Mealtime rules at our house

I’m pretty happy with the way our family handles meals. There’s nothing revolutionary here, but in case it’s helpful:

Principles:

• encourage adequate nutrition. My kids have all been low weight / underweight, and often aren’t that interested in food, so some of this is designed to encourage them to eat more.
• bodily autonomy (not forcing food)
• keep dinner as a time that’s reasonably enjoyable for all participants — in our case typically Jeff and me, our kids, and 2-3 housemates

The two main policies:

• You must stay at the table for at least 10 minutes
• You don’t have to eat anything you don’t want to

Less important policies:

• You may not complain about the food or say it “looks like a pile of garbage.” “No thanks” is all the refusal that’s needed
• You must come to the table when the meal is served
• If you’re especially sad/grumpy and want to eat alone, you may take your food to another room if you want
• If you ask for more food, you must either eat it or spend 5 minutes with it (you can’t request food, decide you don’t want it, and then leave the table 2 minutes later.)
• You must pick some food to have on your plate, even if you don’t currently feel like eating it
• After-dinner sweets may be withheld if you have not had adequate dinner
• You may ask for something else or get food from the kitchen. Grownups may decline to help you get extra food, but there is cereal and such where kids can reach it.
• If you’re done with your meal, no enticing other people away from the table (by inviting them to play, etc)
• Keep your voice to a medium volume (no shouting / especially loud talking, especially if our housemate has a headache)
• Singing at the table only if everyone present says it’s ok
• At dinner with housemates, conversation topics must be of general interest. Things that are not of general interest: Extended summaries of a TV show you saw or a dream you had, extended shop talk about programming that is not interesting to non-programmers, and repeating the baby’s name over and over. Grownups should try to keep conversation accessible to the kids for the first 10 minutes of the meal and can do boring grownup talk after that.
• If you’re no longer at dinner, you can play quietly nearby or can go somewhere else. You can’t stay nearby and be loud or ask “What?” to parts of the conversation you only half-heard. You can come back to the table if you want to rejoin the conversation.

These rules are mostly for dinner; breakfast and lunch are less structured.

Ellyn Satter’s division of responsibility in feeding seems solid. I haven’t gone all-in with her method, though maybe I would if it felt like food were a serious problem in our house. It felt like more hassle for all of us (including not just Jeff and me, but also people providing childcare and our housemates when they cook dinner) than I wanted to sign up for.