It Doesn't Matter WHEN Your Kids Eat Their Crap

Parents are obsessed with the order in which their kids eat food!

Or at least that is what an alien visitor would probably conclude.

• “Finish your food.  Then you can have dessert.”
• “Two more bites of broccoli before you eat your brownie.”
• “If you want some ice cream you have to eat your pizza first.”
• “No, you may not have candy before breakfast. You have to wait until after lunch.”

But really, it doesn’t matter when your kids eat their crap; what matters is how much crap they eat.

Trying to control when your kids eat their sweets and treats is a losing battle.

As far as I can tell, parents don’t fixate on regulating the order of their kids’ eating because they’re concerned about etiquette. (Although, on some level it is true that we do need to teach our little heathens not to attack dessert first so they’ll pass muster at their first black-tie event, but that’s material for another post.)  

Instead, parents become timekeepers for two reasons:

1) Parents are convinced that without a little incentive their kids would never touch anything green.

2) Parents are trying to convey something about the relative importance of sweets and treats compared to vegetables and other healthy foods: sweets come last because they’re less essential.

Unfortunately, neither goal can be accomplished by holding out on sweets and treats.

Research shows that:

1) Bribing kids to eat broccoli is a surefire way to ruin its reputation — I’m having flashbacks to high school, and it’s not pretty — just as it reinforces the superior status of sweets.  So kids learn that vegetables are important (like chores) but not desirable. This lesson lasts a lifetime.

2) Pressuring kids to eat something (and bribing or controlling the order in which your kids get to eat is indeed a form of pressure) makes kids eat less of the target food. 

Trying to put vegetables and other healthy fare first doesn’t actually work.

Letting your kids control when they eat their sweets and treats isn’t the same thing as giving them a free-for-all. 

You still need to provide some structured guidance.

1) Rather than teach your children that they need to eat healthy foods before they eat their sweets and treats, teach them the about proportion. In other words, teach your kids to eat more healthy foods and less sweets and treats overall. Read It Doesn’t Matter What Your Kids Eat!

2) Set a daily or weekly limit on sweets and treats and then let your children decide when they get the goodies.  If you’re worried that candy before dinner will ruin your kids’ appetite, make sure the serving size is small.  It won’t just solve your immediate problem; it’s also the right lesson for your kids to learn.  Read Candy with Breakfast?

3) Reinforce the message at parties and other special-eating events where the desserts always look fabulous.  Don’t insist your kids eat the healthy offerings before the desserts. Instead, give your kids some guidance on the goodies, and then direct them to the mains if they’re still hungry. (And make yourself feel better by remembering that at these events the healthy food isn’t usually that healthy anyway.)

4) Consider serving the dessert at the same time as the dinner.

5) Upgrade the quality of your kids’ snacks to include more fruits and vegetables and take the pressure off dinner.  Read 10 Ways Improving Your Kids’ Snacking Will Improve YOUR Life.

Release yourself (and your kids) from the bondage of time.  It will teach your kids the habits they need for a lifetime of healthy eating (and eliminate at least one of the headaches of parenting). 

Read How Do I Get My Child to Eat More Growing Foods?

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

To Restrict or Not, That is the Question.

Should you restrict how much your toddler eats?

The answer is: it depends on how you do it. 

Wholesale restriction — “I never give my child sugar.” — is usually a big mistake, but so is unfettered access to the pantry.

Research shows that restricting foods makes kids really, really want to eat the forbidden fruits (you know what happened in the original story).  The result is typically counterproductive: your kids end up eating (or at least craving) more of the foods you want them to avoid.  They also end up consuming more calories overall.

On the other end of the spectrum, research shows that kids who are given too much of a free rein eat fewer fruits and vegetables than children who are given more guidance.  And these kids also end up consuming more calories overall.

So what works?  A moderate amount of restriction. (Like Goldilocks, you have to strike a balance.)

2-6 year olds now consume 182 more calories each day than they did 30 years ago.

And those additional calories aren’t coming from apple slices and carrot sticks either.  They’re coming primarily from desserts, salty snacks, candy and fruit drinks.

So you can't just sit back and do nothing.

Proponents of Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding are particularly attuned to this issue and often tell me that they allow their children to eat as much as they want, even when it comes to treats.  But these parents are getting Satter's message wrong.

Contrary to popular interpretation, Ellyn Satter's Division of Responsibility doesn't mean letting kids go wild.

The idea behind Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding is that children inherently know how much they should eat, and so don’t need to be pressured by their parents to eat more, to eat less, or even to eat anything at all.

The Division of Responsibility stacks up like this:

• The parent is responsible for what, when, where.
• The child is responsible for how much and whether.

But even Satter thinks that sweets and treats have to be handled with care. 

For instance, Satter recommends that parents limit kids to eating just one serving of dessert.

To counter the problem that restricting access to desirable foods enhances their allure, Satter suggests that parents occasionally offer their children unlimited access to sweets.  (I don’t know what she means by occasionally, but I doubt Satter means more than once or twice a month. She probably means less.)

Satter doesn’t really mean unlimited though because there’s one caveat: the free-for-all is limited to the amount a kid can consume in one sit-down snacking session.  When forced to sit at the table, most young children run out of attention before they run out of steam. Stomach-space is limited, but attention span even more so.  It’s a brilliant, self-limiting system!

Eating at the table isn’t just a clever way to limit your kids’ consumption of cr*p without a struggle. It is also the right lifetime habit: people eat more when they graze-as-they-go instead of when they eat sitting at the table.

