No dessert until dinner is finished?
Should I withhold dessert until my child eats his dinner?
First of all, part of the reason dessert has such appeal, besides the fact it is sweet, is that it is the forbidden fruit. Withholding dessert until a child eats his peas only serves to increase the importance of dessert and make the dislike for peas even stronger, which is counterproductive to what you want to accomplish. Therefore, withholding dessert is not the best way to end the argument.
Instead, why not say that he can eat his dessert even if his dinner plate isn't clean? You can do this by making sure the dessert you serve is a healthy one that contributes to a child's total nutritional intake for the day. There is really no place in a child's daily diet for biscuits, cakes and sweets, so eliminate these from your dessert repertoire. Instead, begin serving things like fresh fruit salad, baked rice pudding, fresh slices of watermelon, custard, pudding made with skimmed milk, banana oatmeal biscuits, low-fat yoghurt and baked apples.
In fact, make your dessert so nutritious that you can feel good about serving it with the meal. By serving dessert along with the main course and salad you have taken much of the glory away from it and much of the stigma away from the main course. You have also taken the onus off yourself to enforce rules that really weren't serving much purpose anyway.
On those rare occasions when you do have some special dessert, such as a birthday cake, don't take away from children's pleasure by using it as blackmail to get children to eat other foods. Instead, recognise that sweets, once in a while, will not harm their health in the long run.
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