Feeding Kids with Ease, Health and Joy: Episode 230

In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, Jennifer Anderson, registered dietitian and founder of Kids Eat in Color, shares how parents can help kids develop a healthy relationship with food and their bodies—without shame, restriction, or diet culture. Plus, practical tips for school lunches and making family meals easier and more affordable.

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You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.

We talk about:

03:00 What does a healthy relationship with food and our bodies look like?

05:00 Protecting kids from body image and weight concerns

07:00 Boys, body image, and the pressure to look “ripped”

09:00 Talking to kids who are worried about being in a bigger body

12:00 Helping kids develop a healthy relationship with food

14:00 Treats, limits, and avoiding shame or moralizing around food

21:00 Can kids really regulate how much they eat?

24:00 Neurodivergence, interoception, and mindful eating

30:00 Emotional eating, comfort, and food as connection

32:00 Simple strategies for packing school lunches

37:00 Feeding a family when time, money, and energy are limited

39:00 Why simple dinners are good enough

42:00 Jennifer’s book and pre-order bonuses

44:00 The parenting advice Jennifer wishes she’d known earlier

Resources mentioned in this episode:

* Jennifer’s Book Feed Them Well: A Guide to Raising Healthy, Confident Eaters

* Search “Kids Eat in Color” to find Jennifer on all social media platforms

Connect with Sarah Rosensweet:

* Instagram

* Facebook Group

* YouTube

* Website

* Join us on Substack

* Newsletter

* Book a short consult or coaching session call

xx Sarah and Corey

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Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Jennifer Anderson, nutritionist and founder of Kids Eat in Color. Jennifer has a new book coming out all about helping kids develop a good relationship with food and with their bodies. That’s what we’re talking about in today’s episode.

Along the way, we also touched on some great tips for packing school lunches and making meals easier and more affordable. There’s so much conflicting information out there about feeding kids, and with their physical and mental health at risk, knowing what to do can be very stressful for parents. I love Jennifer’s common-sense and relaxed approach to eating and feeding, and I hope you do as well.

If you like this episode, please share it with a friend so more parents can learn about peaceful parenting. If you’re a fan of the podcast, you can help us out not only by sharing it, but by leaving a review and a five-star rating in your podcast player app. While you’re there, don’t forget to follow the show so you don’t miss an episode. If you’d like to support us even more, you can become a supporter on Substack to help us offset the cost of making the show. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

Okay, let’s meet Jennifer.

Hey, Jennifer. Welcome back to the podcast. This is your second time with us.

Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah: Yeah, I’m so excited. You have a new book coming out, so maybe you could introduce yourself and then tell us about your new book, which is available for pre-order and coming out in September. We will link to that in the show notes, but tell us a little bit about who you are and about your new book.

Jennifer: Sure. I’m a registered dietitian. I have two kids who have not been easy to feed, and I’m the founder of Kids Eat in Color and the CEO of Better Bites. I’m so excited to have this book coming out. It’s called Feed Them Well: A Guide to Raising Healthy, Confident Eaters for Life. I just cannot wait for parents to have this resource.

Sarah: Amazing. You were telling me before we started that the focus of your book is having kids have a healthy relationship not only with food, but with their bodies. Maybe we could start out by talking about—obviously, this could be a very long conversation—but some of the top things you’ve found that are really helpful, sort of dos and don’ts, in terms of having kids have that healthy relationship with food.

And also, what do you mean when you talk about a healthy relationship with their bodies? Maybe that’s a two-part question.

Jennifer: Yeah. I love that you framed it as a two-part question, because it is kind of a two-part question, but I feel like that’s only because in English we don’t have a way to describe the fact that these things are deeply connected in us.

When I think about a healthy relationship with food, I want to make sure kids know how to take care of their bodies. They know what a balanced diet looks like. They’re able to enjoy food, whatever kind of food it is. And also, we want kids to be able to really appreciate and live in their bodies, experience life through their bodies, and not have this deep what’s called internalized weight bias, where thin is the ideal. Thin is what everybody is shooting for. You should either be worried about how thin you are or trying to get thinner. That is a soul-sucking way of living when we’re so focused on weight and diet culture.

So we want to give kids another option. We want to give kids the ability to really appreciate their bodies, and yet we also want to do so in a way that they’re still able to care about the health of their bodies in a way that’s healthy, as opposed to just diet culture.

What I call this is embodied independence, where kids are independent. They know all the things they need to do, and they’re also embodied. They’re living in and experiencing their bodies.

