Joy and food and relationships

What about fast food? Are you saying that your children dictate where you eat?

Ideally unschooling families aren't centered around power, they're centered around communication. And part of getting there can involve stepping away from power-loaded terminology like "dictate" or "in charge" since words like that can nudge our thoughts into more antagonistic modes of interaction.

The trick with communication is that it starts with listening and striving for understanding - and little kids mostly aren't wired for those parts. They grow into them, but in the meantime it's up to parents to model the important parts of communication - the listening and understanding parts. Ironically, conventional parenting works just the opposite because it IS centered around power. And in a power struggle, the person in power doesn't have to listen or understand. So adults tell and kids are expected to listen and learn - while holding out for the day when they'll be the grownups and not have to do that any more That's the baggage most of us bring to parenting and need to deschool from as we work to decentralize power in our relationships.

Food is a big hot button topic for a lot of people because it's also tied up in power dynamics. The people in power get to choose the food, when and how it gets eaten, and by whom, and we'd all like it to be our "turn". Recognizing that we're coming from these kinds of expectations is often part of learning a better set of expectations, a better set of relationship skills.

Woven into all of this is the expectation that kids will and should learn what parents want them to learn - and while some kids do, the results are based more on the personality of the kid than anything else. Unschooling involves recognizing that personality matters in big ways and working with that - listening, striving to understand, and then adapting to each child's needs and interests and personality so that we can make it easier for them to explore the world in ways that work for them.

So from my longtime radical unschooling perspective the question: "[do] your children dictate where you eat?" doesn't make a lot of sense. I like my kids. I'm interested in them as people. I want to know that they like, what they want, what lights them up and brings them joy. If they want to eat out, I'm interested in the reasons for that! Maybe I'd like to eat out, too - especially as we've moved up the financial ladder to "working poor" from "dirt poor" it's been a wonderful luxury to go out to eat that we all appreciate sometimes. Maybe it's not in the budget, but what other options do we have? How can I ride this wave of joyful enthusiasm with my kid? What can I do to keep on making life sweeter and easier, richer and more wonderful for all of us? Sometimes it's a lot of work for me! That doesn't mean it can't be joyful work, lifting myself up with my own hands while I lift up my family, too.
That doesn't mean you always "have to" go out at the drop of a hint, though. What is it about eating out that your kids like? Can you provide more of it at home? Learn to make something similar? Or is it more that eating out feels better somehow - easier, less constrained, more special? How can you make home easier, less constrained, more special?
Sometimes the appeal in going out for fast food, in particular, is that it comes packaged. You get to unwrap it - like a present. And some little kids really get into that - one of mine did. And we were dead broke at the time - foodstamps broke. I couldn't even afford those individually wrapped crackers-and-cheese packets. So I made my own - made little portions of things and wrapped them up in leftover gift wrap. That was fun, and it made being painfully poor not so painful.

Sometimes what kids like about packaging or eating out is that the food is made to be attractive in some way - so use that, make food that's attractive to kids. Add colors, add sprinkles, cut things in fun ways, make shapes and characters, make toys a part of the presentation. I had a lot of resistance to that - old cultural scars of poverty and puritanism - but with a little shift in my thinking it was delightful to rediscover playing with food. It let me heal some of my own inner child as well as connect better with my kids to make preparing and eating food acts of joy and celebration.