Meal Plan: How to Deal With the Mental Burnout of Feeding Your Family
If there’s anything quarantine has amplified, it’s the mental load connected with the responsibility of feeding your family. Day after day after day.
And to be quite clear - this mental work has always been there.
As mothers and caregivers, we have a part of our brain that never stops thinking, planning and preparing for feeding our families. It seems like just when one meal is eaten and cleaned up after, it’s on to the next.
It’s an ongoing whir of what to feed, when to eat, what-should-we-eat-for-dinner-tonight song that doesn’t stop playing. But for most moms, instead of a harmonious melody, it’s more like the sound of screeching nails against a chalkboard.
So what gives?
What might make the mental load of meal planning and feeding your family an overwhelming burden to carry at times?
I think it’s safe to say that living in quarantine during a pandemic has amplified the many responsibilities we’re juggling as moms, especially when it comes to feeding our families. There are so many moving parts that most people wouldn’t even recognize on the surface.
But now, in face of greater demands and less help, you’re likely feeling the pressure, and it’s a heavy load to carry.
And let me be clear: saying something is hard doesn’t make you weak or ungrateful.
You can be BOTH grateful that you have enough food to feed your family while also burned out on mealtime planning and cooking. It’s not either or in this situation. Acknowledging what you’re tasked with is both demanding and overwhelming at times doesn’t make you less grateful or capable as a mother. It makes you HUMAN.
It’s important to create space for you to acknowledge what you feel, rather than try to dismiss it or minimize what you’re experiencing.
Mental Stressors Involved with Feeding Your Family
If you’re feeling the mealtime burnout - you are not alone, and you’re not crazy. There is good reason why you might feel like a candle being burned at both ends when it comes to feeding your family.
When we look at the big picture of feeding our families, it’s clear that this is not a simple task.
Again, there are many moving parts happening invisibly behind the scenes, much of which mothers are micromanaging.
Some of these many responsibilities include (but are not limited to):
Assessing a budget for grocery shopping
Taking a regular inventory of what you have on hand and what you need (Ex: You might notice that you’re running low on milk and immediately add to your mental list of what you need)
Organizing/categorizing grocery food items
Actually shopping for groceries (this is no easy feat during our current pandemic situation, am I right?)
Managing food supply to ensure there’s enough for everyone
Taking family members’ food preferences into consideration (potentially managing picky eaters, food allergies, etc)
Planning and putting together meals and snacks
Worrying about food waste or not having enough food
Repurposing leftovers
Actually preparing meals
Cleaning produce
Organizing your kitchen to make it conducive for cooking
Mealtime and cooking clean-up
Trying new recipes
Considering nutrition, wondering if everyone’s getting what they need
Dealing with disgruntled family members who don’t like the food you’ve prepared (que the complaining)
Facing food scarcity
Phew. I’m exhausted just listing all this out.
There’s no questioning WHY you might be feeling burned out on mealtimes, mama, or why the thought of needing to prepare another meal or snack for your family might feel like enough to push you over the edge.
It’s important to recognize the many things you’re juggling and how the mental load of this can be a contributing stressor to your overall mental health.
Reasons Why You Might Feel Mentally Burnt Out
There are other added stressors which can further complicate the task of feeding your family.
This may include things like:
Experiencing financial hardship, food insecurity
Having a chronic physical condition or mental illness that makes caring for yourself and your family challenging
Having a physical disability that makes it challenging to get around your kitchen, cook, etc.
Having a child or family member with special needs or chronic illness
Having a history of or active eating disorder, which can create challenges around food and eating
Having a child with feeding challenges or feeling stuck on how to get a picky eater to eat
Going through pregnancy/postpartum
Lack of support
If you’re facing any of these challenges, it can further intensify the mental work involved with mealtimes.
Simple Ways to Support Your Mental Energy
No matter what your individual circumstances might be, you’re not alone. You might feel like a bad mom for dreading mealtimes or for forever wondering, “What should I make for dinner?”, but how you feel about mealtimes is not a reflection of who you are as a mother.
To start, try acknowledging that feeding your family and being constantly responsible for this is HARD. Approaching yourself from a place of compassion versus criticism or self-judgement. If you’re comparing yourself to what other people “seem” to be doing, you'll always feel like you’re falling short and not doing enough. This is not a productive mindset for feeding your family.
Adjusting your mindset is an important place to start to help you better support yourself and your own mental health.
In addition, I’ve put together a few ideas and tips below to help you create some more mental space for yourself when it comes to feeding your family.
Making some small tweaks and adjustments to how you approach meal planning (meaning, the preparation, planning, and feeding of your family) can help create some more mental space for you to keep your sanity. Check out some of these ideas below:
How to Feed Your Family When You’re Mentally Over It
1.Meet yourself where you’re at:
Sometimes the expectations we might have for ourselves (when it comes to feeding our family) feel impossible right from the start.
You might have the best intentions to craft some homemade meals from scratch or have fresh produce at every meal. Especially in this age of social media, it may be easy to compare what you’re doing to other people and feel like you need to be doing the same things too.
