Don't Feed Your Child

Don’t Feed Your Child


Mindful parents don’t feed infants and children, we let them eat. When I visualize a parent feeding a child I see a parent spooning food into a child’s mouth. This parent seems determined to get a certain amount of food and a certain type of food into the child. They may resort to distraction, rewards, or punishment to accomplish their goal—getting the child to eat.

A mindful parent offers food to an infant or child. This parent also chooses one or two foods to offer, but they have no agenda about the amount of food that needs to be consumed. It is not thel parent’s job to get the child to eat. This parent follows the child’s tempo, offering a new spoonful when the child has finished chewing (look at the jaw moving) and opens his or her mouth for more. If the child is self feeding, the parent sits back and observes, or eats their own meal.

A mindful parent lets the child explore the food with touch, taste and smell. The child is allowed to eat as little or as much as they wish. Observation of a child will tell us when an infant or child is finished. A rejected food can be offered again at another time, but it is not forced on the child, not even a small taste. In this way we allow our children to maintain their ability to react to their own nutritional needs. This is how we create healthy eaters.

Fattening Up Babies

We are so obsessed about weight in this country. Even babies are targets. Babies are supposed to be cubby. They are supposed to have several chins, a neck that is hard to find, and rolls of fat at their thighs, wrists and elbows. For the first year babies should be fed on demand. That means feeding them when they show they are hungry and stopping when they show they are done. A baby fed like this will grow appropriately.

Some babies have less fat than others. Over and over I have heard from moms (who are offering appropriate foods at appropriate times) of smaller, leaner babies that they were told to fatten up their child and get them to eat more. They have been instructed to put powdered milk in foods or slather butter on crackers or in rice cereal.

You should never MAKE your baby eat. This will alter their life-long perception about food intake. They will start eating for external cues instead of internal ones - hunger and fullness. As babies instinctually know how much energy (calories) they need, offering high density, high calorie foods will usually result in the baby eating less quantity. This has been proven is several studies. Babies given watered down formula drank more and those given concentrated formula ate less.

It is not your job to get your child to eat. If you have a thinner baby, you can try offering food more often, maybe every 1 ½ - 2 hours. If babies are hungry they will eat, if they’re not, they won’t. Follow their cues. They know what they are doing.

Please Don't Be This Parent

It is amazing how possessed some parents are about what and how much their child eats. At the San Diego Zoo, watching elephants eat, a parent started in on her child. "See how the elephant eats everything" she said. I'm no child psychologist, but does she think that her kid is going to relate to the elephant and decide, "wow, she's right, I'll start eating all of my vegetables too". Or does the kid think, "I thought we were here for fun and now I'm being lectured about my vegetables." I vote for the latter. If mom keeps this up soon the kid won't want to go anywhere with mom, as he feels he will always be an open target for criticism.

Please don't be this parent. All the studies that quantify the feeding behaviors between parents and children have shown that when a parent over manages the child's eating, the child will over eat when left on his or her own. A parent's job is to provide a variety of healthy food in a timely manner and letthe child choose to eat the offered foods or not.

I have seen over and over a child signalling that he or she is done with the meal. The parent says "take one more bite before you go". What is this parent trying to accomplish? I am still amazed by how many parents think one more bite of food will make or break a child's nutrition, unlikely. This "one more bite" becomes a knee jerk reaction on the part of the parent, always insisting on the last decision. This is not a successful way to teach a child to take care of him or her self. Nor does it let a child know they can trust their own internal cues for knowing when they have had enough food. We are all born with a natural instinct to eat to survive, and know when we have had enough. The only reason children loose this ability is if we teach them to ignore it, by telling them how much to eat.