When we think about what we want to do and what we want to not do, we want to model what we want kids to do, ideally, and this is in every single area of parenting, including eating. That’s where the independence comes from. We’re modeling, and we’re also providing the boundaries and opportunities for them.

I always tell parents, “You are in charge of your restaurant at home. You’re the head chef. You’re going to set when your restaurant hours are, you’re going to set what’s on the menu, you’re going to set all these things.” As you’re doing that, you are teaching your child what is part of a healthy lifestyle.

On the other side, we’re thinking about their relationship with their body. We want to minimize internalized weight bias, and that means we’re not discussing body sizes or body shapes. We’re not weighing ourselves in front of our kids. One of the most powerful things you can do as a parent is to not discuss your body size or shape and not discuss any weight-loss attempts at any point, if that’s something you ever engage in. Those two things are huge risk factors for disordered eating and eating disorders. If we could just not do that, that would actually be huge.

Sarah: I feel like that’s actually a real gift my mother gave me. She never talked about her weight or diets or her body, really, at all. And I feel like I’m one of the few people I know who—I’ll say at least until perimenopause recently—had no body-image issues for my whole adult life. I think that really did stem from being raised without that being a thing that people were talking about.

Jennifer: Yeah, absolutely. It was discussed in the groups that I grew up in. At the same time, my parents were like, “No, you are not allowed to look at beauty magazines or teen magazines.” I don’t remember really pushing back on that as a teenager, but now I am so grateful because, whether it’s social media now or teen magazines or so many other things, so many of them are focused on body image: how thin you are, how to get thin, how to stay thin, all this stuff. And that stuff is just toxic.

Sarah: Yeah, and it used to just be for girls, right? And now boys are—I have so many clients who’ve said their son wants a six-pack, and they’re eight or nine years old and won’t take off their shirt to go swimming.

Jennifer: My kids are right now into parkour, and it’s interesting to watch because we’ve been very careful about what we’ve said about them. They’ve recently started talking about six-packs and strong cores and all that because, in reality, my son is like, “I need a stronger core because that will help me flip better.” And he’s 100% right that his core strength is going to determine his success in this sport in a lot of ways.

At the same time, getting ripped is not the phrasing that I would really prefer because so much of that is focused on image, right? And yet this is what they’re hearing. My kids are 11 and 13, but it really started last year, when they were 10 and 12, where they’re just kind of being exposed to these ideas of fitness.

So when we think about kids understanding this, yeah, we have to have them understand their physical fitness, and then we also have to help them understand that it’s not about looks. It is about how we feel. It’s about what we can do. It’s about how we can serve people. It’s about so much more than just how we look.

So as I think about my kids getting ready to do these things and doing these things, I’m going to continue to focus on, “This will help you flip,” not, “This will help you look ripped.”

Sarah: Talk a little bit more about some of the dos and don’ts about the healthy relationship. We’ve sort of focused on our bodies. Actually, you know what? Before you do, I want to ask you about something else first, so we’ll stay on that for another second.

If you have a child who is in a bigger body and they’re concerned to obsessed about being in a bigger body and feeling like that’s, quote, “bad,” how do you talk to them about that?

Jennifer: So I think the first thing is—and I have a framework in the book that, even though it’s kind of cheesy, I call the LOVE framework—we want to listen. We really want to listen, and then we want to validate. Because if a kid is coming to us and saying, “I’m fat. I want to lose weight,” one, we don’t really know what they mean by that. We don’t know where that came from. Are they being teased? Did they hear something? Are their friends all trying to lose weight? We have to listen and understand.

And then we have to say, “Yeah, you feel like you want to lose weight. You’re feeling bad right now. You’re telling me that your body is rounder than your friends’.” As we validate, we want to use neutral, factual language. If they’re describing their body in negative terms, we don’t want to say, “Oh no, you’re wrong,” because that’s not right, and it’s also not bad to be in a bigger body. And so if we’re like, “Oh, no, no, no, you’re not fat,” that’s not helpful because we’re just invalidating their whole experience, and we’re also reinforcing the idea that fat is bad.

Instead, we want to be like, “Oh yeah, you’re right. I’ve noticed that in our family, we all have softer tummies. We all have rounder tummies.” When we’re using basic descriptive language that’s not negative, we help them reinterpret their body in a way that is more neutral, where we can then eventually move away from this judgment of body size and shape to an acceptance of body size and shape, where that’s just not part of what we’re talking about. It’s just like, “Oh, it’s neutral. This is just a body,” and let’s move on to something more interesting.

