Anxiety Riddled Dilemmas

Am I doing the right things or the wrong things?  Am I making the problems worse or better?  Will there be long term consequences or are the points I'm trying to show sticking?  Am I doing too much or not enough? 

These are all things that run through my mind constantly every day!  All of these points have to deal with one thing in particular:  FOOD.

Seriously I am all but a hair away from going full blown crazy!  Specifically I am talking about the constant food battles with my children, my older son much more so.  I am using the word "battles" in a general sense because long ago I gave up on actually having battles about food.  Now we stick to discussions or a neutral approach, making it no big deal (except on the inside where I'm going crazy).    

I know for a fact that I am not the only one going through this.  I have read articles, news stories, and the endless slew of material that seems to surface on what, and how, your child should be eating.  The thing no one takes into consideration:  I can't make my child eat anything!   That last fact I mean quite literally.  I hit my breaking point about 2.5 years ago, it was then that I decided to stop catering to my son.  I would make him something and he wouldn't eat it.  Naturally I thought he just didn't want the grilled cheese I made but he MUST be hungry so I would make meal #2.  Which he would then proceed to not eat.  It was this constant state of cooking so as to find the one thing he would actually feel like eating.  I grew tired of that, very quickly I might add, and decided enough was enough.

Fast forward to present day.  I try to set a good example for them and eat fairly healthy myself.  I also offer many fruits and veggies throughout the day just like the powers that be say to.  I cook one meal for dinner and we all sit down together to "eat" as a family.  What's there is there and you can take it or leave it.  We don't make a big deal when he decides not to eat dinner EVERY. SINGLE. NIGHT!  But really, is that healthy?  This is where my mind starts going.  Clearly he is healthy and is growing normally.  Obviously he gets what he needs between the hours of 7 and 3.  But is this doing anything in the long term to him.  Am I unknowingly creating undesirable lifelong habits?  I'm not only worried about this specific point but just talking in general about this dilemma.

I also wonder about whether not keeping sweets in the house is actually creating more of a problem.  We stopped keeping sweets, chips, and the like in the house on a regular basis long ago because if it's there the DH will eat it.  I keep things like pretzels, fruit snacks, and granola bars in the house for the kids but not cookies, cakes and candy bars.  We do enjoy sweets now and then but it's when we bake them, which is not very often because the 4 of us really don't need to eat 3 dozen cookies.  I wonder if this may be having the opposite effect though because he goes crazy when he does get them and then he fixates on them.  I wonder if he feels like it's the "forbidden fruit" making it all that much more appealing.  Times like these I wish there was a little magic ball that I could stare at and see into the future.  See whether healthy eating habits were established or not.  For that matter a friggin' ball that could tell me what to do would be fabulous!

The other constant "battle" in our house are SNACKS.  My son thinks in order for it to be a snack it has to come out of a package.  Fruits and veggies aren't snacks, there food.  I'm trying so hard to explain to him that a "snack" is just a word for food you eat between meals if your hungry.  His definition of snacks is wildly different so when I offer him some carrot sticks for a snack he looks at me like I just spoke to him in Chinese.  The other part of this equation is that he will happily eat snacks all day long but not touch a single meal.  This, of course, makes him want more snacks because he has nothing with substance in his belly and the vicious cycle has started.  It got to the point where I had to limit snacks (by his definition) to one in the morning and one in the afternoon.  He can eat as many times as he wants and eat all the fruit and veggies in the house but he is not going to eat 5 packs of fruit snacks.  Sometimes I feel like a crazy person setting rules like this but we have meals for a reason!

Well I feel much better now, sometimes you just have to get things out there!  I think the bigger issue at hand here is why we, as mothers, put so much pressure on ourselves and drive ourself crazy over every little thing.  I know the DH isn't losing sleep at night over how we should handle food in our house.  He's not worried about doing the wrong thing so why do I worry so much.  Maybe it all boils down to the fact that I am a "someone" and someone has to do it.