Homeschool parents refuse to eat anything after 4 PM, even though their son begs them to eat dinner with him: 'Listen to your child.'

Emmy Pratt • Senior Editor

Feb 11, 2026 8:00 PM EST

Quality family time should be more important than an arbitrary diet.

People don't discuss how much extreme dieting can prevent you from being a part of normal human reactions. You can't go out to dinner with your friends without counting calories, or not eating anything at all, in fear that you'll go over your allotted calories for the day. You put going to the gym over hanging out with your friends, even if hanging out meant playing sports or doing something active. So much of your mental energy is devoted to thinking about food that you tend to bring it up all the time, even when people aren't actually that interested in hearing about how you've only eaten chicken and vegetables for the past two months.

When I was a kid, a ton of my friends' parents started doing this extreme diet all at the same time. They were only allowed to eat meat for a month, after which they could eat only meat and vegetables. That's literally it. Obviously, such a diet was not sustainable in the long run, but it did technically "work" when they were on it. Being on such a strict diet made it difficult for them have meals with their kids, because they were always cooking two totally different things. Not to mention, talking about weight and food restrictions all the time couldn't have been great for their kids' relationship with food. It's much better to make small, incremental changes to your diet and exercise over time than to make radical changes that you can't sustain.

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via Curated Lifestyle (Unsplash+)

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The parents in this story are on a strange diet that's affecting their kid's mental health. They have decided that they aren't allowed to eat after 4 PM, and their absence from family dinner is making their little boy extremely sad. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like they're going to budge, at least for now.
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via @Stacy7860232574
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via Andrej Lišakov (Unsplash+)

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via @miltonappl3
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via @kenzietuff
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via Elena Leya

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via @jahdod
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via @SharonaZamboni
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via @Maarblek
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via @Bodietlsentme
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