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I am sitting here with a jar of Mango Overnight Oats, in a miraculously quiet house since the kids aren’t up yet, ready to share a story about how I changed my mind about “kids food.” This happened over a decade ago, but it was such a formative moment in how I think about feeding my kids that it is still clear in my mind.
When my oldest was one, she discovered cheese crackers. Up until that point, I made most of her food—I had the benefit of a flexible job, culinary knowledge, time to cook, and she was my only kid.
She was a toddler who generally ate most foods I made her, so the sudden preference and desire for cheese crackers at snack time Every Single Day caught me off guard. And I quickly convinced myself it was the beginning of the end of her being a “good” eater.
At the time, I didn’t have many close friends who had navigated the toddler food phase of life since I was the first in my friend group to have a baby. Which means that I was all ears whenever anyone talked about feeding kids…and I mainly got my information from strangers on the internet.
The only message I saw with any regularity was that if a child starts to taste “processed” foods from the store, it will become harder for them to like the homemade foods they had been used to (happily) eating.
And since this cheese cracker devotion started at daycare, where they were a regular afternoon snack, I took the only route I thought was open to me at the time…
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