7.30am: I eat a crust of toast and half a strawberry. Not because I’m on some hot new mouse diet, but because that’s what’s left after the kids have “finished” breakfast and I’m in a rush. I make myself an iced latte, take two glorious sips, then lose it somewhere between packing lunches and yelling “Shoes on!”
This is what I call parenting cuisine: lukewarm drinks and meals that have already been rejected by someone under four feet tall.
I recently wrote a Day on a Plate column for in the Nine papers. I thought I’d written a painfully honest, highly relatable snapshot of parental life: a diet built on leftovers, chaos and compromise. But a nutritionist reviewed it. Clinically, she scolded my scraps. Not enough fibre. Not enough healthy fats. Too much eating while standing up. I read it while finishing my daughter’s croissant.
To be clear, the dietitian wasn’t wrong. Parents are in fact low-on-fibre, high-on-caffeine creatures. What surprised me was how quickly something so honest and ordinary became what felt like a moral report card.
There has long been a peculiar cultural obsession with what parents eat, especially mothers. Mums online are shamed if they grab a drive-through meal, but mocked if they blend a green smoothie before the day begins. Dads, meanwhile, get the other end of the stereotype: the bumbling fool who lives off crusts and beer. As though domestic incompetence is a personality trait.
In both cases, I reckon we miss the point. Most parents aren’t chasing optimal macros. We want to do better, of course. Gosh, we try. But we’re quite busy chasing tiny humans who refuse to get dressed.
The internet tells us to “fuel our bodies” with quinoa, seeds and mindfulness. The reality is that many parents fuel their bodies with whatever’s within arm’s reach. The “what I eat in a day” videos on Instagram might be aspirational, but they’re hardly realistic. They don’t show the 7am late wake-up, the 8am tears, the 11am half-banana or the 3pm secondhand hot chocolate you finish because it’s easier than pouring it out.
They also don’t show – at least not in the glossy clips that rack up millions of views – the small heartbreak of waste. The uneaten lunches, the untouched fruit, the food quietly scraped into the compost while you calculate the cost in your head. Judging a parent for salvaging those scraps is, quite frankly, a privilege. It assumes a financial and logistical ease that many parents simply don’t have. Sometimes eating leftovers isn’t neglecting yourself; it’s protecting the family budget.
I’m not saying nutrition doesn’t matter. I’m saying we’ve forgotten context. If I had written my Day on a Plate just two days later, the headline might have read “Dad Eats Like a Functional Human”. There are days when I manage a morning smoothie, keep my protein high, sit down for lunch and skip a sugary dessert. But there are also days when the best I can do is finish a half-eaten sandwich. That’s not carelessness, that’s fluctuation. It’s called balance. Or “life with children”. Parenting is a full-contact, seven-day-a-week sport. Meals are often triage; whatever stops the hunger growl between school pickup and bath time.
What looks like laziness from far away is usually just logistics. Parents spend so much time preparing food for others that they forget to prepare it for themselves. By the time we’ve made lunches, cut fruit, reheated dinner and negotiated one more bite of broccoli, we’re too tired to saute our own kale.
Parenting is relentless and support is scarce. That’s the system we live in. And I refuse to let a nutritionist make me feel like that’s a failure. When meals are inhaled over the sink, it’s not bad habits: it’s survival.
Instead of asking parents to eat like wellness influencers, maybe we should ask what support they need to have a peaceful, seated meal. Maybe we could praise the effort – the peanut butter protein, the broccoli side, the shared hot chocolate – rather than tallying what’s missing.
Because the truth is: I don’t really need a lecture about legumes. I need someone to watch the kids long enough for me to finish my coffee before it goes cold.
• Sean Szeps is a writer, content creator and father of twins. He’s the author of Not Like Other Dads and writes about the messy, funny and human side of parenting. Find him on Instagram @seanszeps
