Joan Hedman
Tina Shepard, a registered nutritionist as well as a
registered dietician, presented this seminar to a packed house. Tina holds both a bachelor’s degree in
Nutritional Science and a Master’s in Human Nutrition from the
“We’re not here to talk about basic nutrition,” Tina began, “We’re here to discuss strategies for getting finicky children to eat.” The primary focus here was nutrition for pre-school age children, although we occasionally did discuss nutrition for other ages.
Parents’
Responsibilities:
Notice that one item is not listed above: making the child eat. It is the parent’s responsibility to present the food. It is the child’s responsibility to eat it. Many parents have a problem accepting this concept… we’ll come back to this later.
Seven
Principals for Maintaining a Healthy Diet for Everyone:
One of the important things to remember is that a portion size for children is relatively small: a medium banana would be two child servings; 1 slice of bread is an entire serving for a child. Start small! Many people give children adult size portions, and that can be overwhelming to a small child. The typical one-year-old needs 1000 calories a day, but the typical three-year-old needs only 300 more, for a total of 1,300 calories. By the time they are three, kids’ growth has slowed substantially from those sprouting-like-a-weed first years.
As parents, we have the greatest influence on what our children eat. Here are Tina’s suggestions for providing good examples for our children to follow:
Stages: whether you call it a phase or a stage, children change as they grow. One week they’ll love broccoli, and the next week – sometimes the next day -- they won’t touch it. They may not touch it again for two years, but eventually, if you keep offering it, they’ll find their way back to it.
Peer pressure: Children can feel pressure to eat or not eat certain foods. This can be beneficial if you can pair up your child with a friend or cousin that likes vegetables, but it can also result in kids who won’t eat anything but macaroni and cheese.
Dependency: Kids rely on their caregivers for food; they need to be in the care of someone who knows what to buy and how to prepare it. Unfortunately, in some situations, this isn’t always possible.
Television: The influence of tv is well documented at this point; kids who watch tv have lower activity levels, and this has a negative impact on their overall health.
Allergies, disabilities: Physical limitations may make providing good nutrition even more difficult.
Many preschool-age children are neophobic, or afraid of new things. Research with infants has shown it can take up to 10 attempts introducing a new food before it’s accepted; with older children, you can expect the same kind of resistance!
Vitamins A and C are key nutrients that children must receive while growing. Tina recommends chewable children’s vitamins. Trader Joe’s house brand does not contain aspartame, an ingredient of concern to some parents.
The Juice
Recommended
Meals and Snacks:
Tina recommends three regularly scheduled meals and two regularly scheduled snacks daily. Early risers will need a mid-morning snack to make it till lunchtime, and pretty much everyone needs and afternoon snack to tide them over until dinner time. You can also schedule a snack before bed, if that works for your family. Whatever you do, though, you should give your kids plenty of regular, scheduled opportunities to eat during the day.
One of the benefits of this approach is the disaster meal scenario, wherein a child refuses to eat anything. The next scheduled eating time is only a couple of hours away, and in extreme cases, it can be shifted down a bit to accommodate a grumpy and hungry child. “It’s OK, you don’t have to eat anything now; you can eat at snack time,” is a great response that takes all the heat and pressure out of what can be a trying situation.
Along these same lines, Tina is strongly opposed to short-order cooking to suit a child’s taste. That’s not to say, if you’re broiling salmon and you know your kids won’t eat it, you shouldn’t fix them something at the same time that you know they will eat. That’s perfectly reasonable. What you shouldn’t do, though, is jump up from the table and say, “Let me fix you a sandwich,” when someone turns up their nose at the roast chicken they’ve always eaten in the past. Remember that the next scheduled eating time is not too far off, and it won’t cause any harm at all if they go hungry for a few hours. Several parents mentioned they had a standby, like a bowl of cold cereal or bread and butter, that the child could prepare for himself. Tina was OK with this idea, too, as it put the responsibility of the additional food preparation back onto the child. Remember: parents present the food, kids decide whether and how much of it they will eat.
Facts
about Kids and Eating:
Children will eat. No child ever willfully starved himself. The main issue, of course, is what they eat. If they are constantly snacking on junk food, getting them to eat well at mealtimes is going to be impossible. Stick to the regularly scheduled eating times, and provide those healthy snacks. Remember, they’ll want to eat what they see you eating. How can you expect them to be OK with you telling them, “No chips!” if they’ve just seen you scarf down a half a bag?
Children are capable of regulating their own food intake. They will be more hungry some times than others, and they should be trusted to follow their bodies’ signals.
Kids generally react negatively to new foods, but will usually accept them with time and experience. Offer the foods, have them available, but don’t force the children to eat them.
Parents and caregivers can either support or disrupt children’s food acceptance and regulation. In other words, you can either help or hurt; respect the child’s boundaries and remember this division of responsibility: you present it, they determine whether they will eat it, and how much.
It’s reasonable to expect good behavior at the table. They don’t have to eat, but they do have to behave themselves for an age-appropriate amount of time. That means you shouldn’t expect a 3-year-old to sit quietly for 20 minutes, especially if she finished her own meal after 5 minutes. In cases like this, it’s perfectly acceptable for the child to politely ask to be excused from the table.
Assess
your style:
Battles at the table can result from parental behavior that is too controlling, or too lenient. If you find yourself struggling to get your children to eat anything, can you see yourself in any of these scenarios, below? Tina notes that if these tactics are working for you, there’s no need to worry – it’s only when food has become a major issue and mealtimes are made unpleasant that you should re-think using these tactics.
You’re too controlling if:
n you make your kids stay at the table and eat their vegetables
n you make your kids clean their plates
n you make them eat everything before they can have dessert
n you expect them to get by on only three meals a day
You’re too lenient if:
n you give snacks whenever they want
n you allow bad behavior at the table
n you short-order cook or produce special foods for your children
n you let your children have juice or milk whenever they want them
Normal
Eating is:
n eating when hungry, and stopping when satisfied
n choosing a food or foods that you like, and eating until you’ve had enough
n using restraint in food selection
Tina strongly stressed that placing children on calorie-restricted diets is a bad idea, for several reasons:
n there is no way to know how a child’s body is supposed to turn out
n limiting food intake could damage a child’s growth
n young children especially can’t understand why they aren’t being allowed to eat and may feel hurt that their loved ones are making them suffer.
n denial of food usually leads to a preoccupation with it.
What you can do for the overweight child:
n foster positive self-image
n accept the child’s body
n encourage lots of physical activity
n promote good eating habits
Two
Most Important Things You Can Do:
1. Don’t make a huge issue of
it
2. Set good examples.
You present the food; the
child decides whether to eat it, and how much.
Recommended reading:
Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family
Child of Mine:Feeding with Love and Good Sense
all by Ellyn Satter and widely available in paperback
Tina also had several handouts, copies are attached.
If you have questions, please contact me at (480) 917-6930 or jhedman@alum.mit.edu
© 2002 by Joan Hedman