Should You Give Your Kids Dessert With Meals When Your Child Won’t Eat Dinner?
Most of us grew up in a home where desserts were often put on a pedestal, where candy was dished out as a “treat”, and where we may’ve even been rewarded for good behavior with sweets of some sort.
In saying this, there is no finger-pointing or blame intended whatsoever, but rather, just to establish the environment in which we grew up around sweets and sugar.
Why?
When we can understand the things influencing our own perception, beliefs, and behaviors around sweets and sugar, it can help us have more awareness about how we feed our own children.
Many of us will tend to recycle approaches to food we learned from our own caregivers. And to no fault to them.
Our parents and caregivers did the best they could with the information and resources they had at the time. And more often than not, your caregivers are likely repeating behaviors and attitudes around food they picked up from their caregivers. And so the cycle continues.
But when it comes to sweets and sugar, I want you to see the possibility of approaching things in a different way. Instead of defaulting to the same things you were exposed to and learned about sugar as a child, I want you to consider another option, one that can help support your children in building a healthy and positive relationship with all foods, including - yes, sweets!
Why is this important?
Here’s the thing: Sweets and sugar in general are highly demonized in our society today, and iet culture can take the full blame for that! There’s a lot here I can’t cover in this specific blog post about this, but know the fear-mongering around sugar and kids has made it confusing for parents to understand how to best approach this.
(You can read more about the influence diet culture has on feeding kids and some of the common misconceptions around kids and sugar: “5 Myths About Sugar and Kids: Sugar and Diabetes Myth Vs Fact”)
On one-hand, there’s this idea that restricting our children from sugar and sweets is best for their health, and so exposure to it should be minimized as much as possible.
On the other hand, reality poses a different challenge. We live in a world where sweets and desserts EXIST. And while we can try to minimize it in our home as much as possible, this approach doesn’t teach our children how to self-regulate sugar or normalize sweets.
Many children who haven’t had regular opportunities to eat sweets can have a higher risk of growing up into adults who have a chaotic relationship with sugar. Sadly, the boomerang effect of restricting sweets often ends up being overeating or binging on sweets.
It’s a catch 22, and many parents feel stuck in this rock and a hard place.
And you might find yourself in a similar situation where you're wondering how to support your children in building a healthy relationship with all foods, including sweets, while feeling conflicted about how to deal with foods that have been demonized by diet culture, like all the sugary foods many kids LOVE to eat.
Well my friend, if you’ve found yourself in this situation, I have some good news for you. There is a way to approach sweets that offers structure and support without being restrictive, and it’s something you can implement in your home TODAY.
Let’s dive in and talk about what this looks like more below:
The Power of Offering Desserts With Meals
One major shift you can take to implement an approach to sweets that creates structure and support for your child while also allowing them exposure to sweets is to offer sweets within the structure of their meal and snack routine.
Children do better with a rhythm and routine around food for multiple reasons, including:
It makes food predictable and reliable
They don’t have to guess when food is coming
They can trust food is always part of their future and that they will be reliably fed
It’s the foundation of building a trusting feeding relationship with your child
Many times, when parents hear this idea of offering sweets more frequently for their children, it’s often misinterpreted as just letting them eat whatever sweets they want whenever they want. However, that is not an approach I’m condoning here whatsoever. In fact, that could actually make sweets more chaotic for your child.
A more positive and structured approach would involve YOU as the parent, taking a proactive role with sweets and intentionally plugging them in alongside your children’s meals and snacks. In contrast to just letting your kids eat sweets whenever they want, you’re taking the initiative to intentionally plug in sweets alongside your children’s meals and snacks.
You can read more about this importance of parents taking the initiative to offer sweets before your child asks here: “5 Reasons Why to Offer Your Kids Sweets Before They Ask For Them”
The benefit of this is that it gives your child structure around food and eating, which is necessary for them to build a healthy relationship with food.
Another important benefit of offering sweets alongside meals is that it helps normalize sweets for your children because they’re seeing sweets alongside foods they’re already familiar with eating.
When you offer sweets alongside vegetables and any other foods you’re accustomed to serving your kids, you’re essentially communicating the message that all foods are emotionally equivalent.
