How to Get Your Child to Eat

Contributor: “One of the most common topics among mom’s is how to get their child to eat. Children do not have control over much in their life and are almost fully dependent on their parents. Three things that they have complete control over is what goes into their mouth, what comes out and going to the bathroom and sleeping. When challenges occur with eating, sleeping and toileting, it most commonly comes from a power struggle between the parent and child. Ellyn Satter is a well known author who is an expertise in the field of children and eating. The information she gives is straight forward yet solid and easy to apply. Here is an insert from one of her books How to get your kids to eat… and not too much!” Sarah Amini

 

Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding

Parents provide structure, support and opportunities. Children choose how much and whether to eat from what the parents provide.

The Division of Responsibility for Infants:

• The parent is responsible for what
• The child is responsible for how much (and everything else)

The parent helps the infant to be calm and organized and feeds smoothly, paying attention to information coming from the baby about timing, tempo, frequency and amounts

The Division of Responsibility For Toddlers through Adolescents:

• The parent is responsible for what, when, where
• The child is responsible for how much and whether

Parents’ Feeding Jobs:

• Choose and prepare the food
• Provide regular meals and snacks
• Make eating times pleasant
• Show children what they have to learn about food and mealtime behavior
• Not let children graze for food or beverages between meal and snack times
• Let children grow up to get bodies that are right for them

Fundamental to parents’ jobs is trusting children to decide how much and whether to eat. If parents do their jobs with feeding, children will do their jobs with eating:

• Children will eat
• They will eat the amount they need
• They will learn to eat the food their parents eat
• They will grow predictably
• They will learn to behave well at the table

Copyright © 2010 by Ellyn Satter. Published at www.EllynSatter.com.

Rights to reproduce: As long as you leave it unchanged, you don’t charge for it, and you include the entire copyright statement, you may reproduce this article. Please let us know you have used it by sending a website link or an electronic copy to info@ellynsatter.com

Pgs. 31-47

Pressure Doesn’t Work

The way I get a kid to eat is not to try. You have to let it be her idea. YOU SHOULDN”T FORCE YOUR CHILD TO EAT (OR RESTRICT THE AMOUNT SHE EATS). It is the most unhelpful thing you can possibly do. To either of you. Pressuring your child to eat can make her eating worse, and make her grow poorly, and make her feel bad about herself and her body and her eating. Forcing can make YOU miserable. If can make meals and feeling degerate from a fun and satisfying process into a battle in which nobody wants.

Parents (and children) get into trouble with feeing when they cross the lines of division of responsibility: When they do what they shouldn’t, and fail to do what they should. You are crossing the lines when you try to control the amount your child eats. Any direct control on the amount a child eats amounts to pressure- from then on, it’s just a matter of degree. You are also crossing the lines when you fail to take responsibility for planning and preparing meals and snack and making them important.

I am fully aware that you are probably pressuring, because almost all parents do, just like their parents did before them. Parents pressure from good intentions- because they want the best for their child and because they want her to grow up well and strong and well-formed and lovely. They thing they need to put on pressure to get their child to eat enough (but not too much) and to eat the right stuff.

Wrong, all wrong. This most logical and pervasive of presumptions just does not hold up when you look at it closely. Research has shown that when adults put pressure on eating, children don’t eat as well and grow as well. Period. (Satter, EM: The feeding relationship. Journal of the American Dietetic Association 86:352-356, 1986.)

I am not advocating letting kids do exactly what they want with eating and food selection. That is called anarchy. And neglect.

There is a difference between putting on pressure and setting limits. If you fail to set limits you won’t like what happens. and your child will not do well. You have to find the middle ground between being too rigid and controlling and letting things get out of control.

Forcing Can Take Many Forms

Starting with the assumption that parents have to CONTROL eating, I have seen people get into horrendous struggles with their children. Often the problem starts with a child who eats funny or is sick, and parents and advisors get scared and put on the pressure. The child resists and parents get even more scared and put on even more pressure. Eventually it gets to the point where the situation is so bad that everyone is afraid to change it, because, as bad as it is, how much worse would it be if everyone stopped doing what they were doing? Pressure can be forcing food in… (and) pressure can be withholding food.

Pressure on Food Acceptance

People can get into forcing when they try to get a child to eat more or less than she really wants. They also do it when they try to get a child to finish a vegetable that she doesn;t like (even if she simply doesn’t like it just that day), or to eat in a manner that is not comfortable. It is also forcing to short-order cook, because that makes it very important to you that your child EAT and removes not-eating as an option… if it forcing to bribe a child with a cookie or praise for eating certain foods, or to give a child “a look” when she turns down something.

It’s Hard Not to Force

Forcing comes in many different forms, and ranges in intensity from the subtle to the vehement. Children are not innocent bystanders in the process. They do things that bring out the forcing tendencies in us adults, who are, after all, concerned about their welfare and do want the best for them.