And then, after we’ve listened and validated, we really want to see if there’s something that we need to take action on. We’re saying, “Okay, do I need to help my child learn coping skills for being bullied? Do I need to talk to the school? Do I need to talk to their friend’s parents? What is my role now in figuring out what needs to happen? Is my child showing signs of having disordered eating? Have they put themselves on a diet?”

Those are the sorts of things where you want to take it seriously. If they’re restricting themselves from different foods or they’re doing things to try to change the size of their body, then is the time to involve a professional. Whether it’s a counselor, an eating disorder therapist, their doctor, whoever it is, that is the time. I know it’s hard when we think, “Oh my gosh, my kid potentially has disordered eating or an eating disorder.” That can fill parents with a lot of guilt and fear and shame and all that sort of thing. Don’t let that stop you from getting your child help as soon as possible.

Sarah: Yeah, this is not a DIY project.

Jennifer: Yeah, it’s not. Now, of course, you can be DIY-ing it all the way up to that point, but at the point where you see a big red flag, go bring somebody else in.

Sarah: So what are some tips for helping kids have a healthy relationship with food?

Jennifer: I love to talk about food factually, the same way we would talk about bodies. It’s like, “Oh, these are the names of foods. They’re hard, they’re crunchy, they’re savory, they’re sweet, they’re delicious,” as opposed to this sort of, “These are healthy foods, and these are not healthy foods.”

It adds a level of complication that is too simple and also contributes to a very rigid perspective of food and eating. Potentially, that can even leak over into how people think of their bodies.

Sarah: Yeah, because it just occurred to me—I was reflecting before, when I was thinking of questions to ask you—that I do know someone who talks to their child about, “We have to eat healthy food before we eat the unhealthy food.” And why would you ever want to tell your child that you’re giving them something unhealthy anyway? “Have this dangerous toy.” You know?

Jennifer: Yeah. “Don’t play with the dangerous toy until you’ve played with the safe toy.” I completely agree with that, and I think it comes from a very well-meaning place where, again, we’re wanting to pass on this information that empowers kids to nurture their bodies for the rest of their life.

So it’s all coming from a good place. We just have to think that kids will internalize this sort of, “Wait a second. You’re giving me all this healthy food, but then we have this unhealthy food. Why are you giving me unhealthy food? And also, am I bad if I eat this unhealthy food? Should I feel guilty? Should I feel afraid of it?” There are a lot of things that kids can take from these conversations.

Now, it doesn’t mean that if you’re using this language, you have ruined your child or you have given your child an eating disorder. I am telling you, kids are not that easy to ruin. And you can give them new skills, though, which is just to understand every food does something different in your body, and we can listen to our body to find out what’s right for us. Because let’s say you have an allergy. Yeah, there are some foods that are truly unhealthy. You’re going to have a really bad reaction. And there are also foods where, if you eat too much of them—and this is truly just about every food, including water—if you eat too much of it, you can also become unhealthy.

You can’t just live on broccoli. I promise you. That’s not healthy. And we see this in people who become really obsessed with healthy eating. They become very unhealthy. They’re unable to maintain their physical and mental health and social health. It affects all their relationships. So I like to get away from this unhealthy/healthy thinking.

And it is so healthy to be able to sit down and enjoy a bowl of ice cream. We’re visiting my parents right now, and my two kids had these big bowls of ice cream, and also the two baby cousins, who are two and not even quite one yet, my mom was giving them ice cream too. I was like, “This is such a grandma move right now.”

But here they are, they’re all together enjoying their ice cream, and the two-year-old had sprinkles for the first time. It was just this really amazing bonding moment. I don’t want my kids, in the back of their heads, to think, “Oh my gosh, I shouldn’t have eaten that much ice cream,” or, “I shouldn’t have eaten that ice cream,” or, “That was unhealthy for me.” I just don’t want that for them.

Sarah: Yeah. You want to enjoy the food that you’re eating, no matter what the food is. So how do you talk about it then? I’ve heard some people say “sometimes food,” like, “This is food that we don’t eat every day.” How do you talk about or differentiate?

Jennifer: You can model that, and I like to do what’s called predictable parenting, where you’re just going to be really consistent about whatever you’re going to do, and you’re going to help your kid get in touch with their hunger and fullness cues. So you’re going to serve them meals, but you’re also going to be like, “Sorry, you can’t have a snack right now because dinner’s in 30 minutes.”

You’re going to have a really predictable routine of meals, and that has the purpose of developing their embodiment, which is actually being able to tune in and listen: What is going on inside of my body? What does it need? How do I respond to it? One thing you do is just have an eating routine. That actually goes a really long way in helping kids have a good relationship with food.

