A Parent’s Role At Mealtime
Parents and caregivers play an important role in mealtime. Parent personalities, lifestyles, anxieties, and feeding histories often contribute to the issues children have around eating.
As parents, we can ask ourselves these questions when we are struggling to feed our kids.
Questions
What expectations do we have around what and how much our kids eat? Are they reasonable for their age or skill level? Are we providing too much or not enough structure with meals and snacks?
Sometimes our expectations are not realistic given what’s happening at the table right now.
If you have a child who can sit and eat for 3 to 5 minutes, expecting them to sit for 15 to 20 minutes just isn’t a realistic expectation for your next meal. It doesn’t mean you won’t get there eventually, but it isn’t the best place to start. Start by trying to add one or two minutes at a time and consider using a timer to help lengthen how long they sit at the table. If your child moves around a lot when sitting, consider some big movement and heavy work activities before coming to the table. Take a look at the seating and make sure there is enough support for your child to easily sit upright during mealtime. This can help your child stay at the table longer. Make sure you have a mealtime schedule in place (see Creating Structure and Routines for Mealtime), with at least 2 to 3 hours between snacks and meals. Realistic expectations are important when you think about the kinds of foods your child will eat too. For example, if you have a child who only eats dry foods, expecting them to eat mushy or mixed textured food may be too big of a leap for now. Instead, try offering a separate dip for their dry food to go into, and this allows your child to control just how much “wet” food goes in the mouth at a time. Or consider coating wet food in breadcrumbs to give the outside a dry, crunchier texture.
Are we pushing them too hard to eat?
Are you sitting and staring at your child during mealtime while silently praying that they will take a bite of a new food on the plate? Or are you begging or bribing them to eat? Are you telling them to try a bite of a new food before they can have something else? While our intentions might come from a good place, this places unnecessary pressure and stress on mealtime. Instead, take the focus off of the child and what they are eating and avoid pressure in all of its forms. Talk about your day or his day or his favorite show. Keep mealtime positive and playful. For example, you could make a happy face out of the food on the plate, stack cucumbers or crackers into a tower, talk about how noisy a food is when you bite it, model eating it in a casual way, and have them help prep the meal without any expectations to eat.
What issues are you concerned about with your child’s feeding? How worried are you about what they are eating? How does this impact your child?
Kids are smart! When we are worried about their eating, it shows. They pick up on our stress and this has a negative impact on mealtime. We want to create a calm and positive environment for eating. If we let our worries about calories, nutrition, and variety spill out onto the table, we will make a bigger mess of mealtime! We know it’s hard. You want your child to eat nutritious foods to help them grow and thrive. However, too much worry and emphasis on how much your child eats for each meal or making sure they are eating all the correct amounts of each food group will often lead to pressured feeding experiences or hold the child back from developing more independence when they eat. Pressuring kids to eat does not work! In the long run, it creates mealtime battles and negative associations with eating and the parents! The best way to help is to meet them where they are right now and provide a pressure-free place to eat and learn about new foods. If you are worried about nutritional deficiencies and your child has a limited diet of accepted foods, talk to your pediatrician.
What behaviors are we reinforcing during mealtime?
How we respond to our child’s behavior at the table sets the tone for future mealtimes. It often takes pickier eaters time to learn how to eat more nutritious foods. Strategies like forcing, placing pressure to eat, or distracting to feed your child are not good solutions over the long term for developing a good relationship with eating. This leads to negative mealtime behaviors in the future. Calm and consistent parenting at mealtimes is important. Parents’ reactions during a difficult meal may actually make mealtimes worse over time. The following are common examples:
Mealtime Tag: running after your child with a spoon and getting a bite in while they play. This is not how children learn how to eat, and not sustainable over time. Instead, limit distractions in the other visible parts of the house or turn the chair so they aren’t seeing all of their toys. Keep mealtime at the table. Sit and model eating with your child.
Short Order Cooking: making multiple food options at your child’s whim. This gives your child too much control over the menu and limits opportunities to explore new foods. Sometimes, they don’t even eat what they requested in the first place! Instead, offer 2 to 3 foods during a meal, with at least one being a preferred food.
Distracted Dinner: using screens and toys to distract your child from realizing that they are eating while you feed them. Just like Mealtime Tag, this is not how children learn to eat new foods. Children need to be engaged with foods by looking at, touching, and willingly opening their mouths for a bite. Instead, try stopping the distractions “cold turkey” knowing that a few meals will be more difficult initially, as they learn to pay attention to what they eat. You may also need to do a “slow and steady” approach, turning on the screen or TV after a certain number of bites.
Mealtime Cheerleader: praising and cheering for every bite or interaction with new food. Even praise can be a form of pressure. Children learn that they have control and power over your emotions through what they eat or don’t eat. Instead, narrate what is happening (“that bite made a big noise”) or ignore it completely and don’t react to them tasting new food.
Pressure Bites: bribing and pleading to get your child to eat. This is the flip side of the Mealtime Cheerleader. Again, children will learn that they have power over your emotions. For some kids, pressure leads to stress, which doesn’t help their appetite or motivation to eat. Instead, try reacting in a calm and neutral manner when your child doesn’t want to eat something. Find something that your child can do with the food, whether it’s serving it to someone else, feeding it to you, or cutting it in half.
How well do we eat? Do we model good eating habits? Do we eat with them? What does the family eat? Do we have a history of issues with eating and does this impact how we approach feeding our kids?
Kids learn by doing but they also learn by watching. If we aren’t sitting at the table and eating with our kids, we miss out on important opportunities to model eating and exploring new foods. We are also missing out on opportunities to bond and connect with our kids.
Our own history around eating may also be influencing how we feed our kids and what we expect at mealtime. Just because we were told to finish everything on our plate before leaving the table, doesn’t mean this is the best approach. In fact, the opposite is true. Children need to be in control of whether they eat and how much they eat. This is important for developing hunger and satiety cues and for establishing positive mealtimes.
How do family stressors and cultural factors impact our child’s eating?
Mealtime is a social experience and we need to consider the family dynamics and whether or not they support or hinder positive mealtimes. These are important cultural and family considerations when thinking about what may be impacting your child’s eating:
Is your schedule jam-packed?
Are you and your kids always in a rush with no time to sit and eat as a family?
Are the foods that your family eats a mismatch for your child’s sensory preferences (e.g. spicy foods for kids with a more sensitive palate or bland foods for kids who really crave more flavor and texture)?
Are mealtimes too chaotic for your child who is more sensitive to the sights and sounds around them?
Are all caregivers on the same page with their approach to feeding or are your kids getting mixed messages during mealtime?
