Parenting

Stop Asking Your Kid What They Want for Dinner—’Good Enough’ Explains Why Fewer Choices Actually Work

January 30, 2026

You’re standing in the kitchen, exhausted, asking your five-year-old what they want for dinner. They stare at you blankly. You offer options. They reject all of them. You offer more. Now they’re crying. Now you’re spiraling. Now everyone’s having cereal at 7 p.m. and no one’s happy about it.

Sound familiar? Somewhere along the way, modern parenting convinced us that giving kids endless choices builds confidence and independence. But what if all those options are actually overwhelming them—and making your life way harder than it needs to be?

On Good Enough, hosts Natasha Leggero and Sabrina Jalees dig into the everyday chaos of raising kids, and this week Leggero drops a bombshell realization: she’s been parenting her young daughter like a teenager. And once you hear why, a lot of those daily power struggles start to make sense.

The governor, the gardener, and the guide

Leggero went to a lecture by Kim John Payne, author of The Soul of Discipline, and walked out realizing she’d been doing a lot of things way too advanced for a tiny human. Payne breaks parenting into three age-based stages, and his whole point is that most parents are rushing kids into roles they’re not built for yet.

From birth to around five, you’re the Governor. You run the show. Kids get choices, but they’re small and controlled. Not “what do you want for dinner?” but “pasta or toast?”
Then comes the Gardener phase. You’re still guiding, but now you’re shaping what’s already there—encouraging good habits, redirecting mayhem, gently steering behavior.
And when kids become teenagers, you shift into the Guide role. You step back. You advise. You let them experiment, fail, and figure things out.

The problem? “Too many people are parenting young children as the guide,” Leggero recalls Payne explaining. “And I was like, oh my god, that’s what I’m doing.”

She gives an example: her daughter mentions wanting to be a singer, and Leggero’s instinct is to immediately map out a whole plan—singing lessons, piano, the works. “I’m acting like she’s choosing her college things,” she admits. But kids don’t actually have the brain wiring for that kind of decision-making yet. They can sound mature, be wildly articulate, and have strong opinions, but emotionally and cognitively, they still need structure more than freedom.

The two-choice trick

So what’s the fix? It’s deceptively simple: narrow it down to two options, both of which lead to the outcome you actually need.

Jalees jumps in with a reality check first. Narrowing choices doesn’t magically work every single time, but it works often enough that it’s worth committing to. She says she’s been using it with both her eight-year-old and her two-year-old, and surprisingly, it holds up for both ages. Even the older one still responds to it.

“Do you want to put your shoes on over here, or do you want to go sit outside and put them on?” she explains. It feels like freedom, but it’s contained freedom. Two paths, same destination. You’re not asking them to solve a problem, you’re letting them pick the vibe.

That idea clicks even harder when Leggero shares what happened at a Thai restaurant. Her daughter immediately rejected the pad see ew the table ordered, and her instinct kicked in fast. “Well, if you don’t want that, let’s think of five other things I could get you on the menu,” she remembers thinking.

But the couple they were eating with didn’t do all that. They just said, “You’ll love it, don’t worry.” The kid tried it. She loved it—and that moment stuck. “It’s just like…just narrowing it a little bit,” Leggero says.

And that’s the whole point. Kids don’t need endless alternatives. They need a smaller lane to move inside. Because too many choices don’t make kids feel empowered. They make them spiral. In other words: you’re not being controlling. You’re being merciful.

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It’s okay to just…decide

Here’s the part that can feel almost illegal in the age of gentle parenting discourse and TikTok thinkpieces: sometimes, you’re allowed to just be the parent.

Leggero admits she’s been letting her daughter’s willfulness run the show more than she meant to. “I think I was doing that at the beginning,” she says, “but now I’m just like, she’s so willful. I’m kind of letting her figure out what she wants to do. And I’m like, I need to put the brakes on that a little bit.”

Her daughter is sharp and articulate, which makes it easy to assume she’s ready for bigger decisions than she actually is. “She’s so verbal and erudite,” Leggero explains. “I think that she’s emotionally at that level too, but she doesn’t have the executive functioning to be making big decisions.” Put simply, sounding grown and being ready are not the same thing.

That distinction matters, because kids burn a ton of energy trying to read the room when the rules keep shifting. When they know what’s happening next and what’s expected of them, their nervous systems can finally stand down. Predictability doesn’t squash independence. It gives them something solid to lean on.

So if you’ve been treating every meal, every outing, every bedtime like a tiny board meeting, it might be time to take a little authority back. Not in a power-trip way. Just in an “I’m the adult and I’ve got this handled” way. Your kid doesn’t need to co-sign every decision. Sometimes the most comforting thing you can do is decide for them and keep it moving.

For more insights, tune into Good Enough, streaming now.