Food Thievery

During the past couple of months, Sarah and I have noticed a new trend of behavior emerging from our 4-year-old twin boys Mr. B and Mr. C.

The boys have been sneaking into our pantry to steal food.

This new trend began as an innocuous occurrence in the morning around breakfast time. We noticed a few items pilfered here and there but we wrote it off as a harmless game, or something they were doing to test the boudaries of our house rules.

But it turned out this was just the start of a trend that began to grow both in frequency of occurrences and in the amount of food that was being stolen.

We began to find boxes of crackers hidden in the boys closet upstairs, plates of uneaten food on the front porch and the kinds of food that was stolen had a common theme.

If there were any treats in the house like cookies or candy these were most often the food items that were stolen.

We sat the boys down at our dinner table and had talks with them both together and individually.

But no matter what we said, no matter how we explained the importance to consult mommy or daddy first before taking food, the trend increased.

After a few weeks of this Sarah and I decided that we needed to take some action.

Here are the steps we took, as well as the outcomes.

If you’ve ever dealt with this issue in your own family you might recognize some of the actions that we have taken. I hope that relating our experience with dealing with this behavior can be of value to you and your family, too!

 

1. More Food At Meal Times

These are growing boys, after all, we reasoned. It makes sense that if they’re going through some kind of growth spurt right now that they would want to eat a lot of extra food. So what we need to do, we thought, is to provide more quantity of food at mealtime.

So we would offer more food after a meal if the boys said they are still hungry. One night after we finished a dinner of pasta, vegetables and fruit, Mr. B and Mr. C both said they were still hungry and asked me to make them peanut butter toast.

After I made the first batch and they gobbled it down they asked me to make more.

After the second batch went down the hatch and they asked me to make more I began to question this plan. Are they really this hungry, I thought? Or was this just them exercising an exciting new power they had over Daddy?

It turned out to be the latter, as I made them another batch of peanut butter toast and they only got through about a quarter of each slice before declaring their tummy’s were full.

There, I thought. Now we won’t have any problem with them sneaking into the pantry in the morning and stealing treats. I felt optimistic.

I felt optimistic until the next morning, when they pilfered twice as many treats as usual.

 

2. Carrots and Sticks

The next plan we put into action was to introduce incentives and punishments.

A mealtime without food thievery was rewarded with a little extra screen time or even some small treat. A mealtime with food thievery was punished with trips to timeout, favorite toys taken away, or favorite activities shortened or skipped.

This was an effective plan of action and we saw good results from both boys once we put this plan into effect.

But project management began to break down.

To be most effective, a plan of incentives and punishments requires the diligent, focused and consistent attention of mommy and daddy, the project managers.

Inconsistencies in management inevitably began to creep in. What daddy might reward with a treat went completely unrewarded by mommy and what mommy might punish with time out went completely unpunished by daddy.

There was nothing more exciting to Mr. B or Mr. C to uncover one of these loopholes and exploit it for whatever leeway they could. We soon found ourselves spending more time in negotiations with four-year-olds than we did putting any rewards or punishments into effect.

It turns out that four-year-old boys can be tirelessly effective lawyers when a treat is at stake.

And once our system of incentives and punishments became derailed by negotiation and inconsistencies the food thievery came right back again, anyway.

 

3. Strategic Surrender

Many times throughout the past few months I asked my boys about their feelings to try to get a sense of what was at the root of this food thievery. Answers I received were all over the board.

But after several weeks one overarching theme did emerge.

It was the theme of control.

In a dozen different ways Mr. B and Mr. C were telling us that they wanted more control over this most important and cherished area of their lives: the food that they eat each day.

So Sarah and I have embarked on a new plan of action.

It began at the grocery store where we guided the boys through the aisles and allowed them to choose items that they might like to have for breakfast this week.

While we did have the final say on some of the choices that they made, the vast majority of the breakfast items we purchased were their own choices. They picked something out from the shelf, reached up and grabbed it themselves and dropped it into the cart.

We wanted them to feel as much ownership as possible.

Then, with the boys help, we created four boxes.

Two go on a refrigerator shelf and contain the refrigerated breakfast items (one for each boy) and two go in a special cabinet to contain their other dry food choices (one for each boy).

These are Mr. B and Mr. C’s breakfast boxes.

And each morning this week, without asking any permission, without any management or oversight, Mr. B and Mr. C are allowed to wake up as early as they want to go downstairs and begin consuming as much or as little as they want from their own breakfast boxes.

We provided them some guidance and some basic ground-rules (don’t fill the dog’s bowl with raisins, for example) and then surrendered control.

The short-term results have been erratic.

Waffles have been toasted in the toaster and left there forgotten. Juice has been spilled on the floor. Some of the chosen foods were all consumed in one sitting and some have gone all week completely untouched.

It’s been almost a week and we went into this plan with expectations that the boys (and us) would suffer through a learning curve.

But the long-term outlook is promising, because the food thievery dropped 200% overnight.

Since we have begun this new plan no food has been stolen. No treats have been taken from the pantry. No food has been squirreled away in the usual hiding places.

We both feel optimistic that this plan will allow the boys to have the level of control they seem to need, therefore negating the need to steal food in the first place.

 

In Conclusion

After weeks of household upset resulting from our boys stealing food, we tried a series of action plans and finally settled on one that seems to be giving us positive results.

In some ways, it’s been more difficult for Sarah and I to surrender this control to the boys over their breakfast mealtime than it has been for the boys to take on this new responsibility.

But allowing them to make messes, make mistakes and try and fail and then go through the process of cleaning up, reflecting and reevaluating previous choices and talking about it afterward is a good process. We are hopeful that this process will better prepare them to be the best self-managers and self-regulators they can be in the near-term and for decades to come.

Now we would like to hear from you on this topic!

Have you dealt with issues of food thievery in your own family? Tell us in the comments below along with what solutions have worked for you and your family.