My daughter thought the bento box buffoonery was hilarious. She was not wrong.
I bought the little cutters. The star shapes, the dinosaurs, the tiny bear faces. I watched videos on Instagram of parents who had clearly trained for this, producing elaborate lunch arrangements with food built into scenes - a lion made of cantaloupe, a sandwich cut into the shape of a race car, cucumber slices fanned out like a peacock tail. I did not go that far. But I did make a plate of dinosaur-shaped sandwiches and a little arrangement of apple slices with the skin peeled in a stripe pattern, and I presented it to my son like I was unveiling something special.
My daughter watched this from across the kitchen with the energy of someone observing a nature documentary. When my first attempt at a dinosaur shape came out looking less like a T-Rex and more like a lumpy oval, she leaned over and said “Dad, that doesn’t look like a dinosaur. It looks like a mouse.” She wasn’t wrong either. We started calling them mouseasaurs. It became our thing.
My son picked up a mouseasaur, turned it over, and put it back down.
“What’s in it?” he asked.
Ham and cheese, I told him. Same as always.
“I don’t want Ham and cheese.”
He has eaten Ham and cheese sandwiches before. Not often, but it’s happened. The dinosaur shape did not help. If anything, I think the novelty made him more suspicious, not less. Like - why is dad doing something different? What’s he trying to hide?
One afternoon my daughter offered to help shape the sandwiches, and I let her. She was mid-mouseasaur when my son walked into the kitchen, saw her hands on his food, and completely lost it. Full crying fit. Not about the shape, not about the food - about the fact that his sister had touched it. That was the end of lunch that day, and honestly, a pretty rough afternoon altogether.
I tried the bento approach for about two weeks. Some days he’d eat the components he was already going to eat anyway - crackers, cheese, apple slices - and ignore the rest regardless of shape. A few times he ate the contents of the sandwich but not the bread, which was interesting. But I genuinely cannot tell if the shape had anything to do with it or if it was just random daily variation in what he felt like eating. He is not consistent. That’s the whole problem.
The thing I keep running into is that the strategies that work for some kids don’t translate. I’ll read a thread in one of the picky eating communities - there’s a big one on Reddit, r/pickyeaters, plus a bunch of Facebook groups - and there will be a parent saying “we started making food fun and now my daughter eats everything!” And then fifteen other parents saying “we tried that and our kid couldn’t care less about the shape, he still won’t eat it.” My son is firmly in the second camp.
I asked my daughter if she understood why her brother wouldn’t try new foods.
She thought about it for a second.
“I think he’s just scared to taste it,” she said. “Like, what if it’s gross?”
I asked if she ever felt that way.
She looked at me like I’d asked something completely beside the point. “That’s different,” she said, and walked away to start making crafts from leftover cardboard boxes.
This from the girl who won’t eat a bagel if it has only one topping.
I’m not sure what to do with it yet. But I’m thinking about it.
There was one actual win this month, and I want to document it because wins have been rare enough that I’m treating each one like evidence.
We made homemade pizza. Plain tomato sauce, both kids involved, everyone assembles their own. My son wanted his plain - just sauce and cheese - which, fine, I’ll take it. The sauce I made for it has tomatoes (obviously), onions, carrots, and celery (all diced small enough to need a microscope to find it), so if he just wants cheese on that my dad-brain can allow it. My daughter required pepperoni on every single bite, which meant a distribution of pepperoni so dense and deliberate it looked like a geometry project. She inspected each slice before eating it. A bite without pepperoni was unacceptable. A nitrate-free pepperoni, it turns out, is also not acceptable, a fact I discovered after one overly-optimistic grocery run.
My son, presented with a square pizza to cut himself, immediately abandoned the concept of triangles and went freehand. Zig-zags. Curves. One piece that was roughly the shape of Australia. He ate all of it.
My daughter watched his cutting technique with visible irritation, mostly because some of his creative cutting curtailed the pepperoni coverage of her slices.
I don’t fully understand why pizza worked when so many other things haven’t. The involvement? The customization? The fact that pizza is culturally pre-approved as a food that children are allowed to enjoy? I don’t know. But both kids ate dinner, nobody cried, and I’m counting it.
It doesn’t tell me what to try next, though. So.
Next I’m going to try the “one bite” rule. I’ve been avoiding it because I’ve heard mixed things. At this point, ‘mixed results’ sounds better than pizza five nights a week.