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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781936693290 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bull Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 396 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
How to Get Your Kid to Eat ... But Not Too Much
By Ellyn Satter, Ken Miller
Bull Publishing Company
Copyright © 1987 Ellyn SatterAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-936693-29-0
CHAPTER 1
All About Eating
Eating well is one of life's great pleasures. If a child is to be healthy and strong, and fit well into the world, she has to be able to eat the food. At the same time, if she is to keep eating in its proper place as only one of life's issues, she has to be able to take care of it in a matter-of-fact way.
Too many people today are unsuccessful with eating, and unsuccessful with feeding their children. The incidence of significant childhood eating problems is estimated at 25 to 30% — and those are only situations that parents consider problematic and are brought to professional attention. Problem eating behaviors include poor food acceptance, eating "too much" or "too little," delay or difficulty in learning the mechanics of eating or progressing to appropriately mature eating styles, objectionable mealtime behaviors and bizarre food habits.
Parents worry about their children's eating habits, their growth and weight, their nutrition and their manners. Adults are anxious and ambivalent about their own eating, and those feelings rub off on their parenting with food. They get into struggles with feeding their children, struggles that seemingly have no satisfactory resolution:
"Jason hardly eats anything — at least compared with the other babies I know. He only takes three or four ounces at a time. He's growing all right, but it worries me. I try to get him to take more, but it just makes him mad — he cries and yells and arches his back and throws his body around."
"Eric won't eat his vegetables. In fact, there are just a lot of foods he won't eat. I put peas on his plate and he has a fit until I take them back off again. I have tried serving vegetables cooked and raw and dressed up in a sauce and even let him help prepare them. But he still won't eat. If I try making him stay at the table until he eats some, he sits there for an hour, until I finally break down and let him go."
"Mary eats so much I am afraid she will get fat. I give her as much as I think she should have, but she just wolfs it down and cries for more. She can never wait four hours until the next feeding and sometimes she cries an hour before it is time to feed her."
"I am so sick of cooking for my children, I could just scream. I end up making two or three meals. They say, 'what's that' and I tell them and then they say 'ack, I won't eat that.' And so I say, 'all right, what will you eat?' I feel like a short-order cook. Sometimes I feel like saying, 'that's your dinner, like it or lump it, and better luck next time.'"
"It's gotten to the point where I positively dread dinner time. My husband is on the kids all the time about their eating. 'Eat this, eat that, use your fork, don't use your fingers. You can't leave until you eat all of that.' One of the kids will do it, but the other one won't eat a thing. I think he would sit there for the rest of his life before he gave into his father."
"I don't eat until the kids are in bed. The way they behave at the table really gets on my nerves. They hurry up and eat some, and make a mess, or whine about what's there. Then they get down and run off and then come back and eat a little more. And they hound me for things when I am trying to eat."
We are talking about the feeding relationship: an interactive process in which both parent and child participate. Parents offer food, the child eats it — or fails to eat it. The child gives information about what she wants or doesn't want, and demonstrates her ability to eat, or lack of it. And parents give information about what's available and in what setting and what kind of eating is acceptable to them.
Eating times can be happy times, when children and parents feel they are getting along well enough with each other, and getting the job done in a satisfactory way. Or they can be painful times, when both are anxious and frustrated.
Early problems with feeding can persist, and can get even worse, and can distort lifelong eating and weight management attitudes and behaviors. Most, if not all, adolescent and adult eating disorders, obsessive (and often failed) weight management efforts, and neurotic attitudes and behaviors about eating have their roots in early childhood feeding interactions.
What It's Like for the Child
Painful as feeding problems are for parents, think what they must be like for children.
Learning about eating starts at birth. The way a child eats and accepts food and feels about eating is determined to a large extent by her early experiences with eating. But it goes farther than that. The way eating is managed can have an enormous impact on the way a child feels about herself and about the world.
Especially for the very young child, eating and feeding is central to her relationship with the world. If she is hungry, she is miserable and feels alone. Hunger is, after all, a very powerful and potentially painful drive. Whether a child learns to fear or accommodate hunger depends on her early experience with eating.
If she cries to be fed, and someone shows up promptly and feeds with some sensitivity to her abilities and preferences, she associates hunger with pleasure and it makes her look forward to what happens next. And she thinks, on whatever level babies think, that she must be a very important and fine person and that people must like her to go to such trouble on her behalf.
But feeding can be handled in other ways, ways that make her feel anxious and desperate when she gets hungry. Her caretakers can be slow or inconsistent about responding to her hunger signals. They can force her to eat more than she wants or insist that she eat food that revolts her. They can let her just get started eating well and then take it away.
Very few adults would be willing to deliberately do something that would hurt a child's feelings or lower her self-esteem. But that happens all the time in feeding. It happens because adults have their own hang-ups about eating and play them out in the way they feed their children.
