There was a phase in my son’s toddlerhood that brought me to the brink of despair. While as a one-year-old he enthusiastically ate olives stuffed with anchovies – hardly anyone could understand this – at the age of two there was a time when nothing on his plate was allowed to touch each other. Meat, vegetables, side dishes, every part of the lunch had to be in a different corner. Sauce? No thanks. I was about to get help from my mom and borrow her fondue plates, which are divided into sections. When I was three years old, things got even worse: pasta with butter became the only warm meal my son was willing to eat – for what felt like months. To make a long story short, he survived all of this unscathed. I, on the other hand, were perplexed by these sudden changes of heart. “I think the child is broken,” I muttered to myself at the time. I’m smarter now because I’ve read “Family at the Table”.
First the good news: The author Christine Order (with Georg Cadeggianini) assumes that parents generally mean well towards their children. However, and that’s where it starts, unfortunately this doesn’t always lead to them behaving in a sensible way. In the chapter “And Now Advertising,” for example, Order shows us how, with our classic airplane games, humming noises and praises like “Hmm, delicious, delicious,” we actually do everything we can to distract a child and somehow foist the meal on him. For generations, parents have hoped that their offspring would hardly notice that they are actually eating. Of course, this little game is only successful to a limited extent and overselling the food makes less sense than letting the child eat it themselves – even if it makes a mess for themselves and those around them.
Whether toddler or school-age child, every age brings new challenges to the table for parents. The latter, however, serves the authors not only as a place where children learn to eat, manners and good behavior. Rather, shared meals are often the only opportunity to talk about the day, tell stories, listen, laugh, argue or perhaps even get rid of your worries. Eating together means a reliable rhythm for the day, more or less fixed times to see and experience each other. The place at the table becomes a school for life.
It’s fitting that Christine Order completed her training with the famous Danish family therapist Jesper Juul. Like him, she teaches adults to understand children’s behavior and to look at the big picture. Full of humor and with a lot of insight, she creates an understanding of children’s behavior, which is as enlightening as it is calming.
Co-author Georg Cadeggianini is an editor at the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, has seven children and, according to his biography on the publisher’s website, is an expert in jokes. These requirements probably also provide him with the expertise for meals at the dinner table.
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