7 Practical Reasons Why To Offer Your Kids Dessert With Dinner
Did you know that how you offer desserts to your kids matters?
Yes, it’s true! The manner in which you approach sweets with your kids can be influential in shaping their overall relationship with food.
If you’re anything like me, you likely grew up having dessert after dinner. You may have learned that you had to eat so much of your dinner or all your veggies to get dessert. Or maybe dessert was only allowed on special occasions.
Like many things, we often recycle what we learned growing up with our own kids, including behavior around food.
But when it comes to offering desserts, waiting until after dinner to serve sweets to your kids may not be the most effective way to help them develop a positive relationship with all food.
The good news is that when you know better, you can do better.
You may be wondering: what’s the best way to serve desserts to help your child develop a positive relationship with these foods?
I’m going to explain more about this below, but first, let’s talk about WHY your approach to sweets matters. Then we’ll talk about the how.
7 Reasons Why You Should Serve Your Kids Dessert With Dinner
If you look closely at our society and how we approach food in general, it’s easy to see there’s a hierarchy with food. Foods deemed more “healthy” are typically pushed on people’s plates, while foods labeled as “unhealthy” are demonized and often withheld.
While this is a common pattern of thinking about food (good versus bad), what are the consequences associated with this black and white approach toward food?
The dangers I see specifically play out into how kids are influenced to feel about food and their bodies.
For example, children who grow up hearing that the foods they like and enjoy (like sweets and desserts) are “bad” for them, are more likely to grow up with food guilt and body shame.
Kids, who don’t necessarily have the brain capacity to understand the nuances of food, begin to believe they are in fact “bad” for eating the things they’ve heard described as such. When a child believes she is a bad person for eating a cookie, this can quickly spiral into a chaotic and complicated relationship with food and her body. I know this to be true because I was one of these kids.
Another common scenario I see playing out with the hierarchy of food is this idea that certain foods have to be “earned” or only allowed on special occasions. This type of mentality around food elevates desserts over other foods, putting them on a pedestal and effectively making them even more desirable.
For example, when desserts are used as rewards, bribes, or incentives for good behavior, this is communicating a message to a child that desserts need to be earned. When children feel like foods they’re eating are earned, it can not only deflate they’re sense of worth and self-esteem, but it creates a disconnect between food and their bodies. What does this mean exactly?
Kids begin to formulate rules around food that may dictate how they eat for years to come rather than tune into and trust the signals and information their bodies are giving them.
Kids can be trusted to eat and enjoy a variety of foods, including desserts, and often because of our own fears and unresolved issues around food, we feel like we have to control and micromanage everything they eat. However, this is a surefire recipe for problematic power struggles and food issues that can plague a child for years to come.
A simple way to prevent this to be intentional with the manner and frequency in which you offer desserts in your own home. When a child can trust these foods are available and regularly part of his future, he won’t feel obsessive or preoccupied with food, including desserts.
Imagine your child being able to enjoy a dessert, eat an amount that felt best in her body, and then move on?
Many adults can’t imagine doing this, let alone seeing their children do this, and so they resort to tightly controlling or restricting dessert intake.
While this might be the case for you, I want to encourage you to approach dessert differently with your children in order to help support them in building a positive relationship with food and their bodies.
One powerful way to do this is to switch up the way you offer dessert.
Why?
What’s customary in many families is to save dessert until after dinner, or to wait to offer dessert until kids have eaten a meal.
When I share this with parents, I automatically get push-back: “They would never eat real food!”, or, “They would just eat their dessert and want nothing else!” And this is exactly the kind of mindset I want to gently encourage you to challenge - for the sake of your child’s relationship with food.
I know this may seem counterintuitive for a multitude of reasons, but here me out.
Serving dessert with dinner (or with any structured meal your child may be having) is a powerful approach to helping them see all foods on an equal playing field.
Now, this doesn’t mean I’m saying a cookie is equal to an apple nutritionally. What I’m saying is that your child needs equal opportunities to eat a variety of foods in order to learn how to self-regulate an amount of food that feels right to him and to ultimately TRUST his own body to guide him in eating a variety of foods.
