Bargains over Breakfast

Most school mornings this term I’ve made pancakes and scrambled eggs with melted cheese on top for breakfast. This morning, I made French Toast. I used gourmet fruit bread as the base, and sprinkled cinnamon into the egg. I topped it with butter, maple syrup, and sliced strawberries.

Before I tell you how that went over (hint: it involved a shocking lack of delighted gratitude from my children) I want to explain the “why” behind cooked breakfasts (hint: it is not because I enjoy cooking so much I want to be concocting pancakes and eggs every morning.)

One of the phrases that really pushed my buttons when I was a new Mama was, “oh, when a child gets hungry enough, they’ll eat.”

Whenever I talked about my firstborn’s eating (or lack thereof) and had this phrase offered to me by other well-meaning parents (which happened a lot) it always sent my blood pressure north. Because, you see, that isn’t true for some kids.

Even then, four years before our ADHD diagnosis, and long before we had language or knowledge to understand why this might be, we knew Dominic was different than other kids when it came to eating. He was almost never hungry. He would never ask for food, or for a drink when he needed water. He seemingly either didn’t know how to read his own body’s signals in this area, or he wasn’t paying attention to them, or both.

I will not bore you with the long saga of all that we have done to help Dominic in this area—the meals we’ve fed him in wheelbarrows in rice paddies, the sticker charts, the several years of spoon-feeding him in front of the television, the printed breakfast menus sine we’ve started school. Suffice to say that we’ve had many battles over eating in this household and tried many different strategies. And you know that saying, “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink?” Turns out that holds true for a strong willed child with ADHD, too. The only strategies that have worked for us around food have involved not battling, not trying to force anything, and staying as low-key, calm, and as low-pressure as possible.

Which is SO hard to do, friends, when you are looking at your pint-size seven year old at 6:30 in the morning, knowing that after he takes Ritalin he will not be interested in eating anything again until about 4pm, if then. Ritalin does amazing things for Dominic’s ability to pay attention and focus in class, but in a cruel twist of medication fate it further suppresses appetite, which means that while he is at school Dominic will eat approximately 4.3% of the snack and lunch we have lovingly packed for him, if that.

So you see how breakfast becomes very important if you want to give your child a chance of functioning well during school. And you see how I might be moved to get up every morning and make pancakes and eggs covered with grated cheese.

Pancakes and eggs has been the breakfast staple for about 10 weeks now and it’s worked super well, but this week I started to see signs that we may have done our dash with that particular combination.

Dominic has stopped finishing his eggs, and generally become much more resistant around breakfast again.

So, this morning, I decided a change might be in order.

Change is fraught with risk around here, so I approached this issue carefully. I told Dominic I didn’t want to make pancakes and eggs this morning, and that I thought I might make French Toast instead to celebrate the last day of the school term.

He said OK.

So I made French Toast, called the kids to the kitchen for breakfast, and they both howled simultaneously when they saw what was on their plate.

To judge by the level of distress and outrage, you would have thought I’d served them up a bowl of warm dog poo garnished with strawberries.

“First of all,” I said. “Do not talk to me like that. That is not OK. Secondly, Dominic, you said yes to French Toast.”

 “I did NOT,” he yelled.

I took a deep breath and looked at my two scowling, red-faced minions.

“I am NOT eating THAT,” Alex declared.

“Me either,” Dominic said. “I am making MY OWN breakfast.”

I took another deep breath and considered my options.

While I would dearly love to live in a world where both my children do what I tell them to just because they should, because I am the damn parent, I do not. Instead, I live in a world where one of my children will do what I tell him to 70% of the time (97% if you count times where I invoke incentives or threaten consequences). The other child…? Well, it depends on if he’s paying attention to me when I ask, if he’s not highly absorbed in doing something else he finds interesting, and if he feels like it. Furthermore, invoking incentives and threatening consequences have proven to be of limited and variable usefulness with him.

So, as I saw them in that moment, my options with regards to breakfast were:

1. Tell them to eat it or else…
2. Set the oven timer and tell them to eat it within ten minutes or they lose iPad time that day…
3. Tell them that it was their choice, but if they chose not to eat it they weren’t getting anything else and they could go to school with no breakfast…

And the likely outcomes of each of these option was:

1. Escalation to anger and yelling by all parties. Alex would eventually eat it. Dominic would not.
2. Escalation to anger and yelling by all parties. Alex would eventually eat it before the timer ran out. Dominic would not.
3. Escalation to anger and yelling by the kids. Alex would eat it. Dominic would not.

As tempted as I was to pick one of these options, draw a line in the sand, and double down, I knew it would likely result in not achieving the larger goal of getting protein where it needed to go.

Then I had a brainwave.

“It’s casual clothes day at school today, but you’re supposed to bring in a dollar donation for the sponsored children,” I said. “If you eat the French toast, I will pay the dollar you need to take to school to wear casual clothes. If you choose NOT to eat this I will help you find something else to eat, but then you will either have to wear your school uniform or you will have to pay the dollar out of your money jar.”

Both kids glared at me.

Then Alex picked up his plate, walked to the table, sat down, and started eating. Dominic folded his arms.

“I’m making my own breakfast today,” he said.

“What did you have in mind?” I asked.

“I’m going up to pick it off the trees in the backyard and I’m going to have a citrus breakfast,” Dominic said.

“Citrus is an OK start,” I said. “But citrus has no protein in it. If you want to know what I recommend, I recommend you take one bite of French Toast to test it out and then make your decision.”

Dominic went into the playroom to think this over. I did my best not to sigh, grind my teeth, talk about how sponsored children would likely be delighted with the option of French Toast, or undermine the choice I had offered him.

Alex finished his breakfast and happily showed me his clean plate. Dominic had apparently forgotten he was supposed to be thinking about breakfast options and had started tying three balloons together with elaborate knots.

“Go and sit at the table NOW, Dominic,” I said, after I sent Alex off to get dressed for school. “And make up your mind whether you’re going to eat the French Toast or something else.”

Dominic reluctantly relocated himself to the kitchen table, took a mouse nibble out a piece of French toast and tossed it down scornfully.

“I am DEFINITELY making my own breakfast,” he said.

“OK,” I said. “It needs to have peanut butter in it.”

So I helped Dominic get two slices of bread out of the freezer and toast them and make a peanut butter and Nutella toast sandwich, which he then ate. Then he ate a big bowl of yogurt.

Major parental goal of the morning accomplished, I relaxed a little.

“Alright,” I said. “Remember that you need to pay for casual clothes day yourself, so let’s get a dollar out of your money jar.”

“No,” Dominic said. “I’m going to wear my uniform.”

“Um…” I said, nonplussed. “You know you’ll be the only kid at school in your uniform. Everyone else will be wearing casual clothes.”

“Yeah,” Dominic said, unconcerned.

“Do you think that might make you feel a bit strange at school?” I asked. “If all your friends are wearing fun clothes and you’re in a uniform?”

“No,” Dominic said.

So he went to school on casual clothes day wearing his uniform. But he ate his damn breakfast. And the heartening take-away I am choosing to glean from this??? … All signs point to him likely being as immune to peer pressure in his teens as he is to parental pressure right now.