Why is this important?
It doesn’t create a hierarchy of foods, nor does it put foods up on a pedestal for children.
When kids aren’t allowed to have dessert until after they eat dinner or there are stipulations involved (i.e. making them eat a certain number of bites or having them eat their vegetables first), this is what forms the hierarchy of foods in a child’s mind.
When kids feel like they have to get through the vegetables to get to dessert, it inadvertently makes the veggies more of a struggle and essentially escalates dessert up on a pedestal. Kids might feel like they have to get through the “bad stuff” in order to get to the “good stuff”.
On the other hand, if you take the initiative to offer sweets alongside your child’s meal, this can help subside those obsessions or anxieties around eating sweets.
Your child will be better able to eat for internally guided reasons (like according to their innate hunger and satiety cues), rather than by externally motivated reasons (for example, kids may be more likely to overeat sweets or eat in the absence of hunger when there’s any feelings of restriction or deprivation around them, or when sweets are offered after they’ve been encouraged to eat a meal).
When children see sweets frequently alongside foods they’re eating for meals and snacks, this can help take the power away from sweets in general.
Kids will be better able to self-regulate their sugar intake and learn how to eat according to what their bodies need, not due to fear of missing out on something they really enjoy or like.
For more help with this, be sure to check out this post here: “7 Practical Reasons Why To Offer Your Kids Dessert With Dinner”
How to Get Started Offering Sweets With Meals
If you’re just trying this out with your children, it may feel counterintuitive, even awkward. That’s okay. This may be especially true if sweets weren’t presented to you in this manner as you were growing up.
It’s a change, but remind yourself it’s a positive one. This is an approach to sweets that will help you normalize sugar for your children and provide them the structure and support they need to learn how to self-regulate sweets and develop a healthy relationship with all foods.
As you’re delving into this, you might find some questions pop up for you or run into some areas where you feel unsure about what you’re doing.
Let me encourage you by giving you this basic framework to work through to support you in helping your child and to build a trusting feeding relationship with your kids.
Having a sturdy foundation in place will help you navigate through the nuances that inevitably come up when feeding kids and keep you and your family on the right track.
With that in mind, here are some principles to keep in mind as you adapt this approach to feeding your kids.
Understand your jobs with feeding:
As parents, we often take it upon ourselves to micromanage our children and how they eat. We might feel responsible for getting them to eat vegetables and stay away from sugar. We might impose our own hidden agendas on them when it comes to eating, and this might get projected as rules we have at mealtimes for them to follow.
While this certainly comes from a place of good intention, it steps outside the boundaries of what we’re capable of doing with our children. As the saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”.
So often, we’d prefer if our kids ate in a certain way, so we impose our ideals on them. However, it’s important to step back to see the big picture here. Our children are already born with the programming they need to self-regulate their intake and to get what they need to support their individual growth, appetite and development.
Our jobs with feeding them involve providing regular food throughout the day in the form of structured meals and snacks, offering a variety of foods, and making mealtimes a safe place for them to learn and explore how to eat.
That’s it. It’s not our job to get our children to eat or get them to eat certain foods. When we swerve out of our lanes and try to do their eating jobs for them, this can spark the power struggles. Sticking with your jobs with feeding can support your children in learning how to better self-regulate what they need. Which brings me to point number 2.
2. Learn to trust your children with eating:
Just like we have certain responsibilities with feeding our children, our kids also have their jobs with “eating”. It boils down to this: parents provide, child decides.
What does this mean?
It means we have our jobs of providing food regularly and consistently to our children in the forms of meals and snacks, and our children get to decide: 1) Whether or not they even want to eat at any given meal or snack, 2) What they want to eat from the foods you’ve provided, and 3) How much they want to eat from the food offered.
This is fundamentally different from many conventional approaches to feeding children and may feel counterintuitive. However, it’s also an evidenced-based approach to supporting children in developing a healthy and positive relationship with all foods.
What’s important here is trust.
As parents, it’s essential to learn how to trust your children to eat what they need from the foods you provide without trying to micromanage them in any way. You’re offering a variety of foods and trusting them to eat what they need.