This can never happen if foods are presented in a hierarchy. In many ways, when saving dessert for after dinner, it elevates the dessert as “better” than the meal. This can inadvertently cause a child to feel deprived or restricted from eating desserts.
Research has found that certain food-related parenting practices, including food restriction and pressure-to-eat, have been associated with higher weight status, as well as the use of unhealthy weight-related behaviors, in children and adolescents.
Again, I know this can be challenging for parents for many reasons.
Maybe you grew up without being allowed to eat any desserts at all. Maybe you weren’t allowed to eat dessert until you ate your vegetables or everything served on your plate for dinner.
While your family and parents did the best they could with the information and resources they had at the time (as are you doing), it’s important to see the big picture to understand if this approach to dessert was helpful for the long-term.
Many mothers I work with are healing through a chaotic relationship with foods, including desserts, because they grew up with many rules around them.
You can choose to approach desserts with your children differently to help them develop a positive relationship with food.
To be more concrete, here are 7 compelling reasons why you should serve dessert with dinner:
It establishes an equal playing field for all food:
Sometimes serving dessert after dinner creates rules or a dichotomy between certain foods. This can also cause a child to eat for external reasons rather than internal, based on how her body is feeling.
We often see that kids overeat over the course of time when dessert is saved for after meals rather than allowed to be part of meals. Allowing dessert with meals actually helps your child better self-regulate.
When foods are presented to a child together, including desserts, this helps prevent children from viewing food as a hierarchy or dichotomy of good versus bad.
In addition, a child doesn’t feel like they have to get through dinner in order to eat dessert.
When certain foods, like desserts, aren’t put on a pedestal, kids are better able to tune into what their bodies need versus eating in the absence of hunger.
2. It allows them to learn how to listen to their bodies rather than external food rules:
When desserts are withheld until after mealtimes rather than served alongside other foods, there tends to be some stipulations attached.
For example, a child may be told, “You need to eat your veggies if you want your dessert”, or “No eating dessert until you’ve finished what’s on your plate.”
This type of rhetoric, although well-intended, can unintentionally communicate with children that their bodies can’t be trusted.
When there are rules around food, kids start to lose trust in their own bodies, which means they can effectively ignore their own innate hunger and fullness cues.
Offering dessert with dinner gives a child the opportunity to decide what to eat from what’s been provided on their plates based on her body rather than outside rules dictating what she should or shouldn’t eat.
3. It helps them better self-regulate:
When desserts aren’t put on a pedestal and kids have regular opportunities to eat a variety of foods within the context of structured meals and snacks, they’re better able to self-regulate an amount (and types) of food that work best for their bodies.
The family dinner table is a great place to practice this and to help give kids opportunities to eat a variety of foods.
When desserts are included as part of their meals, they can learn how to self-regulate amounts that feel best for their bodies.
For some kids, this may mean a bite of a dessert before exploring other foods on the plate, eating the entirety of the dessert and not much of other foods, and anything in between.
Kids can be trusted to self-regulate their intake from what we offer them, provided that we give them TRUST and safe opportunities.
4. It can decrease obsessiveness and preoccupation with sweets:
If you’ve had a child who’s seemed sugar obsessed or preoccupied with sweets and desserts, it may be because he hasn’t had enough exposures and/or because sweets are only reserved for special occasions.
Again, by offering dessert with meal times, you’re not only increasing exposure, but you’re approaching sweets in a more neutral way.
When desserts are only saved for after meals or on special occasions, they become more “special” in a child’s mind.
Feelings of deprivation around desserts can make these foods even more desirable to a child, which can increase obsessiveness with sweets. When you make it part of a meal and don’t make a big deal out of it, it is less of a big deal to your child. This can help decrease the obsessiveness around these foods.
5. It helps a child build body trust:
When you offer dessert alongside a meal, you’re communicating with your child that you trust them to eat.
The importance of trust with food can’t be overstated.
Your child wants to feel trusted to eat and autonomous with his body.