Small Children are Neophobic

In the first place, small children are neophobic: they fear anything new. Leann Birch, a child psychologist at the University of Illinois (Birch, L.L. and Martin, D.W.: I don’t like it; I never tried it: Effects of exposure on the two-year-old children’s food preferences. Appetite 3:353-360, 1982), found in her research that most two-year-olds routinely refused to taste new foods and did not like them when they tasted them. It took several exposures to the new food for them to get ready to taste it, and once having tasted it, it took a lot of tastes for them to get to the point where they liked it.

Children’s first reaction to a new food is negative and suspicious. In a word, “Yuk!” (And they also learn very quickly that “Yuk” can run a thumbnail up the spine of any but the most placid of adults.)

She is in charge. When it comes to putting food in her mouth, chewing it and swallowing it, she is the one who is calling the shots. YOU got the food in front of her, and once you did that, you were out of a job.

Suppose… a parent came along and started to put pressure when they were just getting warmed up to try something new. What do you think would happen? Right, they would balk. Or suppose that they parent provided an alternative food whenever the child showed the slightest hesitation about eating? Right, they would learn that the food wasn’t worth considering in the first place. And they wouldn’t get the chance to get used to the food and grow out of the two-year-old neophobia. And, most limiting of all, they would learn to pay more attention to the parent’s moves than their own internal reaction to food.

Children Vary In How Much They Eat

Children also bring out forcing tendencies in parents because of the big variations in the amount and type of food they eat. Combine that with adults’ tendency to manage quantities, in both themselves and their children, and you have trouble. I guarantee it!

You can’t predict how much a child will eat. From birth on, children vary a lot in their day-to-day food intake. They eat half again one day as the next, and may go for several days eating relatively little, and then make up for it. They also eat differently from year to year.

It’s easy to fall prey to this variation, especially if there is anything about your child’s growth that is concerning you. I can easily understand how a parent of a small and thin child might be tempted to restrict on the big-eating days. Add to those feelings the very common attitude (even among health professionals) that parents SHOULD manage amounts, and have  a lot of pressure- and it’s on YOU.

Children Vary In What They Like

Children vary in what foods they find appealing. They love green beans one day, and you make more the next time, and they aren’t interested. Now the pressure is on you to be able to predict (what they will like).

Children Vary In Their Love Of Eating

Everyone feels different about eating. Some children get a big kick out of eating, and others seem like they couldn’t care less… People feel a lot of different ways about it, and all feelings are acceptable. Our thinness-conscious times tell us we’re not to be too hooked on eating. But some of us just are, and we’ll get lots of further if we work with those feelings rather than battling against them.

Forcing Doesn’t Work

If you feed (or try to feed) a child less or more than he really wants, if can produce the opposite of what you want. Children who are overfed become revolted by food and prone to under eat when they get a chance. They also become skillful at manipulating their parents to do what they want them to do by refusing to eat.

On the other hand, children who are underfed become preoccupied with food and prone to overeat when they get the chance. The more parents try to restrict children’s eating the more pressure children put on eating. They feel like they have to put up a struggle to get food.

In the struggle with their parents about eating, children learn that there is something the matter with their bodies, and with them. Since their desires are so often in conflict with what their parents seem willing to give them, eventually they become embarrassed at their needs. Later, when they grow up, children enter into the struggle with themselves. They feel a great deal of conflict between what they want and what they think they should want. And they continue to be ashamed of their desires.

You, as a parent, may get into problems with feeding because you have a lot of pressure on YOU. Part of that pressure comes from “common knowledge.” People have a lot of opinions about what it takes to make a child eat well. If feeding is not going well or if a child is growing poorly, they are quite willing to offer their advice, “for what it’s worth,” they often say. Usually it isn’t worth much. In fact, it is worse than worthless; it is downright destructive.

With respect to eating, when parents over manage, it takes away their child’s ability to manage themselves. So when you are not around or when you relax your supervision, children don’t have themselves to fall back on, and they may eat too much.

The parent is responsible for WHAT, the child is responsible for HOW MUCH and even WHETHER.

Parents get into trouble with feeding because they fail to do what they should, and do what they shouldn’t. They fail to put themselves in charge of the menu, and short-order cook, or fail to get a meal on the table at all. Then they get after the child for the amount she is eating or the type of food she is digging out of the refrigerator.

Why Do Parents Force?

Parents cross the lines of division of responsibility in feeding for a variety of reason. The reason I run across most often is simple misunderstanding about food regulation or food selection. Parents don’t know that children have the built-in capacity to choose a nutritious diet (assuming a selection of generally nutritious food is offered) and to eat the right amount to allow them to grow well.

Pg. 174

Division of Responsibility In Feeding

Parents are responsible for what is presented to eat and the manner in which it is presented

-Selecting and buying food

-Making and Presenting meals

-Regulating timing of meals and snacks

-Presenting food in a form a child can handle

-Allowing eating methods a child can master

-Making family mealtimes pleasant

-Helping the child to participate in family meals

-Helping the child to attend to his eating

-Maintaining standards of behavior at the table

The parent is NOT responsible for

-How much the child eats

-Whether he eats

-How his body turns out

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