Meet the Uchida-Wood Family! Dr. Mai Uchida is one physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and old friend from The Family Dinner Project. We’re thrilled that she and her family have agreed to take a look at their always interesting family dinners!
The family:
Mai Uchida and Jacques Wood of Watertown, MA. The Uchida-Woods have two – soon three! — children: Taka (5), Genji (3) and an almost due baby boy.
The goals:
Currently, the family is working towards two main goals for their meals, which Mai summarizes as “Encouraging Independence” and “Real Answers to Real Questions.” As parents, the Uchida-Woods have taken note of their children’s emerging maturity level and their ability to handle new tasks and information even at a young age. So they work to support Taka and Genji’s growth in an age-appropriate way.
“We do our best to trust that our kids are ready to hear real answers to real questions. Of course, a dinner table is a place for our kids to ask us questions that might feel heavy (to us rather than them), and we do our best as parents to discuss them in a way they can understand,” says Mai . . Even very young children can have big questions, especially now, during an ongoing pandemic and social unrest. Mai and Jacques have made the family dinner a place where the kids can safely search for answers. Mai also wrote about some of those experiences and conversations in a post for The MGH Clay Center talk to kids about racism.
In addition to exploring conversation topics, the Uchida-Wood kids are always building their independence skills at the table. “We’re always amazed that they can do so much on their own,” says Mai, adding that she and Jacques “do our best to let them shine in independence at mealtimes.” Taka and Genji learn to prepare and serve food for themselves and others, and to use kid-friendly kitchen tools to prepare meals for the family.
The challenges:
The biggest challenge for the Uchida-Woods is a familiar one to most parents of young children: getting Taka and Genji to eat their vegetables. Fortunately, the family’s focus on independence can help. “This year we started growing our own vegetables in our backyard. We put the dirt in the planters and planted the seeds. Our children have shown so much pride and joy in watching the vegetables grow and finally harvesting them! They didn’t hesitate to take a bite out of our chard, peppers and tomatoes when it came from their own garden that they grew from scratch! (Whether they liked them or not was another story… but they sure enjoyed trying them.)”
The strategies:
Like most parents, Mai and Jacques are building quite a toolkit of strategies they can try to get the kids to eat a wider variety of foods. One of their time-tested approaches is to get creative with storytelling over dinner. “For our youngest son who loves superhero stories and often struggles with constipation, we tell him stories about the Spinach Ranger and the Broccoli Ranger who come to fight against the Poopy Monsters who build a fortress in his stomach and try to hurt his stomach!” Older brother Taka, on the other hand, likes to listen to the advice his mother received from her grandmother: eat as if you were painting a picture in your stomach. You need a lot of beautiful colors and textures to make a full painting!
On the more practical side, Mai and Jacques encourage regular trying new foods by reminding the kids that our tastes change as we grow. “Even if they don’t like something, we celebrate them trying it as an achievement,” says Mai. And there’s no harm in making new dishes more appealing with a favorite dipping sauce or cooking method. “Our kids eat pretty much anything, whether it’s stewed in Japanese curry or in miso soup. They also like to dip their vegetables in a Japanese sauce called Pon-shabu, and they eat most things in their noodle bowls with the Japanese noodle broth called Men-tsuyu.”
The food:
Promoting independence and eating a wide variety of foods play a role again in the family’s favorite meals. Everyone in the Uchida-Wood family likes to build their own dinner creations, with noodles and sushi often taking center stage. “We put all the ready-made ingredients in the middle of the table and we collect what we want on our plate or bowl. Genji often chooses soba noodles, tops it with some fried or boiled veggies and egg, all dipped in some cold soup. Taka takes a piece of Nori (dried seaweed), spreads some rice on it and then puts some sashimi (raw fish) on top, which he dips in soy sauce. He rolls up the nori and he has hand-rolled sushi!”
It’s also important to Mai and Jacques that they use food “as a gateway to cultural curiosity.” Mai recalls that when she was growing up, most of her non-Japanese friends “were very disgusted at the thought of eating raw fish.” Still, sushi is a popular dish in America these days, which Mai finds encouraging. “How ethnic food has changed from ‘ew’ to ‘wow!’ shows the growth in our society’s acceptance and curiosity for different cultures,” she says. She adds that she hopes that through exposure to the ethnic food traditions Mai and Jacques share at home, going to friends’ homes, and being exposed through their family’s food choices, the children will gain respect for a wide variety of cultures.
The best part:
“As much as we love food, we also love to cook together!! It can get chaotic, it gets messy and often the final product may not be pretty, but so many funny phrases and ideas come out of our kids as we cook together and it’s such a special time! Below, Mai and Jacques shared a video of the family making a favorite dish together to give us all a taste of what a dinner with the Uchida-Woods is really like.
Do you have your own family dinner project to share with us, or would you like to tell us about how your family is sharing meals during COVID-19? We’d love to hear from you! Contact us.
