can you blow on it even though I too am capable of blowing?’ You don’t hear baby seagulls asking how many more bites of sewer garbage they have to eat until they can go shit on a sunbather. No. It’s just human children.”
So, so true; human children are incredibly spoiled. Like many of us moms, Laditan attempts to prepare healthy meals such as “pan-seared chicken thighs with roasted potatoes and baby corn” and they look at it like it’s “a pile of duck tongues served with on a bed of infant baby fingers garnished with dirty toenail clippings, backwash and leprosy.”
Man, do I feel her pain. I recently made homemade meatballs (even though the store-bought frozen ones are 800 times easier to prepare) and had the audacity to sneak spinach into them. Oh, the horror. You would have thought I made my kids walk across hot coals to get to the table first if you’d heard their screams of torture. Also, like Laditan, I have three children, and I too have a zero percent success rate for getting all three to like the meal I’ve prepared (unless it’s pizza delivered right to the door). I’m lucky to be 2 for 3, but usually end up 1 for 3, or even worse, 0. This is particularly awesome after spending 90 minutes cooking over a hot stove, only to be followed by 30 minutes of cleaning the kitchen.
In her post, Laditan also takes a jab at any judgmental and/or braggy parents out there. She calls for a new parenting rule to be enforced across the land: If your kid is good at something (like eating, sleeping, or potty-training), please shut up about it. We don’t need to hear “my son LOVES kale and can’t stand candy.” Laditan admits she has good sleepers, but she doesn’t rub her well-rested eyes in the face of the exhausted mother at the park, half-asleep while pushing her baby on the swing.
And finally, Bunmi calls for a rallying of parents everywhere. Let’s say screw dinner time, she suggests, and just feed them en masse:
“Rather than feeding our children individually in our own homes, we need to nourish them at giant picnic tables in the street sitting side by side, too distracted by each other’s presence to realize they’re eating. Screw traffic — every night at 6 PM, we set up the collapsible tables and do it orphanage-style: handing out sandwiches and apple slices and then hosing down the kids with dish soap (bath time) and calling it a night.”
Love it, Bunmi. You bring the apple slices and I’ll bring the wine.