Then you want to talk about food neutrally, and you want to model what a balanced diet looks like. If you really own your role as the restaurant owner, you’re not going to be making multiple meals. You’re going to be making one meal for the family, in most cases, and you’re always going to make sure there’s at least one food on there that your child’s comfortable with. It doesn’t have to be their absolute favorite food, but it’s got to be something that they’re comfortable with.

Sarah: Something they’ll eat.

Jennifer: Yeah, something they’ll eat, in most cases. Although kids are eating eggs several times a week for their whole life, and then one day my son’s like, “I don’t like eggs. I’ve never liked eggs.” I’m like, “That’s just so not true.” So you never know, which is why I say something they’re comfortable with, something that they almost always eat.

Then you can model what a balanced diet looks like. You’re probably not going to serve candy for meals. Maybe you add a little candy onto a meal or snack, and that’s a strategy people often use, and that’s fine. But you’re going to show that every single meal—or most meals—has a fruit or a vegetable. I like to think of it in terms of a protein food that also has fat, an energy food, which is a carbohydrate-rich source, and then also color, which is fruits and/or vegetables. That’s kind of how I think of a balanced meal.

We want to model that for kids for most of their meals and most of their snacks. They will absorb what that means. And so without saying anything, without being like, “Oh, this is a sometimes food. This is an always food,” you’re going to show them that it’s only there sometimes.

Sarah: Right.

Jennifer: And you’re also going to show them that other foods are there all the time. Now, as kids go out, they’re going to get hyped up on candy and sweets. It’s not like these are going to be, quote, “neutral foods.” They’re not. Maybe when they’re in preschool, but by the time they’re six and in school, with friends and parties, they know that these other foods are different. They know.

On social media, I’ve heard, “Oh, we can never restrict kids. We can never say anything that suggests they’re different.” I’m sorry. Hyper-palatable food—meaning candy, things with added sodium and sugar and fat—they are so different.

Sarah: Right. Your brain knows they’re different.

Jennifer: Yeah. The kids know they’re different. So we don’t have to hide the fact that we know they’re different. We can also set some limits, but we just want to be consistent about them. Like, “Oh, you can have two cookies.” Sometimes we might want to give kids more cookies. You might even say, “Hey, I want my kid to be able to choose how many cookies they have.” That’s all totally fine, and it’s all within the bounds of something that’s going to help kids have a healthy relationship with food and their bodies.

Sarah: I mean, I guess it depends, too, on the access, right? Like you were saying, you’re the executive chef of your restaurant. What we did, which I think worked pretty well, was we only occasionally had—I’d buy ice cream once in a while, and we’d eat it until it was gone. Or we’d have chips once in a while, or we’d make cookies once in a while. They sort of had, not 100% free access, but everybody would eat it, and then it would be gone, and then we wouldn’t have that stuff in the house anymore.

But the funny thing is—I mentioned to you before that two out of my three kids have been moved out of the house for a while—and I figure now my 19-year-old, I can buy chips and she can decide to eat them or not. So they come home and they’re like, “When did we become a chips household?” I feel like at a certain point you can just have in your house whatever you want and your kids are adults. But it’s hilarious because they’re like, “And bacon? When did you start buying bacon regularly?”

Jennifer: Right. And I think ultimately they’re going to grow up. They’re going to decide what they have in their house, and you’re going to decide what’s in your house. We just want to kind of get them to that point where they can enjoy all foods without any guilt.

Like, yeah, you made cookies and you enjoyed them together, and then that was that, and then you didn’t have them around for a while. You weren’t sitting there saying, “Oh, well, cookies are bad for you, and so we only have them sometimes.” No, cookies aren’t bad for you. They’re only bad for you if you’re eating so many cookies that it’s pushing out all the other food that you need.

Sarah: Yeah. So that reminds me of why I brought that up, which was that you can’t really ask kids to self-regulate, in my opinion—tell me what you think—if that food is available all the time in your house. Most kids, I think, would have cookies all the time if the cookies were just freely available 24/7. So I don’t know. Tell me what you think about that.

Jennifer: Yeah, this is a great question. If you go on social media these days, you’ll see people who are like, “Kids can totally regulate. Kids know when they’re hungry and full. Kids can listen to their hunger and fullness cues.” After doing so much research for this book and also having parented—I don’t have as much experience as you, but I’m at 13 years—I agree some kids can regulate, but a lot of kids cannot.

And here’s the reason. It’s because, again, that hyper-palatable food has a different effect on their brain than other foods. And if it was an ultra-processed food, meaning it’s a food that was kind of created in a factory or the recipe was designed by a multinational snack corporation, they have done so much research to find out the exact recipe that’s going to make people eat the most of it, override their hunger and fullness cues, and therefore buy more of it.

