Malo looked at his plate as if Camille had served something genuinely suspicious.
Pasta. Courgettes. A little chicken. Nothing particularly experimental. Still, his answer came immediately: “I don’t want it.”
It is a scene many parents know: a child refusing to eat, and us immediately wondering what to do. Insist? Negotiate? Ask for two more bites? Or accept that they may hardly eat anything that evening?
Camille started gently. One bite, just to try it. Then two. At least the chicken. Or three pieces of courgette. What about the pasta? He normally likes pasta.
Within a few minutes, dinner was no longer really dinner. It had become a negotiation. And the more Camille tried to get something into Malo, the more determined Malo seemed to keep everything out.
When a child refuses to eat, every bite can become a battle
It is strange to prepare a meal, put a plate in front of your child and suddenly discover that a significant part of your parental power has disappeared.
We can choose what goes on the table. We can decide that dinner will not be replaced five minutes later by a stream of biscuits. We can keep offering different foods.
But we cannot feel hungry on behalf of our child. And we cannot swallow for them either.
The moment Camille started counting bites, every bite became far more important than it needed to be. A courgette was no longer really a courgette. It had become: is he going to listen to me or not?
Malo had discovered something powerful too: there was at least one area where nobody could decide exactly what happened for him.
So both of them held on a little harder.
Camille realised it when she heard herself say, “Two more bites and then you can get down.”
Two bites of what, exactly? And why two?
She was not even sure Malo was hungry anymore. Mostly, she wanted him to eat because she had decided that he should.
What if we talked a little less about the plate?
The next time, Camille tried something much less dramatic: she stopped commenting on every bite.
She put dinner on the table and let Malo look, touch, eat or leave certain things without turning each decision into a discussion.
When Malo announced that he did not like courgettes before he had even touched them, she did not try to convince him they were delicious. She simply kept eating.
Should you force a child to eat?
Of course, stopping the bite-counting does not mean stopping caring about what your child eats. We can still look at their diet overall, keep offering variety and act if something genuinely worries us.
But there is also all the pressure many of us inherited around meals. Plenty of parents grew up with “finish your plate”, “three more bites” or “you’ve hardly eaten anything”. So when we choose to insist less, it sometimes takes only one comment at the table to make us wonder whether we have become far too relaxed.
Yet not fighting over every piece of food does not mean a child will never eat. Malo eats pasta, bread, fruit, chicken on some days and even courgettes when the universe is perfectly aligned. Just not necessarily the amount Camille expected, or at exactly the time she imagined.
And yes, some evenings he will eat very little.
That night, the courgettes stayed on the plate. But Malo had eaten the rest, nobody had counted and dinner had not become an ordeal.
That was already quite a lot.