Why This Book?
Most struggles over feeding grow out of genuine concern for the child, and bad advice. Parents are regularly encouraged to overrule information coming from their children, and impose certain foods, or amounts of food, or feeding schedules. Whenever you impose rigid expectations, feeding will be distorted.
In How to Get Your Kid to Eat, I'm going to give you some good advice. The advice is about the feeding relationship. I'll tell you how to work it out with your child with eating. I'll talk about parenting in general, and parenting as it applies to eating. I'll emphasize doing your part, but also depending on your child to share responsibility with you for her eating. I'll emphasize what you should do so your child can eat and regulate her food intake to the best of her abilities. And, most of all, I'll detail how to make feeding a cooperative process, not just one of outsmarting or controlling your child.
How to Get Your Kid to Eat grows out of my concern about children and their eating. It also grows out of my concern for their parents, and their eating.
I have worked with eating for most of my professional life, first as a clinical dietitian in a medical group practice, doing outpatient nutrition counseling for adults and children. I am now a clinical social worker/dietitian in a private mental health clinic, doing family therapy and individual counseling with people who are immobilized by their concerns about eating.
In the over twenty years I have spent working with people of all ages (I will describe many of my patients, but to protect their privacy, I have changed the nonessential details), I have seen a lot of misery. People can feel upset and immobilized and absolutely terrible about themselves because of their inability to manage their eating. Many times they have carried these struggles with them from childhood.
I have worked with families of young children, and have observed what happens in childhood feeding interactions that distort the way children eat — and the way they feel about eating. My adult patients remember experiencing these distortions as children, and they tell how painful it was to be overmanaged or ignored with eating. Eventually, they have grown up to overmanage and ignore themselves — and they continue to experience the same conflict and anxiety about their eating.
And the cycle repeats. Unless adults are able to correct their own distorted eating attitudes and behaviors, they are likely to parent their children with feeding the way they were parented.
It doesn't have to be that way. There is a healthy and positive way to manage feeding, and I'll tell you about it.
It's a way that grows out of trust: trust in your child to eat in a way that's right for her and to find the body that's right for her. It's the opposite of being managing and controlling. It's a process that depends on the child's internal cues of hunger, appetite and satiety to guide the feeding process.
You'll be amazed at how being positive and trusting about feeding frees you. It makes an enormous difference in feeding if you don't have to worry about getting your child to eat. You can pay attention, instead, to doing a good job with parenting, to sharing her delight in learning to eat, and to watching her growth unfold.
A New Look at Feeding
Maintaining a positive feeding relationship demands a division of responsibility. The parent is responsible for what the child is offered to eat, the child is responsible for how much, and even whether, she eats.
That basic principle both charges you with what you must do, and lets you off the hook when you have done it. You must get good food into the house, you must get a meal on the table and provide satisfying snacks, and you must do it all in a pleasant and supportive fashion.
But once you have done all that, you simply have to let go of it, turn the rest over to your child, and trust her to do her part.
She will. Based on research and experience, here are the facts about children's eating:
Children will eat. They are capable of regulating their food intake. They generally react negatively to new foods but will usually accept them with time and experience. Parents can either support or disrupt children's food acceptance and food regulation.
Children are interested in eating and capable of doing it. Research, and the survival of the species have shown this to be true. Children, like other people, are endowed with an insistent hunger and appetite. They are invested in their own survival. But they can't get food for themselves — they can only appeal to their adults.
Even as newborns, children know how much they need to eat and are capable of taking the lead with feeding. To function effectively, however, they need a supportive parent who is willing and able to be sensitive and responsive to their messages about feeding. Parents who, for whatever reason, are unable to be attentive to infant eating cues make their children feel afraid that they won't be provided for, and that distorts the feeding process.
If children seemingly have no interest in eating and in food, the problem is NOT that they lack a basic desire to eat. There is something else going on. A child's negative experiences with eating can make her behave in contradictory ways. If parents are remote, a child might give up. If parents force, a child might lose interest.
In most cases, when you try to overrule a child's natural eating cues, her eating ends up getting worse, not better. Children who are forced, cajoled, enticed or even tricked to eat, end up revolted by food and prone to avoid eating if they get a chance. Children who are deprived of food in an attempt to keep them thin become preoccupied with food, afraid they won't get enough to eat, and prone to overeat when they get a chance.
Problems with Feeding
The feeding interaction should always be examined when a child's growth is puzzling or when she is doing poorly with eating. If parents and children get into struggles about eating, it can interfere with the child's ability to accept a variety of food or eat the right amount of food. Too often, health workers trying to resolve feeding problems look only at the foods that are being offered and at the child's medical history. While those issues are important, they deal with only part of the story.
