Creating Structure & Routine
Establishing routines around eating is a very important part of a child’s feeding development and can be the difference between very difficult mealtimes or a child who is happy to sit and eat. Issues around mealtime routines and structure are often a problem that we see in our clinical practice. It goes back to our busy, “on the go” lifestyles. Our children are often eating in the car, between afterschool activities, or snacking frequently throughout the day. The importance of mealtime routines and structure cannot be stressed enough. Providing a child predictability around eating helps their body learn when it is time to eat. It also allows for the development of a hunger-satiety cycle that is so important for children to become good eaters. Part of creating a feeding environment that is well-suited to your child includes finding routines that work for your family. There is no one size fits all approach to this but there are guidelines that apply across the board. Here are some general tips and mistakes to avoid.
Tip #1: Create a mealtime schedule to develop hunger and satiety.
Avoid allowing your child to snack throughout the day. Instead, try to make sure there are at least 2 to 3 hours between meals and snacks, including caloric drinks such as juice or milk (or excessive water or carbonated drinks).
Tip #2: Keep mealtimes short and sweet.
Depending on the age and attention span of your child, meals should not be longer than 30 minutes (most kids last 15 minutes).
Tip #3: Include your child in meal preparation.
Helping with meal preparation is a great way to expose kids to new foods. This might include washing, cutting, mixing, and serving foods.
Tip #4: Give your child a job at mealtime.
Including your child in mealtime routines helps to provide cues that it is almost time to eat. Examples include: washing hands, setting the table, and serving food.
Tip #5: Don’t fret about one bad meal.
Try to think about your child’s eating over the course of 3 or 4 days, rather than each meal. Remember that if your child does not eat well in one meal, there will be another chance to eat again in a few hours.
Common Dilemmas that Disrupt Mealtime
Your child’s sports practice goes until late and it takes 30 minutes to get home. She’s starving once she gets in the car.
Try This! Turn a quick snack in the car into a more hearty meal (a turkey sandwich instead of a bag of pretzels). This may not be the day for a family meal. Or give her a small snack to tide her over and limit your expectations about how much she will eat for dinner at home.
Your child is used to grabbing snacks from the snack cabinet whenever he wants or asking for snacks and getting them on demand. He really does not like it if you don’t give him a snack when he asks for it and is likely to throw a huge tantrum when you say no.
Try This! Distract, distract, distract. If your child is young, distraction is often a good strategy for avoiding tantrums. If he wants to grab a snack right before dinner, offer to read him a book, play a game, or take a quick walk around the neighborhood. If he is older, try having a clear schedule written out for timing of meals and snacks, or use timers for when he can have a snack. It may take time for your child to learn that he cannot graze on snacks whenever he wants, and it is important to stay consistent about it.
Your toddler loves to get up in the morning and have a bottle or cup of milk...it’s really like coffee for her and it would be too scary to see what would happen if she did not have it.
Try This! Offer a smaller amount of milk in the morning and try to push the breakfast time back if possible. Keep slowly reducing the amount of milk and then try offering it with breakfast.
Your toddler absolutely refuses to eat dinner and after not eating dinner, will often demand a snack. You are worried that he did not eat anything, and you give him milk or crackers to tide him over until morning.
This is a common issue for many toddlers and young children. They are often tired at the end of the day, cranky and not on their best behavior. It is a slippery slope to give them a snack after they refuse to eat dinner because they will quickly learn to refuse dinner in order to get a more preferred snack (kids are so smart!). Try this instead: Always offer a bedtime snack, regardless of what happened at dinner. Have this happen 1-2 hours after they refused to eat dinner and have some other activities in between (bath time and bedtime stories). This helps avoid creating an association between refusing dinner and getting a snack and will help ease any worry that you may have about your kiddo going to bed hungry...or worse, that he will get up in the middle of the night because he is hungry.
Mealtimes take forever for you to get your kiddo to eat enough…up to an hour. After about 10 minutes, she gets up to play and you have to keep wrangling her back to the table to get in a few bites.
Try this! Set a timer for slightly longer than she normally eats, in this case 12-15 minutes. End the meal when she gets up after 15 minutes. If she did not eat a good amount, offer the next snack a little earlier and make it a heartier snack. A mealtime that lasts an hour essentially sets up a grazing pattern and disrupts hunger and motivation to eat for the next snack or meal.