Sarah: Or even their enjoyment cues. Like people eating things and eating, and they’re not even really enjoying it anymore.

Jennifer: They are overriding their body, and I think it’s unfair to ask children to try to regulate that and to put that on them. Again, some kids are good at this, and if that’s one of your kids and that’s just how they work, fine. That’s fine. You don’t have to set limits.

The key, whether we’re letting kids eat as much as they want or we’re setting limits, isn’t whether we’re setting limits or not. It’s how we’re setting the limits. So if I want to set a limit on cookies, what I want to say is, “We’re all having two cookies today,” and that’s it. I’m not saying, “Because it’s a sometimes food,” or, “Because it’s bad for you,” or, “Because if you eat too much you’re going to gain weight,” or, “Because you don’t have self-control.” I’m not saying any of those things.

What the research has shown, and what’s just been observed, is that kids who have a higher weight hear more of these qualifications from their parents: “Because of this,” “Because you...” “Because that’s just too much.” That part is where you’re adding on guilt, shame, and worry, and that’s what we want to avoid. So when we just say, “Hey, everybody’s having two cookies,” that’s just the facts. I’m going to enforce it, but I’m not adding anything to it. It’s in the addition that we run across problems.

Sarah: Right. More like moralizing. That makes so much sense. I like how you said some kids can regulate and some kids can’t, in terms of the amount that they’re eating and the kinds of food that they’re eating, because I really did follow all of that sort of intuitive feeding advice for kids. And I did have one child who really had a hard time regulating whether they’d eaten enough, or eating past the point of fullness, and the things that they wanted to eat.

It wasn’t until I discovered through some research the connection between ADHD and feeding and found that there are some kids where you can sort of let them more intuitively know what their body needs and wants, and other kids you have to teach mindful eating, which is what we found really solved the issue. Because I was afraid to say anything, you know, because I didn’t want to make this kid feel bad about themselves or their body. But as soon as we had a way to talk about it that was about mindfulness rather than that sort of intuitiveness—I don’t know if you see those two things as different, but that’s sort of how I came to think about it.

Jennifer: Yeah. So here’s the thing with intuitive eating. It was a model, and it’s the name of a book. It was a model designed for adults—a very specific group of women, in fact—to come out of diet culture and to get back in touch with their bodies. Of course, that’s a huge simplification, but it was never designed for children.

And you may have heard of the division of responsibility in child feeding. That was also designed by a dietitian and eating disorder therapist for the purpose of helping private-practice eating disorder clients—children. But the thing is, that’s a very specific group of people in both cases. So to take a model that was designed for a specific group and now say this is applicable to all children, I don’t think is fair. It’s not evidence-based, and it’s something that I’ve really had to do a lot of thinking about over the past two years.

Also, seeing so many kids grow up over the years and helping so many families in the Better Bites programs and things, I’ve been thinking, yeah, this model of always letting your child decide how much to eat, or how much to eat of what foods, actually is not great for many kids.

Sarah: Yeah, it wasn’t great for one of mine.

Jennifer: Neurodivergent kids especially, whether it’s ADHD or autism or something else, sometimes don’t have as strong of a sense of interoception. And this is true even of some neurotypical kids.

Sarah: Yeah.

Jennifer: So the interoceptive sense is the ability to tell: Am I hungry? Am I full? Do I have to go to the bathroom? Am I hot? What is going on inside of my body, and do I know how to respond to it? Do I know how to make sense of that experience?

Some people describe being anxious as being very, very hot. Like, what do you do if you’re very, very hot? They have to learn over time, “Oh, that also means I’m anxious. Therefore something is worrying me. Therefore I need to address the thing.”

So for a lot of kids, we have to walk them through that experience. One of the most powerful ways we can do that is by narrating our internal experience, where we’re saying, “Oh, I’m cold. You see these goosebumps on my arm? That’s telling me I’m cold, and I’m kind of shivering. I’m going to put on something else. Oh, that makes me feel warm.”

Or, “I hear my stomach grumbling, and I feel empty, and I feel kind of grumpy. That’s telling me I’m hungry, and so I’m going to plan to eat a snack. I have snack in 15 minutes,” or, “It’s time for a snack right now.” And then as I’m sitting at the table, saying, “Oh, you know, I’m starting to feel my tummy fill up.” At some point you’re like, “Ah, I’m feeling full now. I’m going to stop eating.”

But like you’re saying, for some kids, we actually have to teach them explicitly. Some of these kids are going to have a harder time potty training. They may have a harder time learning a lot of things and how to respond to their body because they have to be taught explicitly.