Readjusting your expectations for something more realistic for you and your family is necessary to prevent the mealtime burnout. If you’re constantly striving toward something simply unmanageable, you may get caught in a maze you can never find your way out of.
This is a surefire way to trigger overwhelm. Instead, put up the blinders to what everyone else is doing to recognize what is realistic for you. Maybe this means incorporating more convenience foods or having less than cohesive meals. You can always adjust as needed.
Which leads me to the next point.
2. Work with what you have:
Along with unrealistic expectations for mealtimes often comes impossible standards for food.
Sadly, there’s a lot of unnecessary shame and guilt around certain foods, which may make you feel subpar if you’re serving it to your family.
You might feel like a bad mom if you’re not regularly incorporating fresh fruits and veggies into your meals or like you’re doing your family’s health a disservice if you’re relying on convenience foods.
But the unnecessary guilt you’re feeling around food is not helpful for your mental health or sanity either. If you’re dealing with guilt around the foods you’re serving or not serving, this is going to add to the mental stress around mealtimes.
If you’re sacrificing your mental health in the name of being “healthy”, this is not beneficial for you or your family. Food is food, and the most important goal is to keep your family fed and nourished, utilizing the many foods you may have at your disposal.
Fresh, frozen, and convenience foods can all be incorporated into wholesome meals and snacks that feed your family.
3. Build a realistic meal plan:
Sometimes I think the thought of “meal planning” feels so daunting and overwhelming, many moms might not know where to begin.
If you feel like you have to sit down and map out a week's worth of meals, that alone might feel stressful and contribute to the mental burnout you feel around mealtimes. If you’re zooming out and looking at the big picture, it’s more important to have the staples and food components you can work with.
You don’t need to know what you’re going to have every single meal. Instead, you just need to have a framework to work with and can plan ahead with flexibility.
Having some easy staples on hand can also be helpful for putting together quick family meals that require minimal preparation and planning.
This is where some frozen meals can come in handy. For example, we’ll do a pizza night (using frozen pizza), and I’ll serve it with a salad, fresh fruit and milk. Aim for workable staples rather than feeling like you have to plan out every single meal.
4. Enlist help with the different meal time jobs
There are many moving parts to meal planning that we’re constantly juggling.
Taking some of it off your plate can help, whether that’s with ordering groceries so you don’t have to take a trip to the store, emptying the dishwasher so it’s ready to load with dirty dishes, or anything in between. Enlist other family members to help.
Remember we can’t expect our family to be mind readers - it’s important for us to communicate what we’re needing help with. But it might not be easy for you to communicate if you don’t know what you need help with.
One helpful task might be to actually list out all the various jobs involved with feeding your family, including planning out meals, grocery shopping, preparing meals, setting the tables, etc.
Once you have everything listed out, it will be easier for you to see what you might be able to delegate to take off your plate and give you some mental space.
Get your kids involved when you can - getting kids in the kitchen and involved with family meals is an important part of helping them build a healthy relationship with food. If it’s difficult for you to relinquish control - ask yourself, why?
It might turn out less than perfect, but it can help ease the pressure of carrying the whole responsibility yourself. Getting the family involved in any part of the family feeding process can help alleviate some of the load you’re caring.
5. Include yourself in the mealtimes:
To piggyback on the last point, it’s crucial you’re also taking the time to sit with your family and actually eat yourself. I know this is not the case for the majority of mothers, because we’re often so busy attending to everyone’s needs, we hardly have time to sit and eat at the table ourselves.
This is another surefire way to feel burned out around mealtimes. It’s important for your own mental and physical health to take the time to sit and eat, to feed yourself nourishing meals and not just eat the scraps off your kids’ plates while you wait on everyone.
If you’re just constantly picking up after your kids and not eating with them, you’re going to burnout quick. As a mom of 5 kids, I understand this is easier said than done. But it has to become a priority, or your own mental health will become the leftovers.
This is where it might be helpful to have a discussion with your family where you can coordinate ways to more regularly join your family for meals at the table.
One rule I’ve instilled with my family is that once I sit down at the table to eat, I’m not getting up. I know it might seem harsh, but it’s helped me essentially show my family that eating is important for me, too. This means once I sit down, if anyone needs anything, they have to go get whatever they may need themselves.
I also want my kids to see that being a mom doesn’t mean being a martyr - you deserve to eat, too.
6. Try a new recipe or theme (like soup, one pot meal, sheet pan, etc):
Sometimes when we get stuck in a rut with food, this can lead to burnout, too. It’s easy to get into a rhythm and stay in that rhythm because it’s working.
But if food feels boring to you, you might be less inclined to feel joy in cooking or eating - both which are helpful when you’re doing this day after day.
Now, this is not to say that every single time you eat needs to be exciting and fireworks galore, but having a new meal or recipe to look forward to can help liven up the process. This doesn’t mean you need to try anything complicated either.
Comb through any existing cookbooks you might have at home and find a recipe you might like to try that feels doable. You could even try implementing a new theme meal each week, like a sheet pan recipe, one pot meal, new soup or salad, etc.
Pick a category that sounds interesting and find a recipe to fit the bill. If you’ve been hesitant to try new recipes because you have picky eaters at home, I hear you on this front, too. As an option, incorporate at least one safe food that your child feels comfortable with along with a new recipe you’d like to try.
