Food for Sale
Jenny mentioned a few posts ago that our friends lent us several Love and Logic CDs. They're very entertaining and actually offer effective solutions to every-day parenting problems. Jenny made ravioli for dinner tonight. The boys ALWAYS turn their noses up when we have it, so why should tonight be any different. What was different was how we handled it.
After the first comment from Eli ("this is disgusting" or something of the sort), we said, "Oh, that's too bad for you. You're going to miss out on some really good food. But, that's your choice (I really wanted to say "your perogative", but had to keep my audience in mind)." [enter the scowels and dirty looks] "If you guys don't want to eat what mommy made for dinner, that's ok. However, if you want something else to eat later, we'd be happy to fix something for you, but it will cost you $3."
"Huh?" [enter confused looks]
"Well, every day, you get three meals and a few snacks at no charge. That's just part of our obligation as parents, you know, something we have to do. We buy lots of groceries so we can feed our family, and those groceries cost money. So, if you want something other than what we fix for you, again at no charge to you, then you will need to reimburse us."
EUREKA! It worked. See, Eli has been doing lots of extra work around the house to earn spending money for vacation, and he realizes how much effort it takes to make a dollar. So to have to spend $3 on food outside of what he can get for free really made him think.
Oh, yea, he never asked if he could buy something else to eat tonight.
5 Comments:
But he still didn't eat the ravioli, did he?
Well, ravioli is on our menu for dinner on Tuesday night. Guess I better not invite Eli to dinner!
That's hilarious! My favorite is when the kids start using love and logic on us! BEWARE!
It was fun to picture the whole scene in my mind. Where was this love and
logic book when I needed it?
I was watching a cooking show on PBS the other day and they had a funny trick to get kids to eat vegatables. One trick was to add veggies to spaghetti sauce so they wouldn't really notice. The 2nd was to play "dinosaurs" and have them eat spinach/lettuce leaves or broccoli... like they are eating trees and plants. I wondered if little kids would really do it, but the kids on the clip they played were eating it. (maybe they were letting them spit it out when the camera wasn't taping!)
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