Read more about what Satter says about Using “Forbidden” Foods.

Children need structured guidance in order to eat right.

They also need to feel in control. 

And that’s the beauty of Satter’s approach to sweets and treats: it combines structure and restraint in a way that doesn’t build up a rebellion.

1) Don't demonize sweets and treats. Instead, teach your children how to fit them into their diets appropriately.  Read Slacker's Rule.

2) Consider letting your children decide when they eat their treats.  Read Candy with Breakfast?

3) Let your kids indulge from time-to-time, but do it in a way that provides natural limits.  Read Todd's Law or the Guilt-Free Way to Say "Yes" to Sweets.

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

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Sources:

http://www.ellynsatter.com accessed 8/31/2010.

Jansen, E., S. Mulkens, and A. Jansen. 2007. “Do Not Eat the Red Food!: Prohibition of Snacks Leads to Their Relatively Higher Consumption in Children.” Appetite 49(3): 572-77.

Patrick, H., T. A. Nicklas, S. O. Hughes, and M. Morales. 2005. “The Benefits of Authoritative Feeding Style: Caregiver Feeding Styles and Children's Food Consumption Patterns.” Appetite 44(2): 243-49.

Piernas, C. and B. M. Popkin. 2010. “Trends in Snacking Among U.S. Children.” Health Affairs 29(3): 398-404.

What's It To You?

You can’t change how your children eat until you figure out how you benefit from the current eating system.

I know it doesn’t seem like you benefit from the current state of affairs (unless you count hair-pulling as a low-cost way to get a haircut), but you do.  Because, let’s face it, your kids wouldn’t eat the way they do if it didn’t somehow work for you.

That’s not the same thing as saying that the way your kids eat is your fault, because it’s not.  (Let me repeat: it’s not your fault.) But, if the current system didn’t work for you somehow…

1. You would have reacted to your kids’ eating foibles differently
2. In turn, your kids would have reacted to you differently. 
3. Instead of being exactly where you are with your kids’ eating, you would be in a totally different spot.  (It wouldn’t necessarily be a better spot, but it would be a different one.)

Makes sense, right? Don’t you know other parents who reacted to their kids’ eating in a different way than you did and then ended up with different results?

If you’re a normal parent, you engage in a delicate balancing act when you feed your kids: on one hand you try to meet your children’s nutritional and emotional needs and on the other hand you try to take care of your own feelings too.

Sometimes, though, taking care of your feelings produces counterproductive results.

For instance, research shows …

• Parents who describe their children as picky eaters are more likely to pressure their kids into eating, even though pressuring has been shown to make kids more negative about the food they’re pressured to eat (thereby perpetuating the cycle of resistance).

• Also, parents who are concerned that their children might be underweight are more likely to pressure their kids to eat even though pressuring kids to eat has been shown to reduce their food consumption.

• Alternatively, parents who are concerned that their kids might be overweight are more likely to restrict their children’s access to certain foods, even though restriction has been linked to an increased intake of those foods once the restriction is lifted (such as when kids are visiting their grandparents).

Parents I talk to recognize that sometimes the tactics they use don’t work.  Still, using these tactics makes them feel better.  And feeling better is important.

In fact, taking care of ourselves might be the best outcome of the strategies we sometimes choose.

Research shows that we parents aren’t very good at assessing our children’s weight accurately, don’t know how much food our children need to consume, are often wrong about what our kids will and will not eat, often use food to transmit more than nutrition (i.e. to express our love), and the list goes on.

For more on these ideas read Cookie Love. and Hiding Our Heads in the Sand.

The solution isn’t to ignore whatever issue makes you nuts; it’s to take care of yourself in a way that affects the system differently.

There is a host of issues that are particularly poignant for parents.  Some parents find themselves obsessing about nutrition, others will do anything to avoid a conflict, go out of their way to make sure their kids are never hungry, or worry their kids won’t feel loved without treats.

Everyone suffers from some mix of these issues — we all want our kids to eat nutritiously for instance — but some of us are gripped by these concerns more than others.  And when you’re gripped, you can’t even begin to think of alternative tactics.  Read What’s Holding You Hostage?

1) If you have a mealtime script that plays out repeatedly — you do A, your child does B — you know you’re using a tactic that doesn’t work.  (If you and your kids weren't stuck in a rut the script would change.)

2) Ask yourself if the way you are interacting with your children around food could be making things worse.

3) Identify what feelings or fears you have. One way to do this is to imagine that someone has told you to change your tactics — for example, if instead of asking your children to eat two more bites you were told to let your children eat as much as they wanted to — and see what you would say after the word but.  (“But then Sally wouldn’t eat enough. “)

4) Address your worries in a way that helps you break out of a bad system.  For instance...

• If nutrition is big for you, consider giving your child a vitamin pill. It might calm your nutrition-nerves and allow you to experiment with other ways to get to eat the way you want. Dealin’ with the Devil. 

• If hunger avoidance is high on your list, consider using backups. How Cottage Cheese Changed My Life and The Upside of Hunger.

• And if you give in to avoid conflict try Curbing Your Kids’ Craving for Control.

 ~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

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Source:

Gregory, J. E., S. J. Paxton, and A. M. Brozovic. 2010. “Pressure to Eat and Restriction Are Associated With Child Eating Behaviors and Maternal Concern About Child Weight, But Not Child Body Mass Index, in 2-4-Year-Old Children.” Appetite 54: 550-56.