If sweets are too tightly controlled or only allowed after a meal has been eaten, it’s hard for your child to feel as though he is trusted to eat desserts. Help build your child’s body confidence by allowing him to explore desserts alongside the other foods he’s eating. Which leads to the next point
6. It supports the building of a trusting feeding relationship between you and your child:
Feeding kids is an extension of parenting and is an important opportunity for building trust with your child through the interactions you have around food.
Part of building trust with your child is focusing on your jobs with feeding and trusting your child to do her part with eating.
Serving desserts with meals is a great way to practice this because you’re offering your child food (your job with feeding) and allowing your child to choose whether or not she wants to eat and how much she wants to eat from what you’ve provided (her jobs).
When we try to do our kids’ eating jobs for them by micromanaging their intake or telling them what they should or shouldn’t eat, this is what creates power struggles and problems in the feeding interactions between parents and kids. Building trust between you and your child cultivates a healthy relationship with food and body confidence.
7. It frees you from feeling like you need to micromanage your child’s intake:
If you’ve felt nervous about your child eating disorder or are constantly feeling like you have to look over your shoulder to watch how much your child is eating, this method of serving dessert with dinner can help lessen your anxiety around this.
As the parent, you get to decide what you’re offering for a meal, including a dessert that might be part of that meal.
Once you’re offered the meal to your child, the ball is now in his court to decide what he wants to eat from what you’ve provided and how much.
That’s a win-win for both of you and a way to help make meals less stressful for your family.
How to Offer Desserts With Dinner
So now that you’ve got the reasons WHY it’s beneficial to offer desserts to your child with meals, let’s talk about the nuts and bolts about how you might actually implement this.
And let me tell you - it’s not meant to be complicated.
Take the desserts you might regularly have and simply serve them to your children alongside other foods you’re having with dinner. I typically recommend serving 1 serving of dessert with the meals. Now, it might seem strange to serve the cookie next to the carrots, but this is exactly where the magic happens, my friend.
If your child is accustomed to this manner of having dessert, it may inevitably take some time to adjust.
Meaning, your child may go through a dessert honeymoon phase where all they want to do is eat the dessert portion of their meal. That is OKAY. I always tell parents to think about it like a pendulum. What swings to one side has to swing to the other side before it settles somewhere in the middle.
This may very well be what happens to your child who may not yet be familiar with having desserts with meals. Staying consistent with this approach is key to allowing your child to learn how to eat and self-regulate an amount of all foods according to what feels best in his body.
Another important key here is to not interfere with what your child decides to eat from the foods you’ve provided.
This means, you don’t pressure your child to eat in a certain way (either verbally or non-verbally - you know the “look” I’m talking about?). If your child goes for her dessert first and decides to eat that, then you need to allow it.
Most importantly, you need to TRUST your child to eat from the foods you’ve provided, including dessert.
This trust factor on your part can’t be overstated. It’s essential to helping your child develop a healthy and positive relationship with all foods..
This might also mean being aware of your own discomforts around your child eating sugar and desserts and being willing to sit through them in order to create space for your child to do what he needs to do with his food.
Your picture of how your child eats may be very different from how your child is actually able to eat, and that’s okay! Laying down your expectations allows your child to thrive and build confidence in his or her body.
As you can see, serving desserts with meals is one part of the equation. Trusting your child to eat in a manner she needs that is best suited for her body is the other part of the equation.
Remember this is not about what’s right versus wrong, but tuning into your child to decipher what they may need in order to feel confident about food and their bodies.
Common Fears and Questions About Kids and Desserts
Now let’s get into some of the common concerns and questions I hear from parents when I talk about this topic. Because inevitably, when you rock the boat and are committed to trying something new for you and your family, you might hit some roadblocks. I want to help support you through these. Here are some of the questions that may come up for you as you implement serving desserts for your kids with meals:
Q: What Happens If My Child Only Eats Dessert?
A: As I alluded to earlier, your child may go straight for the dessert. They may do this routinely for a while after you switch up your dessert routine. They may even only decide to eat the dessert portion of their dinner before declaring they’re done eating.
