The Fun Factor: Food For Feeding a Picky Eater

If you don’t have fun feeding your toddler, your toddler isn’t having any fun being fed.

I’m not talking about the “draw some ketchup happy faces on your kid’s plate” kind of fun.  I’m just talking about garden-variety fun. You know, where your child actually enjoys eating.

Recent research from Switzerland shows that eating enjoyment reduces picky eating.  In other words, feed your picky eater some fun, and your picky eater might just stop being so picky.

The more children enjoy eating, the less picky they are.

That’s what the research shows.  It makes sense too.  Many kids simply shut down when they feel stressed about eating.

The research also shows that:

• Fun activities, such as cooking, increase eating enjoyment.
• Parental pressure decreases eating enjoyment.

There is oodles of advice out there on increasing the fun factor—gardening, cooking, grocery shopping, food art, sandwich cutouts, you name it.  But fun added on top of pressure isn't fun at all.  In fact, in my experience, pressure cancels out the fun.

That's why you've got to eliminate the pressure first.  Then, you can add in any kind of fun you like.

Parents rarely consider how putting on the pressure is problematic. 

• Do you think your child should always finish her plate?
• Do you feel you have to be especially careful to make sure your child eats enough?
• If your child says, “I’m not hungry,” do you try to get her to eat anyway?
• Do you feel your child would eat much less food if you didn’t guide or regulate her eating?

These are the kinds of questions researchers ask parents to determine how likely they are to put on the pressure.

Read: The Pressure Cooker Problem , The Dinner Dance: When Is Enough Enough? and A New Approach to Teaching Tot to Try New Foods.

Of course, pressure might not actually cause a picky eating problem; it might be the way parents react to a picky eating problem instead.

This is a case when it doesn’t matter which came first, the chicken or the egg, because there’s no question that pressure reinforces pickiness. 

Remember, picky eating is rarely a real reaction to the food.

I'm sure you intuitively know this because picky eaters are totally erratic in their eating behavior: Loving today what they hated yesterday, and hating today what they loved yesterday.  That’s why you can’t feed your way out of a picky-eating problem.

So back off the pressure and put your energy towards producing a happier eating environment instead.

Read The Road Less Traveled.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

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Source: van der Horst, K. 2012. “Overcoming Picky Eating. Eating Enjoyment as a Central Aspect of Children's Eating Behaviors.” Appetite 58: 567-74

Treating the Symptoms, Not the Cause

When it comes to food, many parents treat the symptoms of their children’s eating problem, rather than treat the problem itself.

That’s what became clear to me when one reader asked the following question in response to my last post The Perils of Plate-Cleaning.

My question is, what age is old enough to know when they've eaten enough? I struggle with this with my 3-1/2 year old. She will say she is done and/or not hungry, but I don't trust that she knows what this means. I will let her stop eating, but then before bed she will tell me she's hungry. She also does the "I'm done" to get to the fruit, but not always. :)

I want to say that even the youngest kids are old enough to know when they’ve eaten enough, but that would be silly.

It’s clear that young children need guidance—not because they don't have an innate ability to eat when they're hungry and stop when they're full, but because they have trouble communicating about hunger and satiation, because they haven't quite connected the dots between eating and the end of hunger, and because the social constraints of eating are difficult to master. (More on this in a moment.)

So here’s my real answer: Managing how much your child eats is a technique that addresses the symptom and not the underlying problem.  You can coax your child into eating enough food so she makes it to bedtime (and then through the night), but at what cost?

This technique won’t teach your child how to identify and articulate her feelings of hunger and satiation more accurately, but it will teach her to look outside herself for cues about how much to eat.   That’s one of the Perils of Plate-Cleaning.

But I get it: it’s tough to know when to end a meal.  Read The Dinner Dance: When is Enough Enough?  And it’s tough to know what your child really means when she says “I’m not hungry.”  (I’ll address this in my post next week so stay tuned.)

Instead of encouraging your child to eat more, imagine being brutally honest: telling your child outright that she has to eat as much as you say until you think she’s old enough to figure that out for herself.

This would be honest and upfront, and would, in my opinion, be a pretty bold (or should I say brave) parenting move!  It also would be OK if your child went along with the plan, but what if she doesn’t?

Imagine your child responds, “But I’m not hungry.”  What could you say?

• “I don’t believe you?”
• “I’m the expert on your tummy, not you?”

Said this way, the lesson is pretty unpalatable.

If you want your child to eat more at meals you have to identify what your child needs to learn, and then teach it to her.