Fortunately or unfortunately, that kind of falls to us to help them because we’re the ones who are with them so much of the time, and they’re most likely to be relaxed around us and able to learn. The more we can narrate our experiences—although that can be exhausting, I know—the more they can start to make those connections.

Sarah: That makes a lot of sense. And I think also the interoception thing that you mentioned is really a big part of it. Then there’s also that eating can be very regulating in terms of the chewing action and being able to differentiate hunger from boredom. There are so many things that some people or children just know, and some people or children need to be, as you said, explicitly taught those things.

Jennifer: Yeah. It’s just something that they don’t know, and their body doesn’t automatically make those connections. And that’s so true, especially with chewing.

If you find your child is eating a lot when they’re bored or when they’re lonely or when they have negative feelings or hard feelings, one of the things you can really fall back on is your eating routine, where you’re like, “Okay, we’re going to eat our meals at these times. We’re going to eat our snacks at these times.” It kind of keeps everybody on the same page in terms of when we’re eating.

And then it’s a little bit harder to say, “Oh, I’m going to use food to help my kids soothe themselves,” because that’s really tempting when we know, “Hey, if I just give them a snack, they’re going to calm down.” I’m definitely a big fan of occasionally using food as a pick-me-up because what a great tool. We could be feeling bad, and then we can eat something, and all of a sudden we can feel so much better.

Sarah: My daughter this morning had to have some blood work done, and she texted me, “The blood work hurt my arm so much. My arm is just killing me, and so I bought myself an almond croissant to feel better.”

Jennifer: Ah.

Sarah: I said, “Great self-care.”

Jennifer: Yes. Great self-care. At the same time, if that’s our only tool, then we’re in trouble. And so I think we have to kind of help our kids. I’m never down on somebody, or myself, for eating just for the purpose of feeling better or just for the purpose of enjoyment. We think about receiving meals from people in tricky times in our lives, or eating something that someone gives us even when we’re not hungry. It can still build connection and be such an uplifting experience.

Sarah: Well, and food is so nurturing, too. Again, before we started our recording, I was telling you how my 22- and 25-year-olds, who don’t live at home anymore, I really use food as a way to show my care and love for them when they no longer, quote, “need it,” right? Like making them food.

Once last year, I made a lasagna and took a picture of it and sent it to them and called it “son bait.”

Jennifer: That’s right.

Sarah: So yeah, food really is nurturing. And I think what I’ve come to think about it is, as long as you just don’t do that all the time, right? Have seconds when you’re not hungry because it’s your favorite food, as long as you don’t do that every single time you eat.

Jennifer: Yeah. I think having the ability to be flexible goes so far in our well-being. When we’re really inflexible, sometimes our life circumstances call for inflexibility. If we have very tight deadlines for when we can eat and when we can’t eat, or maybe we’re working through a health issue or something like that where we just really have to be a little bit more mindful of what we’re eating, maybe we have a little bit less flexibility.

But if we’re out of that season, we’re in a different time, then we can be more flexible during that time. I think the key is we’re not over-moralizing this experience. Instead, we’re enjoying it, we’re participating in it, and we’re learning to connect to real life, not just eating away all of our hard times or avoiding all of our hard emotions or things like that.

Sarah: That makes so much sense. Okay, let’s shift gears a little bit. I’m talking to you—I know school has already started in some parts of the country, and it’s starting in the next few weeks in other parts of the country. And with school comes packed school lunches.

Jennifer: Right.

Sarah: And I think every parent out there is like, “Oh, I’ve got to start making lunches again.” So do you have any sort of hot tips for things that you find—are there ways to cut corners to pack lunches that kids will eat, that are healthy and nutritious, and also don’t take a ton of time or money to do?

Jennifer: Sure. So when I’m packing lunches, first I just kind of start with the same formula, which is a protein food, an energy food—which is what I call a higher-starchy carbohydrate food—and then the color, the fruits or vegetables.

If you want to really cut corners, get yourself a lunchbox that only has three containers. That’s one of my big tips. A lot of these fancy bento lunches have four, five, six containers of food, and then often people feel pressured to fill it with six different kinds of foods. That’s just a lot for you to think about. I have all the different lunchboxes because it’s part of my job, and we often send ones that have a few more compartments, but that can be stressful. I’ve definitely felt that, where I’m like, “Just give me three containers.”

