Grandmother Sends Grandson To Bed Without Food After He Refuses To Eat What She Cooked
Her daughter was furious she sent her son to bed without dinner.
VGstockstudio / TetyanaRusanova / Shutterstock A grandmother who sent her five-year-old grandson to bed without dinner is now wondering if she was in the wrong.
She claimed that the boy refused to eat what she made for dinner, and she did not feel like cooking an alternative meal for him. Now, she is questioning if she made the wrong decision after the boy’s mother became angry with her.
The grandmother is vegetarian, and her ‘picky’ grandson refused to eat the vegetarian meal she prepared for dinner.
In a since-deleted Reddit post, the 59-year-old grandma revealed that her 31-year-old daughter and her husband recently moved into her home due to financial difficulties. They also brought along their three children, who were between the ages of five and nine years old.
Since the woman’s daughter also lives with them, she is usually the one providing meals for her children, especially since the grandmother is vegetarian and the rest of the family is not. The woman’s five-year-old grandson has also never expressed an interest in eating the meals she cooks.
“Her youngest is picky and doesn’t like my food,” she wrote.
One weekend, the woman’s daughter informed her that she was going out with her friends and needed her to look after the children for a while.
“I assumed she would be home by dinner because she didn’t say anything specifically to me about doing anything for the kids,” the grandmother shared. However, when nine o’clock in the evening rolled around and she still wasn’t back, the grandmother decided to fix dinner for herself and her grandchildren. “I just made rice and steamed veggies for myself because I wasn’t too hungry,” the woman wrote. “I offered some for the children, and the older ones ate, the five-year-old was upset though.”
The child asked his grandmother to cook him chicken nuggets instead. The woman admitted that while she had chicken and breadcrumbs on hand and knew how to make them, she was uncomfortable with cooking meat and refused to prepare them for her grandson. She told him that he would have to wait until his mom returned so that she could make him chicken nuggets instead.
“He got upset and threw the plate of food down and it broke,” the woman wrote. “I picked up the ceramic pieces, but had him clean up the rice.”
The woman wound up sending her grandson to bed without any dinner.
When the woman’s daughter arrived home around 11 p.m., she informed her what had occurred at dinnertime.
“She was really upset that I let him sleep hungry,” the woman wrote. “I said it was one evening and he’s not starving. She told me to get over myself and make the [expletive] chicken.”
The woman’s daughter also criticized her for making her son clean up the mess he had made on the floor as if he were “a maid.”
According to the grandmother, her daughter is coddling her son and needs to toughen up, even if it means making him eat meals he is not a fan of. However, she asked others online if it was wrong of her to send her grandson to bed without a proper dinner.
Photo: Altrendo Images / Shutterstock
Some commenters sided with the grandmother, noting that it was not her responsibility to prepare dinner for her grandchildren.
“It seems she just left the kids at home without asking you to watch/feed them … where was the father?" one Redditor questioned. "Seems like they are taking advantage of living with you assuming you are a built-in babysitter that doesn't need to be asked."
“You are not obligated to make chicken nuggets from scratch … I’d set some serious ground rules about this if I were you, otherwise, they will never move out of your house,” another user advised.
Others noted that the boy was not going to starve to death if he missed a single dinner.
However, others online argued that the grandmother should have prepared an alternative meal for her grandson, given that he was a picky child who was hungry.
“It’s not like he can make his own food," a third user pointed out. "If meat makes you uncomfortable, find something else he’ll eat. Toast and cereal take seconds.”
“I'm a vegetarian too and also would have not cooked meat, but you handled this poorly,” another user added.
The woman later clarified that she allowed the boy to have a few crackers before going to sleep, and even offered him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to eat instead of the rice and vegetables.
Sending a child to bed hungry may affect their sleep quality, according to Stephanie Jackson, MD, a pediatric neurologist who specializes in sleep medicine. “A kid who goes to bed hungry is going to have a tough time getting to sleep,” she told Riley Children’s Health.
Jackson suggested offering your children a small snack before bedtime if they have not finished their dinner plates to help them get the correct amount of sleep they need.
Even though the grandmother did offer her grandson crackers and peanut butter and jelly, the bigger issue appears to be the lack of communication between the grandmother and her daughter.
If the woman wanted to go out with her friends for the night, she should have explicitly asked her mother if she would be able to watch the children and cook them dinner — and ideally even provided the meal for her picky son. The grandmother should have also made it clear to her daughter that if the children did not eat what she prepared for them, then they would have to wait for their mother to provide an alternative option.
Megan Quinn is a writer at YourTango who covers entertainment and news, self, love, and relationships.