We ask a lot of toddlers when it comes to food and eating.  It’s not just about identifying hunger and satiation. We also ask them to:

• Willingly eat foods that don’t make their Top 10 Lists because they’re healthy.
• Moderate their eating so that they’re hungry on a schedule.
• Eat when meals are prepared even if that means interrupting important play.
• Predict how much they have to eat to get them to the next meal, which sometimes means making it through the night.

 Address these lessons and you’re golden.  Here’s how:

1) Teach your children a style of eating that has them grazing around the plate—a bite of this a bite of that—so they eat some of the veggies before they are too full.  Read Playing for Peas.

2) Help your children plan for meals by moderating their snacks.  Read How Big is that Bag? Eating in the Age of Portion Distortion.

3) Double-check that you haven’t given your child an incentive not to eat meals.  Read Why Won’t My Child Eat Dinner?” 

4) Figure out a way to (sometimes) let your child play.  Read When Playing is More Fun Than Eating.

5) Teach your child to report her hunger and satiation more accurately. Read How Much Should Your Kids Eat?

6) Serve less food and watch your toddler pack it away.  Read When Less is More.

7) Use dessert creatively.  Read Dishing Up Dessert.

8) Finally, recognize that sometimes, there is an Upside to Hunger.

The upshot is that if you change the structure of meals, and change how you interact with your child around meals, you'll change how your child eats...

...honestly.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

The Perils of Plate-Cleaning

One reason for the national obesity epidemic is that parents teach kids to clean their plates.  And the portions on those plates are both larger, and more calorie dense, than ever before.

How else can we explain the fact that almost all adults finish all the food on their plate, regardless of how much food there is or how hungry they are?

• In a recent study 91% of adults reported they had eaten every bite of their last meal.
• 28% of the adults said they had finished their food even though they had been full.

There’s no research I know of that has tracked the connection between these parenting techniques and the adult habit of plate cleaning, but it's the only feasible explanation. Parents have to be teaching kids this trick.  By telling our kids to clean their plates, take two more bites, or pressure them to eat more than they would without a little intervention, we’re producing adults who follow our advice: they gobble up all the goods.

Plate-cleaning is planned behavior.

Most research shows that people unconsciously eat more when confronted with big portions.  Read Size Matters and How Big is that Bag? Eating in the Age of Portion Distortion.  

What's surprising to me about this research is that it shows that most people set the intention to clean their plates before they sit down to eat. 

• 86% of the people in the study said they planned to consume the entire meal from the outset.

This has got to be learned behavior.

Even the folks who ate past the point of satiation didn't blame their over-consumption on unconscious eating. 

• 77% of the people who continued eating past the point of fullness said they did so to avoid wasting food.

That's parent logic if I ever heard it!

Once learned, plate-cleaning is a hard habit to break.

• All but 18% of the people who planned to clean their plates stuck to their mission. And most of the people who revised their plan did so by taking another helping.  In other words, they revised their plan by eating more than the original portion size.  Only 7% ate less than they planned because they were full.

I'm really not interested in pointing the finger at parents. (Though I wouldn't blame you if that's what you took away from this post.)

But I think we can use this study as a wake-up call, to show us that sometimes we teach our children unintended lessons—even when we have the best intentions.

Today, in this age of portion distortion, when a sandwich at Panera packs in almost half a day’s worth of  calories—a Sierra Turkey on Focaccia with Asiago Cheese has 920 calories and a kids' size macaroni and cheese delivers almost 500 calories—we have to ask ourselves: Is finishing their food really the habit we want to teach our kids?

Habits learned in childhood last a lifetime.  Unless your adult children deliberately (struggle to) unlearn them. 

So rather than push children to eat more, I suggest we teach kids to:

• Leave some food on their plates.
• Pause during eating to give their bodies a chance to signal they are full.  The Power of the Pregnant Pause.

We also can:

• Reduce how much food we put on our kids' plates, so at least they consume less when they do clean their plates. (Offering less food also has the unintended benefit of enticing reluctant eaters to sample the offerings.  Read When Less is More.)
• Believe our kids when they say they're full.  Read The Dinner Dance: When is Enough Enough?

I know, this approach won't solve the problem of getting your kids to eat their veggies—but there are habits more important  than veggie-eating— and it won't get your toddler to sit still long enough to stave off a meltdown.  These problems can be solved in other ways though.  For ideas read Playing For Peas,  Why Won't My Child Eat Dinner?, When Playing is More Fun Than Eating, and The Upside of Hunger.

Remember, it's not what you feed, but what you teach, that matters.

 ~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

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Source: Fay, S. H., D. Ferriday, E. C. Hinton, N. G. Shakeshaft, P. J. Rogers, and J. M. Brunstrom. 2011. “What Determines Real-World Meal Size? Evidence for Pre-Meal Planning.” Appetite 56: 284-89.