Also think, “Is there something that I can use from dinner or another meal that I made earlier in the week in this lunchbox?” The more you can incorporate that, the better. Or, if you can’t, see if you can make it during your dinner meal. When you’re already in the kitchen, things are already a mess. It might look like a bomb went off in your kitchen, where there’s a half-made lunchbox, there’s a half-made dinner, but if you’re the sort of person who can kind of manage that chaos, then do it then, because then you only have to clean up once. It’s already chaos; you’re just adding a little bit more chaos.

And you can also train your kids to help you, depending on your kids, of course. That can be a way for them to help save time for you. And then also kind of lean into maybe a baby carrot or a cucumber that you just chop, chop, or stuff where you’re cutting it up but it doesn’t feel that hard for you.

I think so much of what’s hard and easy—I was kind of talking to my Instagram audience about this recently—is individual. Making meatballs to me is a bridge too far. That just feels so hard and tedious. And a lot of people are like, “Oh my gosh, it feels so easy to me.” So I think a lot of this is what feels hard and what feels easy to you, and kind of run with that. Don’t compare your child’s lunchbox to everybody else’s.

If your kid is going to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day, if you can send peanuts, or a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich every day, go ahead. Send them with the same lunch every day if they’re the kind of kid who just needs the same lunch every day. If your kid needs a different lunch every day, obviously that’s a little trickier.

But also, if you can say, “Okay, can I use something from dinner?” that can really help. My kids have also learned that they kind of like soup at lunch, and I freeze it in one-cup segments, little portions. They know how to take it out of the freezer, put it in the microwave, heat it up, and put it in the thermos. That’s something that I was able to train them to do.

So any prep that you can do outside of it, when you’re already doing something else, is just going to save you a little time. And then if you can also save time with cleanup by doing it at the same time as dinner, that can be really helpful. We have a whole bunch of under-15-minute lunches in my Everyday Lunches e-book, as well as mix-and-match guides.

Sarah: Okay, nice.

Jennifer: And they can be really fun. I think engaging your kids, too—finding out what are they going to actually eat, asking them questions. “Does this lunch look okay?” If it comes back uneaten, ask them what was wrong with it so that you can kind of iterate on lunches as well.

Sarah: I once accidentally sent a thermos full of hot water with one of my kids to school. I forgot—I think it was probably macaroni and cheese that I was putting in it—and I forgot to put the macaroni and cheese in.

Jennifer: Oh my gosh. There are so many times that I’ve messed up on lunches in one way or another. You do the best you can, you know?

Sarah: Yeah. I mentioned before when we were talking about lunches that making food—and I’m somebody who cooks a lot, and I’ve made a lot of food for 25 or 26 years now with kids—it does take a lot of time and money and energy to make, I’m going to say, “nice food,” whatever that means to you. But the food you feel good about serving your family.

If you’re short on time, money, energy, or one, two, or three of those things, what’s the best use of resources, do you think, for feeding families if you’re short on some of that stuff?

Jennifer: First, go for frozen fruits and veggies. Just go right there, because that is no compromise whatsoever. It’s just a different form of the same food.

Sarah: They’re often cheaper too, I find. Especially frozen fruit is a lot cheaper than fresh fruit.

Jennifer: Yeah. Lean into that first. Also, find some cooking methods that are easy. The other day I put a bunch of chicken thighs in the Crock-Pot and poured some salsa over it. It was delicious at the end of the day. It took me five minutes, if that. I’m trying to think of what I served with it. I think it was leftover rice or something that was already leftover, something I could just quickly heat up in the microwave.

I can’t remember what we did for veggies, but I could have also added on the side of that just a couple bags of frozen peas, and we would’ve been good, right? So some bread and some frozen peas. I had a meal that took me maybe 15 minutes to make, very economical. It’s really kind of looking for those time-saving prep methods and then saying, “Okay, what can we do?”

Sarah: Yeah. One thing I always talk to overwhelmed parents about is trying to just really, really simplify dinner. Coming home, daycare pickup, everyone’s tired, blah, blah, blah. And I always have this funny story. Once when I was pregnant with my third, and my other two were two and five, my husband had an out-of-town job for four months, and I was in school full-time.

Jennifer: Oh my God.

Sarah: It was exhausting. And I would make eggs for dinner a lot.

Jennifer: Oh my goodness, yes.

Sarah: Eggs and baby carrots and toast were the go-to dinner, to the point where one Saturday morning I said to my sons, “Who wants some fried eggs for breakfast?” And my two-year-old said, “Silly Mommy, fried eggs are for dinner.”

Jennifer: I love that. Oh my gosh, we went through years and years and years where at least once a week we had eggs and toast and baby carrots, or some microwave peas or something from the freezer.