3. Stay in your lane with sweets:
So knowing this information, how does this apply to sweets and desserts? I’m so glad you asked because I’m going to explain further here.
Essentially, sweets work in the very same way, where you’re in charge of deciding what and when you’re offering sweets to your children and with what meals or snacks.
You might decide to offer a couple cookies (the what) with lunch (the when) or allow your children to pick out a few pieces of candy (the what) to have alongside their dinner (the when).
Taking this proactive approach to intentionally allowing sweets alongside meal and snack times gives your children the supportive structure they need around sugar. This also helps normalize sweets for them when they’re able to see them alongside other foods they’re used to eating and gives them the opportunity to learn how to self-regulate and eat according to what they need, not just because the food (or sweets) are there.
The important part of this approach is to stay in your lane. Remember the feeding jobs we reviewed above both you and your children have - you provide, your children decide.
So effectively with sweets, your children get to decide what they want to eat from the foods you’ve offered them at mealtimes, including the sweets, and how much. This is where that trust factor is so important.
Your child might eat in a way that looks drastically different from what you would expect or want them to eat, and that’s okay. Lean into any discomfort that may come up for you as your child’s eating in order to give them the space and autonomy they need to learn how to self-regulate their eating. You’ve provided the structure, now it’s important to trust them to eat from the foods you’ve offered.
Frequently Asked Questions About Sweets With Meals
Understandably, as you implement this or try this out in your home, you may run into some questions. This is a new approach, and you’re doing the best you can to navigate this with your family.
I want to share some of the most common questions I get about this to help you as you work through this yourself and with your own children:
3 main questions that often come up with this approach include:
What to do if my child doesn’t eat any dinner. Should I still offer dessert?
Sometimes, you might look at what your child has eaten over the course of the day or feel the need to base whether or not you allow dessert on how they eat at dinner time.
However, this is taking a reactive approach to feeding your child rather than a proactive one. Going back into your jobs with feeding your children, you want to offer dessert with meals regardless of what your child has eaten earlier that day or how you may think they’re going to eat at that particular meal.
Offering sweets shouldn’t be based on stipulations but should be given intentionally because you’re supporting your child in building a positive relationship with all foods.
Take the initiative to offer sweets. Put them on the menu with other meals and foods you’re offering your children, regardless of how or what they’ve eaten (or not eaten) earlier.
When you present them together to your children, you’re allowing them to learn how to self-regulate their intake of all foods and to trust those foods will be available to them. Having sweets isn’t determined by their behavior or what they eat. This helps take out the morality of food and prevents the deprivation factor from forming around sweets.
2. What if my child only eats the dessert part of their meal?
This is a great question. Many times, a child will only eat the dessert portion of their meal and nothing else. For many parents, this can feel super uncomfortable.
This is where it’s crucial to remember the framework for feeding children: parents provide, child decides.
You can trust your child to eat what they want from the foods you provide, no matter how different this looks from your own expectations of how or what they should eat.
For kids who have had limited access to sweets in the past, seeing sweets as part of their meals will feel MUCH more exciting. They might want to only eat the sweet portion to their meal or only be drawn toward the dessert, and that is okay.
You can trust them to eat what they need from the foods you provide.
Sometimes parents see this pattern and find it worrisome, so it causes them to draw back into a more restrictive approach with sweets again.
However, it’s important to push through any discomfort you might have and continue to offer sweets alongside meals and snacks, intentionally and proactively.
Over time, as your children can trust sweets are an indefinite part of their future, they’ll begin to show interest in other foods.
Keep in mind that sometimes kids will just eat the dessert part of their meal and want nothing more for no other reason than that’s what they wanted, and that’s okay. It’s all part of normal eating for children.
The most important thing for you is to TRUST your children to eat. For more on this, check out this post here: “My Child Eats Too Much Sugar: Learn About the Dessert Pendulum Effect”
3. What if my child eats all the dessert and then wants more?
Many times, children will eat the dessert portion of their meal and ask for more of it, whatever it was - whether cookies, candy, chocolate, etc. This can often make parents feel trapped in a corner about how to best approach this. So here are a couple suggestions to keep in mind.
