Despite his acting like it doesn't matter, your adolescent continues to depend on you to maintain the structure of family meals. He will participate in family meals when you make meals a priority, keep mealtimes pleasant and use mealtimes for connecting. Adolescents who have family meals do better in all ways, and they do better nutritionally after they leave home. With feeding as with all other things, your task is to find the middle ground between being controlling on the one hand and throwing away all controls on the other. The division of responsibility in feeding guides you in knowing when to take leadership and when to let go.

• Expect your child to manage his schedule and his snacking so he can arrive at dinner on time and hungry.
• Teach him to take responsibility for eating 3 meals a day and a snack right after school.
• Let him find his own ways with food away from home: what to eat, how much to eat, how to get what he needs.
• Discuss his food-management strategies with him; consider what works and what doesn't.
• Build your child's food-management skills for after he leaves home: meal planning, food preparation, shopping, storage, sanitation.

For more about feeding your adolescent (and for research backing up this advice), see Ellyn Satter's Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family: How to Eat, How to Raise Good Eaters, How to Cook, Kelcy Press, 2008. Also see www.EllynSatter.com to purchase books and to review other resources.