Real Time for Meal Time

I have so many thoughts and questions and beginnings of answers swirling through my head after coming home from the International Play Iceland conference last week. As I toured the schools, I found myself rotating through the following thoughts:

…We could do that!

… I wish we could do that!

… That’s just like the way we do it!

… Wow! That would never go over in America.

… Hmmm. I would never do that.

It was an amazing experience and one I will never forget. My mind is exploding with exciting ideas and dreams of how to take these lessons, conversations, observations, and experiences, and to sort out what I can do with all of it. Already I can see a change in how I am treating my own children and my job. Hopefully I will have more to say soon, as I process, read my notes, look at my photos, and continue talking to the incredible teachers and directors I met at the conference.

For now, though, I am going to focus on one little thing. Maybe this will help me see how all the many little things tie in together.

And that thing is lunch. At the preschool Kaldársel in Iceland, I was invited to eat lunch with the children. This one little moment, of all of my week, reaffirmed for me the importance of healthy meals and social mealtime.

After a long hike and a snack of apple slices, we returned to the school building to sit down for lunch with the children. There were several tables, each of which sat 6-8 people, spread throughout a few small rooms. 

The food was brought out to each table on a platter. The children were expected to use polite manners, wait their turn, and share the meal. They were provided with china plates, glasses, and real adult-sized silverware. The meal consisted of rice, vegetables, and fish, and was served along with a sauce that tasted like a mild curry. We were given a pitcher of water to accompany the lunch.

The children took turns and served themselves from the platter of food, and poured their own water. They used their own fork and knife to cut their own food. There were adults circulating through the lunch rooms, helping out with replenishing food. However, they weren’t monitoring the children’s food choices. The kids could take as much or as little of each food as they wanted. At the table where I sat, the four kids each took some of everything (although one declined the sauce). No adult took stock of whether or not they tried everything. There were no choices that were unhealthy, so no matter what they chose, it was a good lunch. They had already had fruit in their day, and they were plenty hungry for a good meal after their fresh air, exercise, and a very small snack.

After eating, the children (at this school, they were all ages 4 and 5), took their own plates back to the kitchen. They scraped (very little) leftovers into the garbage, stacked the dirty plates, and sorted the silverware.

One thing that amazed me was the lack of mess. I expected spills and crumbs, but I didn’t find any. There were some stray rice grains on the floor, but that came from eating, not from serving or carrying the plates. It was no more mess than if they had each been handed a pre-plated serving of food.

This one meal made me think a lot about how I do things with my own kids.

It is important to give them responsibility. The Icelandic preschoolers were able to serve themselves, eat, and clean up after themselves.  This was clearly something they were used to doing, and they had developed a skill for eating carefully and neatly after practicing it often.

It is important to give them autonomy. The kids were given only a couple of choices, and all of them were healthy, but they were given the choice to say yes or no. They could load their plate with vegetables and skip the fish. Or choose a tiny amount of each item. They could smother it in curry sauce or skip it altogether. The adults didn’t intervene. The only negative consequence for any child that I can think of would be that they might feel hungry later (a pretty easy lesson to learn, in my opinion).

It is important to be with them. There were staff for cooking the food and wiping tables, but the children’s teachers sat down to eat with the kids. The conversations, since it wasn’t about who is eating what or how much, was about much more important things. One girl explained to the boy sitting next to her that it tickles when you scratch the palm of your own hand. This led into a conversation about clapping hands, making noise, funny feelings, and what tickles the most. The teacher at the table was a part of this fun conversation. Another teacher was comforting a boy who had fallen into a creek and was tired, cold, and worn out (more on that story later!). Another table was talking about how big spiders can grow. These conversations sure beat the ones at my dining table which center around “if I eat this, can I then eat that?” and “How much do I have to eat?” and “But I’m not hungry!” I don’t think I even need to say it, but of course there were no phones, TV, or tablets present to distract from eating and enjoying each other’s company.

It is important to feed children healthy food. This goes without saying, I suppose, but it might be the hardest for me. These children didn’t expect anything different from their lunch, so they were ready to eat it. The teachers explained that they get “breakfast, then fruit time, then lunch, then fruit time again, and then dinner.” Notice that it isn’t snack time in between meals, it is fruit time. Even in a country where they can hardly grow trees and they have to import almost all of their produce, they serve fruit instead of the empty calories in crackers and breads. The children are therefore hungry enough to eat the next meal, and don’t hold out waiting for different options. The next time to eat is going to be just as nutritious as this time is. These kids are growing and their brains are developing at rates that won’t ever happen again in their lives. They need to eat foods that will support all of the development that is happening.

(Of course the ramifications for this are much bigger than lunch time, or meals, or food in general. Obviously responsibility, autonomy, and our attention aren't just reserved for eating. More on these ideas as I work them out myself!)

For now, though: I am challenging myself to make sure that I am there for meals with my kids: to enjoy their conversations, to watch them practice life skills, to teach them independence, and to strengthen the bonds between us. I can’t think of anything more important to put on the menu.