When your child can identify at least one food she feels comfortable with, this can help her feel safe, even with new foods or recipes.
7. Switch up the environment:
Sometimes, something as simple as changing the normal day-to-day environment of your mealtime routine can be enough to give you some mental space and clarity.
I’ve found that this does good for the whole family - not just me. This could be changing up where you’re eating or how you’re approaching mealtime.
For example, if the weather permits, you can sit outside and eat lunch on a blanket. Try putting on some music for the family during dinner, or tell everyone to dress up in their favorite costumes.
We have an old trunk of dress-up clothes, and on random nights when the witching hour is striking hard and my kids are feeling testy, I tell them to go get dressed up for dinner.
Not only does this shift the mood dramatically, it helps us to approach mealtime with more enjoyment, rather than dread. This could also be something simple like putting fresh flowers on the table, lighting candles, or busting out your favorite glassware.
Whatever this might look like for your family, take some time to figure out how you can switch up your mealtime routine to infuse an unexpected element of joy into the eating ambiance.
8. Focus on your feeding jobs to decrease mealtime stress:
A major stressor for parents at mealtimes is often dealing with kids who won’t eat, who are complaining, or who simply don’t want to be at the dinner table.
A majority of moms I work with report feeling like they have to micromanage their children at mealtimes, and this in itself can contribute an enormous amount of stress and mental burnout. I hear ya, mama.
If you’re struggling with this too, imagine what it might feel like if you didn’t have to micromanage your child or try to get them to eat or determine how much food they should eat before leaving the table?
Well, it’s totally possible. Not only is it possible, but switching up your approach to mealtimes can also be a powerful way to help support the building of a trusting and positive feeding relationship between you and your child.
Essentially, the way to stop micromanaging your child’s food intake is to focus on doing your jobs with feeding and trusting your child to do her part with eating.
What does this mean, exactly?
Another way to look at it is like this: Parents provide, the child decides.
Meaning, you are responsible for deciding what, when, and where you are feeding your child; your child is in charge of deciding 1) whether or not she wants to eat, and 2) how much she wants to eat from what you’ve provided.
That’s it!
Easier said than done, I know. But the premise is you are trusting your child to self-regulate and choose an amount of food that feels best for her body.
When you try to do the eating job for her by telling her what to eat or how much to eat, this is going to create a whole lotta tension and stress for everyone at the table.
Sticking to your feeding jobs and trusting your child to do her part with eating will help take out a LOT of stress around mealtimes.
9. Offer the same meal to everyone, family style:
If you’re making multiple things to try to please everyone in your family, this can be quicksand to mealtime burnout.
Ultimately, no matter how hard you try, you just won’t be able to please everyone. Setting that as a standard for mealtime can feel impossible, which can trigger stress around feeding your family.
Instead, aim for including meal components that are reasonably acceptable for the majority of you family members.
Especially if you have a picky or selective eater in your family, having safe food components at mealtimes are essential. But this doesn’t mean you have to create something entirely different to appease each individual family member. For example, one of my kiddos is more selective and has sensory sensitivities.
One of our family’s favorite meals is taco night, to which my daughter does not agree with. The various toppings and textures seem to be overwhelming. However, I know she’s okay with tortillas by themselves. She also likes cheese, so I know she’s safe with those food components. Even though she won’t necessarily assemble and eat a taco persay, I know there’s food items that she would feel comfortable eating.
I might also put out another neutral food component on the table, like fresh fruit or milk, which all of my children are generally agreeable with.
Another thing I do is serve meals family style. Allowing the kids to serve food themselves on their own plates is a little messier but a lot less stressful than me trying to assemble, plate and serve everyone individually. For more support on how you can implement this in your own home, check out this post here: “How Family Style Dining Makes Feeding Kids Easier at Mealtime”
10. Take-out when needed
Sometimes, you just need a break from it all, and that is OKAY.
Remember, you’re human too, and the monotony and repetitiveness of feeding and eating can be too much sometimes. Recognize when you’re needing a break, and don’t feel guilty for asking for help by outsourcing your meal for the night.
Sometimes, proactively planning take-out nights in your normal routine can help prevent the mealtime burnout, especially if you already know it’s pre-built into your week. If you’re feeling guilt around eating take-out food, take some time to understand where this is coming from.
You and your children deserve to eat, and enjoying a meal together - even fast food - can help fit the bill.
Stay Focused on the Big Picture
Creating positive meal time experiences is far more important for you and your family than the actual food itself. Making mealtimes enjoyable is far more healthy for your child over the long run than any food you can eat. When you find yourself feeling stressed or burned out, try to re-calibrate by staying focused on the long term goals.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if the meal was perfect or if you served a dinner that disagreed with every family member - what matters most is how you were able to connect with your family and come together over food, whatever that might look like.
When you remember the big picture, you can feel more at peace focusing on what helps you align with these outcomes, and let go of any unnecessary stressors bogging you down.
I hope this helps, mama. Let me know what resonates with you in the comments below or any helpful tips that have helped you navigate the mental load of feeding your family.
You’ve got this!
