With all the families I have worked with, there are a few major issues that always seem to come up in some fashion. One of those is the issue of food and eating habits.
On one hand, there was the single mom and only child duo who allowed the picky five-year-old child to determine the family’s diet. The two seriously only ever ate grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese, and a few others, since that was all the kid would eat. Another family tried to fight their child’s picky eating by trying just about everything they could think of to get the kid to eat – tactics such as begging, pleading, tricking, yelling, and hand-feeding the kid well into preschool age – until the child would hardly eat at all.
On the other hand, there are the horror stories you hear about: the families who don’t regulate their children’s diet or volume of food intake whatsoever, resulting in obese and unhealthy children. Personally, though, I have seen more of the other extreme.
And then you have the happy medium: those families who don’t push the food issue any more than they neglect it, thereby instilling healthy food habits in their children.
I see so much of the first extreme – parents that regulate their kids diet too much – that I get pretty impatient with it at times. Parents of picky eaters need to realize that forcing the issue isn’t going to help widen the range of foods their kid will eat, any more than only making the tried-and-true will. In one of my parenting classes, we discussed the instinctive basis for picky eating – if you think about it, it’s a survival instinct, left over from when kids were raised in the wilderness, without grocery stores and restaurants to label foods as “safe.” We also talked about how, perhaps for this very reason, you have to put a certain food in front of a small child as many as ten or twenty times, without forcing the issue, before the child will be comfortable trying it. Trying to force a kid to eat, by methods such as making him stay at the table until his plate or clean or serving him the leftovers at every meal until he eats it, is a good way to create aversions that might not have been there otherwise. And giving a kid an overdose of attention in an attempt to get him to eat at all is a good way to discourage eating.
Likewise, if you don’t ever serve anything but what your child prefers, you are doing her the disfavor of allowing her world to stay as narrow as she dictates. It’s a good practice to have a little of everything at each meal: a food you know she likes, as well as something new for her to try (when she’s ready). That way she can opt to try new foods, but if she doesn’t like the new food (or doesn’t feel ready to try it) she won’t suffer for it by leaving the table with an empty stomach. After all, adults have the luxury to choose not to eat certain foods (within reason, of course); why shouldn’t children?
Parents of picky eaters need to remember that their children are not going to allow themselves to starve to death. There is no reason to force your kid to eat, any more than there is reason to restrict the family to kid-approved foods only. Your best plan of action is to treat it like no big deal, as children often get their cues from parents. It really is perfectly natural for children – and adults – to have their likes and dislikes. It’s not worth making every meal a struggle over it.
As for those families of the other extreme – it is important to teach proper diet, both by modeling and by regulating your kids’ diet – but within reason, of course. For example, try to find healthier snacks than potato chips and the like, and be sure that you’re not creating a double standard (i.e. this is okay for adults but not for kids). Kids are growing so fast that overeating is not usually an issue, unless you are feeding them ridiculously high-calorie foods.
Parents need to remember that their job at mealtimes is not just keeping their kids healthy, but teaching them healthy habits for life. Therefore, force-feeding your son spinach, or telling your daughter “no” while you help yourself to another handful of cheese doodles, are going to have lasting impressions on your child – and not the kind you want. However, as long as you 1) use your common sense, and 2) avoid running to extremes, you (and your child) should be just fine.