Parenting

By Ranu Boppana, MD

Feeding Young Children

Feeding young children can often be a tricky task, as any mother of a preschooler can tell you! Toddlers either don’t seem to eat much or have unbalanced ideas of what to eat. Furthermore, as with everything else at this age, they want to do it by themselves! How can parents ensure that their children have healthy diets and teach them to participate in a family meal in the process?

Children’s Developmental Needs
Remember that toddlerhood comes after infancy, a time of rapid growth. Infants triple their birth weight by the end of their first year. During a child’s infancy, parents also have the satisfaction of feeding their babies every couple of hours. Between ages one through five, children experience a normal decrease in appetite and will only gain four to five pounds a year. Be sure not to overload toddlers’ small appetites with snacks or juice because they will then be less likely to eat well at mealtime.

The Importance of Self-Regulation
A key principle that preschoolers need to learn is “self-regulation”. They need to learn to feed themselves and recognize their own satiety signals, eating when hungry and stopping when they are full. As simple as that sounds, many adults have learned to ignore their own hunger signals, eat for all kinds of emotional reasons, and struggle with obesity as a result. To help your children learn self-regulation, don’t institute a “clean plate” rule and don’t equate finishing food with good behavior. Also don’t bribe or distract your children to get them to eat. Try not to let eating become a source of contention because in this oppositional phase of development (think “terrible two’s”!), eating can easily become a battleground. Keep family meals simple and brief, as well, focusing on conversation. It takes a lot of learning for young children to begin to sit and eat in a civilized fashion and a lot of patience on the parent’s part to get them there!

The Perils of Advertising
Food advertising aimed at young children also doesn’t help matters. The number of advertisements for sweet and otherwise unhealthy food products aimed at young children is steadily on the rise. This particularly malignant form of advertising influences children’s food choices at a critical time—just as they are developing. Probably the best way to stem the influence of such advertising is to limit the time your children spend watching television altogether! Limiting television time will also encourage your kids to get some exercise; after all, childhood obesity is reaching epidemic proportions! The best way to avoid unhealthy food choices is to not have them available at home. If you have a hard time limiting junk food, remember that the more your kids fill up on unhealthy foods, the less healthy food they will actually consume.

Reconciling the Role of Food in South Asian Culture
South Asian culture can sometimes complicate matters by focusing too much on food. Universally, mothers judge themselves by how well they feed their children. This is particularly problematic for South Asian parents who observed themselves or their peers not receiving enough nutrition as children. The result? Some South Asian mothers overly focus on food as an issue and are concerned when preschoolers sometimes resist Indian food, which is generally more spicy than (and different from) the foods they see on television or those their friends are eating. Young children have more tastebuds than adults and generally don’t like foods with strong tastes; they usually prefer unadorned foods. Again, downplaying your child’s resistance and offering less spicy and simpler foods is advisable. Even Indian food can be made so with less spice—think plain rice, mild dal and chapattis. Don’t take your child’s preferences as a rejection of South Asian culture. Also avoid turning dinnertime into a battle zone! Stand your ground and don’t allow other family members to escalate mealtime either!

Remember that children’s eating habits really do vary. If your child is growing well—gaining weight and height along his or her growth curve—you do not need to worry. Check your child’s growth using standardized growth curves you get from the doctor; don’t rely on what you think is “healthy”. If your child is losing weight, hasn’t gained weight in six months, vomits or gags with food or complains of stomachaches, constipation or diarrhea, however, its time to see the pediatrician and seek further advice on the matter.

Ranu Boppana, MD is an Adult and Child Psychiatrist in private practice in New York, NY and a Clinical Instructor at the NYU School of Medicine.

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