You might feel uncomfortable that your child has only eaten dessert or that your child eats dessert before trying other parts of their meal.
But here’s the thing about kids.
We can’t judge their overall nutrition intake by ONE meal. Really, how they eat in any given meal is simply a snapshot of their overall intake.
What studies show is when kids are allowed opportunities to self-regulate their intake, they’re able to meet their nutritional needs to support their growth and development over the course of time.
So you may notice your child gravitate toward dessert for a while. But when given the opportunity, your child may gradually begin showing interest in other foods when offered within the context of structured meals and snacks.
Q: How Frequently Should I Offer Desserts?
A: This is a great question, and there’s not really a one size fits all approach to this.
In general, I will say your child may need desserts at a higher frequency than you feel comfortable with or then you may currently be offering.
Offering desserts regularly makes them less of a novelty for your child, which means they have more opportunities to learn how to self-regulate an amount that feels best in their bodies.
In addition, the more opportunities your child has to eat sweets at home, the less of a big deal it will be when they get sweets outside of your home, like on special occasions, birthday parties, etc.
If your child seems obsessed with sugar, then your child may in fact need sugar exposures at a higher frequency. For more support around this topic, be sure to read this blog post here: “How Much Sugar is Okay For My Child to Eat?”
Q: Will My Child Get Addicted to Sugar?
A: There’s a common misconception that the more a child has sugar, the higher their risk is of being addicted to sugar and sweets. Thankfully, I debunked this entire theory for you with research and evidence to support my claims.
You can read the entire post here: “Sugar Addiction: Is My Child Addicted to Sugar?”
Bottom line - Sugar addiction is not real. Kids who don’t get enough opportunities to eat sugar will actually develop symptoms that can mimic addiction. The more you allow sugar within the context of meals and snacks, the less obsessive they will be around them.
Q: What if My Child Wants More Dessert?
A: Your child may very well want more of his dessert after having his portion that’s served with his meal, and that’s okay.
Personally, I choose to give my kids one portion of dessert with meals and limit it at that at meal times. It’s up to them to decide whether or not they want to eat it and how much of it they want to eat. If your child eats all of the dessert and asks for more, what’s key is how you respond.
I encourage parents to lead with a yes. Meaning, you're reassuring your child that more of that dessert is in their future but you’re not giving in to their immediate demands.
Ex: “I can tell you enjoyed those cookies, they were delicious! That’s all we’re having with our dinner tonight, but we're going to have more cookies with our lunch again tomorrow. There's other foods on the table if you're still hungry."
A version of this response helps validate what your child is feeling and also assures they will have opportunities in the near future to have more of the dessert they enjoyed eating.
It's important to follow through on your response and give your child future opportunities to enjoy desserts.
For more response ideas when your child asks for desserts, be sure to check out this post here: “11 Simple Things To Say To Your Kids When They Ask For Sweets”
Q: What About Desserts That Don’t Go With Dinner?
A: Inevitably, there are just some foods that are logistically more challenging to eat with dinner - like ice cream, or popsicles for example.
If these are the types of desserts that you might commonly offer after dinner, I’d encourage you to think about other times during the course of your child’s day where you can offer them. For example, maybe you try offering ice cream or popsicles as a midday snack.
Switching up the time of day in which you offer these types of foods can be a powerful way to help support your child in building a healthy relationship with food.
Now this doesn’t mean you can’t ever have dessert after dinner.
But consider what’s the default routine with dessert currently in your home and with your kids. Ask yourself if there’s a potential way to change the way you approach desserts to help your child have better opportunities to learn how to self-regulate these foods.
When cookies are served alongside carrots, it gives desserts less power and helps your child learn how to self-regulate all foods according to what feels best in his body.
If you need more support in helping your child build a positive relationship with food or with implementing an effective feeding approach with desserts, I’d love to connect with you!
Be sure to check out my upcoming live virtual workshop on how you can effectively help your child build a healthy relationship with all foods, including desserts - and sign up for the waitlist below!
What questions do you have about offering dessert with dinner for your children?
