You got to cool it now!

Do you ever wonder if you have trained your kids in a way that works for the time being but may not be the best in the long run?  This can apply to so many things since teaching and training our kids to be good little citizens is so comprehensive. I do have one example that I wanted to share.

Ever since my kids were babies and starting to eat solid food I was always very careful to cool off their food before serving it to them.  I may have had an incident with my sister when she was a baby where I heated her baby food jar in the microwave and didn’t stir it up and cool it down, served it to her, and she screamed and it burned her little mouth.  I was kind of traumatized by it (she doesn’t remember it thankfully). Anyhow, my routine is to prepare the food, portion it out for the kids, and I let it cool before ever calling them down to eat. I time my meal preparation so that the food is plated and cooled by the time we are ready to eat.  The kids sit down to a meal that is almost always portioned and cooled so they can dig in right away (no one wants to deal with hangry kids).

This works out most of the time at home.  But we don’t always eat at home! It gets a little stressful for me when we are at people’s homes or at restaurants where the kids are ready to eat but a lot of the time the food is steaming hot (as it should be) and they get so impatient and want to eat.  I try to tell them to blow on the food and cut it up for them, but still, they are just so used to eating perfectly cooled food that it makes them so frustrated. And then mealtime becomes very tense and not as enjoyable.

It makes me kind of wish that I had trained my kids to at least be used to blowing on their own food sometimes or waiting at the table while their food cooled.  I guess in my mind I just figured I would let the kids go play and do other things while I prepared the meal ahead of time and would call them to eat when everything was ready to be eaten.

Over time I know that we will have plenty of instances where the kids will have to practice their patience with hot food and in time they’ll get used to it.  I don’t think I will go so far as to make it a permanent habit at home to serve the kids hot food. It just works for us to pre-cool the food before the kids sit down and want to eat.  So I’ll choose that short-term benefit for now!