Canned soup is an okay dinner. There are so many things that I think people are feeling kind of hard on themselves about. Don’t listen to other people’s rules. What is working for you right now? Go with that.

Sarah: Yeah, like pesto pasta and jarred spaghetti sauce and noodles and apple slices. And I think sometimes it’s hard for parents, too, because they like to cook and they want to make nice food for themselves, right? But something has to go.

Jennifer: Yeah. Something’s gotta go, man. Making something nice for yourself—do it when you have a chance, but otherwise it’s okay to let that go for now. You’ll get it back.

That’s the other thing. We feel like, “Oh, I don’t want to give up this part of myself.” You’re not giving it up. You’re just saying, “Hey, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do other things right now, and then at a different stage I will do that again.” I’m actually cooking a lot better now that my kids aren’t holding onto my feet and fighting while I’m trying to cook.

Well, they still do that, but they’re not really getting in the way of cooking. It’s so hard to cook with little kids around.

Sarah: Totally.

Jennifer: I always say I would notoriously let my kids make a huge mess while I was making dinner, and I call it a “time loan.” They’re making a huge mess, but I was able to actually get dinner on the table. I got that time, and then, yeah, I’ll have to pay it back. I’ll have to clean up their mess when they were really little, but it’s worth it.

And I will also say, if you’re having a really hard time budget-wise, but you still have some time to cook, I have a meal plan that’s specifically designed to save money. It’s all about making the most of the food, using up all leftovers and preventing waste and all that, so that you can really spend significantly less—

Sarah: Yeah, I think I saw that a few years ago. We’ll link to that. You’ve had it for a while, right? It’s called Affordable Flavors.

Yeah, we’ll link to that in the show notes. One thing I’m just remembering that we did when my kids were little is there was another family—this woman who had kids around the same age—and we lived a few blocks away. Once a week, we would make double dinner and give it to the other one.

Jennifer: I love that.

Sarah: Yeah. She was Japanese and a really nice Japanese cook, and my kids actually, to be totally honest, weren’t huge fans of her dinners, but my husband and I certainly were.

Jennifer: Oh, that’s great.

Sarah: Yeah. But it was really nice. Once a week, you didn’t have to make anything because somebody gave you dinner. And it’s not very hard to make double of your own dinner. So if anyone has a neighbor that they could do that with, it was really a nice thing to do.

Jennifer: Yeah. That’s a great idea.

Sarah: Well, thank you so much. Tell us about your book launch. We’ll put any links in the show notes, but you told me before that you had some prizes and things for the pre-order.

Jennifer: Yeah. So there are a bunch of pre-order bonuses. As soon as you buy the book, you can upload either your receipt or, let’s say you requested it from the library, you can upload just proof of that request. I have some printables—how to talk to kids about red foods, orange foods, yellow foods—that are super popular. I usually sell it, but I’m giving that away as a pre-order bonus.

There are also mealtime conversation cards coming. There is a live call with my mom that I’m going to be doing that’s also recorded, so depending on when you hear this, it’s still available. There are also conversations like, what do you say if your kid comes back and says, “I’m fat”? What are some scripts? There are some scripts for that. There’s also my bedtime snack chart. There are a lot of tools where you’re like, “Okay, I want to make some improvements in different areas.” There are pre-order bonuses that give you tools for almost every area that you could want to apply.

And then I’m also doing a really fun book tour where I’m meeting with child feeding and food specialists from all over the United States over time, and I’m going to be posting my interviews online for everybody to see. It’s almost like a short-term podcast kind of demo. It’s going to be a lot of fun for people to follow along.

Sarah: Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on. One last question, which I ask all my guests—and I’ve asked you this before, so I can go back and compare and see if you answer it the same way—which is: If you could go back in time to your younger parent self, what advice would you give yourself? It can be about anything. It doesn’t have to be about food or feeding.

Jennifer: Sure. So now that I’m 13 years in, I think the one thing that would’ve been so helpful for me to know is: It’s not my job to make my kid happy. It sounds so simple now, but I’m like, no, it wasn’t my job to try to make them stop crying. It was my job to just hold a boundary and be there.

And when I stopped, when I just kind of let go of that idea of trying to make them happy, oh my gosh, the weight, the drama—it just went away. It’s like, “Oh, it’s okay for you to be unhappy. That’s you and your feelings over there, and I’m here to support. I’m here for you.” And also, it’s not my job to fix that.

Sarah: Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much. Best place for folks to go and find out more about you and what you do?

Jennifer: Kids Eat in Color, whether that’s kidsincolor.com or on your favorite social media. I’m there.

Sarah: All right. Thank you so much, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me.

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