Teenagers
Feeding A Teenager Costs More Than Feeding Two Adults
Adolescent appetite rises sharply during periods of rapid growth, which changes a household food budget, the shopping pattern and the assumptions behind how a family cooks.
Household food spending often rises more when a child becomes a teenager than it did when the child was born. The increase is driven by growth, activity and the timing of meals.
Why appetite rises so steeply
Adolescence involves a period of rapid physical growth, and growth requires energy in addition to what is needed for ordinary daily activity. Appetite tends to follow that requirement.
The size and timing of the increase varies enormously between individuals, and between the same individual at different points. There is no standard curve, and comparisons between teenagers are not very meaningful.
Where appetite changes in ways that worry a parent, in either direction, that is a conversation for a GP or a school nurse rather than something to resolve from general reading.
The budget effect is about volume, not luxury
The extra spending is mostly on ordinary staples in larger quantities: bread, milk, pasta, rice, eggs, cereal. It is a volume increase rather than a change in what is bought.
This is why the rise catches households out. Nothing on the receipt looks different, and the total has simply moved up by an amount that is hard to attribute to anything specific.
Families that shop weekly often find they are shopping twice, because the fridge no longer lasts the week. The second shop is where a good deal of unplanned spending happens.
Meals stop happening at one time
Teenagers eat on schedules set by school, travel, sport and sleep, which rarely align with a household evening meal. Food consumption spreads across a much longer window.
This makes the family meal harder to hold and makes the kitchen busier for longer. It also means a proportion of what is eaten is prepared by the teenager rather than for them.
Cooking in larger batches and leaving portions available is the common adaptation. It reduces the number of separate cooking sessions without requiring everyone to eat simultaneously.
Food bought outside the house
A meaningful share of adolescent food spending happens away from home: at lunch, after school and at weekends. Some of it comes from pocket money and some from the household.
Where it comes from a shared account or a lunch card, it is easy for the amount to go unnoticed by both sides until a statement makes it visible.
Making the arrangement explicit, with an agreed amount rather than open access, is generally less contentious than the alternative of an unannounced restriction later.
What the household can usefully change
Keeping filling, cheap staples available in quantity absorbs most of the increase: bread, oats, eggs, potatoes, tinned pulses and frozen vegetables all serve this purpose.
Access matters as much as supply. Food that requires a decision, a recipe or a search is eaten less often than food that is visible and requires almost nothing.
The aim is not to control what a teenager eats, which rarely works, but to make sure that the easy option in the house is also a reasonable one.
Questions readers ask
What is a reasonable time?
It depends on age, the event, the journey and local norms, which vary enormously. The route home is a better thing to negotiate over than the hour.
They broke the curfew. Now what?
A proportionate, short and stated consequence, applied calmly, keeps future disclosure alive. A large unpredictable one mostly teaches better concealment.