If a child is too fat or too thin, if she eats too much or too little, the problem could be the feeding interaction. Prevention of obesity can be started at birth by establishing a positive and supportive feeding relationship, one that allows the infant to accurately regulate her own food intake. It can be continued throughout the growing-up years by maintaining a division of responsibility in feeding.
If a distorted feeding relationship is not the cause of poor growth, it is almost certain to be the effect. People try too hard to feed children who grow poorly, and children end up eating less, not more, when feeders are over active.
If children are picky about eating, the problem is either too much pressure or too little support. Children eat best when parents follow their lead, set appropriate limits, and feed in a smooth, comfortable, and emotionally satisfying fashion. Children eat worst when parents are either domineering or neglectful in feeding.
Adolescent and adult eating disorders can have their antecedents in early childhood feeding interactions. Parents may be insensitive about feeding, and children can grow up feeling confused and anxious about their eating. The best way to prevent eating disorders is to have a positive feeding relationship throughout the growing-up years.
If a child is sick, it is especially difficult, and especially important, to maintain a positive feeding relationship. Illness often requires special feeding regimens that, in turn, put pressure on parents to take over with feeding. It doesn't work any better to be overmanaging with a sick child than with a well child.
Advances in modern medicine are presenting a whole set of feeding problems that no one has had to deal with before. Babies survive who haven't previously, and the methods used to insure their survival deprive them of the opportunity to learn to eat. (They are fed through the veins, or by tubes, for the first year, or even first several years, of life.) They can learn, but they — and their parents — need special help to do it — and special sensitivity to the feeding relationship.
Summary of the Book
In the early chapters, in the "Basic Principles of Feeding" section, I have laid out what works and what doesn't with feeding. Much is known. I have based my recommendations on my own experience, on extensive reading (I'll share references with you as I go along) and on much consultation with parents and professionals
In the middle section of the book, "Feeding as Your Child Grows," I talk in concrete detail about how to feed children from infancy through adolescence. This middle section is about parenting — and parenting-through-feeding.
I think you will find, as I have, that applying parenting principles to feeding will allow you to understand some things about raising children that you've not understood before. I also think you will find it helpful to follow child — and feeding — development in an orderly fashion from one stage to the next. Each stage builds on and reflects the achievements of the one before — or exposes limitations resulting from earlier failure to achieve.
The final section of the book, "Special Feeding Problems," deals with children and their specific needs. I have referred to the problems earlier. Here, I will simply underscore what it takes to work with special-needs children — or, if at all possible, to prevent their becoming special needs children in the first place. The key is normal feeding.
To prevent feeding problems, or to confine them to the lowest possible level, you have to maintain a healthy feeding relationship throughout the growing-up years. Preventing obesity, eating disorders, aversion to food and objectionable eating behaviors starts at birth — with sympathetic and supportive nipple-feeding. It continues throughout childhood, with appropriate management of feeding based on the child's emotional and developmental needs.
Throughout, the emphasis is on parenting. The best parenting provides both love and limits. These themes play themselves out in feeding, the same that they do in every other aspect of a child's life. Feeding is a metaphor for the parent/child relationship overall. Appropriate feeding and healthy feeding relationships are part and parcel of appropriate parenting and healthy family relationships.
The best parenting grows out of a healthy marriage. Parents who get along well with each other, and support each other, do the best job with parenting — and feeding. Many times distortions in the feeding relationship can be traced back to distorted interactions between the adults in the family.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from How to Get Your Kid to Eat ... But Not Too Much by Ellyn Satter, Ken Miller. Copyright © 1987 Ellyn Satter. Excerpted by permission of Bull Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
BASIC PRINCIPLES OF FEEDING,1. All About Eating,
2. Quit When the Job Is Done,
3. Pressure Doesn't Work,
4. How Much Should Your Child Eat?,
5. What Is Normal Eating?,
6. Nutritional Tactics for Preventing Food Fights,
FEEDING AS YOUR CHILD GROWS,
7. The Newborn,
8. The Older Baby,
9. Is Your Toddler Jerking You Around at the Table?,
10. The Popular Preschooler,
11. The Industrious Schoolager,
12. The Individualistic Teenager,
SPECIAL FEEDING PROBLEMS,
13. The Child Who Grows Poorly,
14. Helping All You Can to Keep Your Child from Being Fat,
15. Eating Disorders,
16. Feeding the Child with Special Needs,
APPENDIX TOOLS AND STRATEGIES,
Recommended Daily Pattern of Food Selection,
Milk Group Portion Sizes,
Meat Group Portion Sizes,
Breads and Cereals,
Fruits and Vegetables,
Vitamin A in Fruits and Vegetables,
Vitamin C in Fruits and Vegetables,
Fun Foods that Make Nutritional Sense,
Choosing Nutritious Snacks,
Calorie Requirements Compared with Basic Needs,
Growth Charts,