Validate their requests: We want to normalize the enjoyment of food for our children. Sometimes, kids are used to hearing “No” around sweet requests, and this can unintentionally communicate the message that something is wrong with these foods or that the enjoyment of foods that might taste really yummy is a bad thing. Validating your children’s request can help communicate the message that they’re safe to enjoy a variety of foods, including sweets. Validating their requests can be a powerful way to give them permission to exploring eating in a manner that feels good for their bodies. Remember, validating there requests doesn’t mean you’re giving in to their immediate request; rather, you’re acknowledging their desires around food are valid. This can look like saying something along the lines of, “Yes, those cookies were delicious”, or “I know the chocolate was yummy and understand you want more.” I
Lead with a yes: You don’t need to give your child’s every request with food, but how you respond is important to help them feel reassured that all foods will continue to be part of their future. We want to try to avoid language that could amplify feelings of deprivation around something while also ensuring that you’re maintaining healthy boundaries. My solution for this is to lead with a yes. Meaning, you’re assuring them more of those foods will be available in the near future. For example, “Yes, we’re going to have cookies again with lunch tomorrow. I’ll make sure we put them on the menu again then so we can have more.” This is just an example, and you can readjust in a manner that works for your children. Essentially, you’re acknowledging their desire for more and letting them know more is coming soon.
Redirect to other foods on the table: Sometimes children are so excited about seeing the dessert, they might forget other foods are also available. You want to redirect gently and in a way that doesn’t add any pressure for your child to eat (or eat certain foods). You can say something along the lines of, “There are other foods on the table you can eat if your tummy is still hungry.” Again, customize this in a manner that would be best understood by your own child. You’re just letting your child know that there are still other foods on the table available for them to eat if they’re still hungry. Remember, your child can be trusted to eat what they need from the foods you’ve offered, even if it’s only a couple bites of something else in addition to the dessert. Stay firm and consistent with this approach to help support your child with the foundation they need to build a positive relationship with all foods.
Be aware of increased interest: Now if your child is repeatedly asking for more dessert or only ever eating the dessert portion from their plate, this could be an indicator your child may need a higher exposure to sweets. Again, the tendency is to see these behaviors and want to reel back from offering sweets. But in reality, children who are showing a high interest in sweets often need more frequent exposure to them or a greater quantity of them in one sitting to feel more satisfied and content to move on from them. You can read more about this here: “Kids Eating Too Much Sugar? 3 Reasons Your Child's Obsessed With Sweets” If you’re aware of this in your own child, you can try a couple things: 1) Consider offering sweets more frequently in the context of your child’s meals and snacks. So if you’re only offering at one meal per day, consider offering it at two. Switch up when you’re offering it, so instead of just at dinnertime, maybe consider doing it at lunch and a snack. This can help a child trust sweets will be available. 2) Offer a bigger quantity of sweets: If you’re only offering 1 cookie at dinner, maybe consider offering 2. Or if you’re only allowing 2 pieces of candy at dinner, maybe try 3 or 4. I do believe kids do better with meals when sweets are offered in a set portion versus an unlimited amount, but there’s definitely some wiggle room depending on the portion you’re starting out with. Additionally, you can use snack times as an opportunity to give your child a more unlimited amount sweets, especially if your child is continually asking for more dessert with meals or only ever eating the dessert. Consider offering a snack where you allow a more unlimited portion of that sweet alongside a couple other snack foods you’d typically offer. For example, you can set out a plate of cookies with milk and cut up fruit for a snack and allow your child to have a higher quantity of what they need to feel satisfied.
I hope this helps you feel more confident in trying this approach with your children.
Remember, offering sweets alongside meals can truly be an effective way to normalize these foods for your children. When all foods are on an equal playing field for your children, it’s easier for them to navigate eating based on what feels best for their individual needs and bodies. Food decisions won’t be based on fear or scarcity of not having access to those foods.
If you need more support implementing this and additional guidance, consider joining me inside my Simplify Sweets program.
You’re not alone as you navigate this, and you’re doing a brave thing by learning and leaning into this with curiosity and the desire to do better for your children.
Cheering you on my friend.
Please feel free to leave any questions in the comments below!