Self-Serving Snacks vs Mealtimes
Our very confident, independent three year old has been attending Montessori schools since she was about a year old. She’s currently at an AMI program that we generally love, and that she thrives in. We try to approach home life with a similar approach that she gets at school. I vaguely remember reading the Absorbent Mind during the fever dream that was pregnancy, and we read Montessori from the Start when she was an infant, so, we have a novice understanding.
We have recently hit a bit of a frustrating inflection point when it comes to mealtimes.
There are three interrelated things happening at home (last month-plus):
— She is snack crazy. She wants constant snacks between meals. So like, we’d have a regularly scheduled snack time, and then she would want a snack 10 minutes after that, and then 15 minutes after that, etc which we tried to have a balanced response to — like allowing fruit and vegetables, or stopping her from snacking right before or right after a meal.
— That transitioned into her exclusively wanting “snack” foods instead of meals, regardless of how much input she had in the meal choice or preparation. Basically a “snack” as anything that isn’t the meal. We say no to this, and there’s typically a small fit, and historically we’ve been able to move on with the meal, even just in part.
— Now here we are, as anyone could have predicted, with her taking 2 bites of a meal, announcing that she’s done, and wanting to help herself to a snack. No way!
To be clear, this is not a pickiness issue. Our daughter has always been more or less open when it comes to food, which we don’t take for granted — she eats most of what we make for meals, she is open to trying new foods, and we have recently been fairly successful with getting her to sit at the table for most of the duration of a meal rather than getting up to go do other things.
We usually offer her the choice of what to have at breakfast, from a fairly wide array of more or less nutritionally complete/substantial offerings, all of which are proven winners, and all of which she helps with the making of (smoothies, eggs, oatmeal, yogurt and toppings, etc). Wha we’re having for dinner is a conversation, and while it is rarely totally her choice, she usually has some sort of say in different elements, and always has the option to help prepare it.
We generally offer two snack times on weekdays: in the car on the way home from school, and during storytime, which is after bathtime and before bedtime. We keep most of the really high value pantry snacks out of reach, but she has long been able to help herself to berries or cherry tomatoes from the fridge.
In children’s house they are able to self serve themselves with snacks that have some element of work associated with them — peeling and slicing hardboiled eggs, spreading sun butter on rice cakes, etc. We know that they also get offered snacks at set times in the morning and afternoon, and that they eat lunches family-style.
From a household food culture lens, we’re not really believers in the free range approach to food, but we’re not trying to be our parents either. We are doing our best to have her be an active participant in family cooking and mealtimes, and to avoid traps like separate meals just for her. If this were the only consideration, I think we would feel pretty secure in moving forward with a tough snack approach.
However — as we enforced our rule of zero-free-snacks-if-you-don’t-eat-dinner this evening, she corrected us: “I can get my own snack, that’s what we do.” And I realized that at school, she absolutely gets to go make herself a snack.
So — is our more rigid / authoritative take inherently in conflict with Montessori philosophy? We don’t want to set rules that are totally at odds with the structure she has at school, which is where she spends the majority of her time, realistically. Is there a way of framing this with her where we can have expectations for mealtimes and she also gets to self-serve snacks? Should we just give all of our mealtime rigidity up, and trust that it will sort itself out with age?