Keep Your Child Fashionably Thin By Putting Meals On Teeny Tiny Plates

Researchers have come up with a hilarious new way to keep Junior from getting larger: Just put your child’s meals on very little plates, so the child cannot figure out she is getting a few spoonfuls of blanched kale for dinner, again.

The medical journal Pediatrics just released an exciting new study that proves kids can’t tell the difference between plate sizes. Give them gigantic plates, like prop plates from movies about giants, and the youngster will eat enough for a week without noticing. Giving children small plates, like those used in popular Brooklyn restaurants, is an easy way to fake out the minds of our littlest ones.

“Researchers gave adult-sized and kid-sized plates to first graders at an elementary school in Philadelphia, and let them serve themselves lunch. Guess what happened?” Well we know what happened from the headline, but go ahead and tell us again: “The kids with bigger plates served themselves more — and ate more.”

A study of 41 kids proved to scientists that giving some of them very teeny little plates is a very successful method for keeping the children’s caloric intake down. The first graders were generally too dumb to realize their own plates were so tiny, and so they ate less than the happy children with human-sized dishes instead of doll plates. Experts say this doesn’t work so well on very smart kids, but smart kids are by definition in short supply.

Photo by Alan Bailey.