Eating habits

The daily routines and habits surrounding meals created in childhood stay with us as we grow up and enter adulthood. It is very useful to consider the following for you as an adult and your child:

 

Parents/caregivers are the role models for the child, and as adults carry the main responsibility for the child's development. Adults are responsible for buying food, planning meals and preparing food. The eating habits and food choices of the adult will affect the child, especially in how adults talk about food, relate to their own bodies and meal choices. All these elements of what the adults does will affect how the child eats, how much it eats and when the child eats.

Using food as a reward can give unwanted effects. The child can become fonder of the food that is used as reward, and dislike the others as they are given a negative association.  An example of this is "You can have ice cream when you finish eating your vegetables".  

Illustration: Kostverktøyet

Food is an effective, but very short-lived coping mechanism when emotions are running high. Comforting a child who is upset, sad, tired, lonely or afraid with food can quickly become problematic as it doesn't teach the child how to deal with these emotions. The association between emotional regulation and food can lead to eating disorders, weight issues and body dissatisfaction. E.g a child feels upset and is given an ice cream, or a child is offered sweets when it has bumped a knee. It is very important that the child learns how to cope with difficult emotions and develops a language to express these feelings. Practice offering a lap for comfort, sitting down with the child and making sure that you as a parent/caregiver are a safe zone for the child when managing emotional states that are uncomfortable. 

 

Illustration: Kostverktøyet

Children are born with an innate ability to self-regulate appetite and satiety. Newborns and babies will cry when hungry and stop eating when full. This ability to regulate intake tends to alter as the child grows and with the influence/pressure from adults. If the parent/caregiver in the toddler years start to pressure the child to eat more or needing to always finish the plate, the child can start to ignore its own satiety signals. Experience and research show that children then learn to not trust their own sense of hunger and satiety. The play with flying spoons of porridge or pressuring the child to have one more bite are strategies that are not useful for the child who needs to learn to listen out for bodily cues. It is important to trust the child when it says it has had enough to eat.

 

Meals are important in sitting together and spending time as a family unity, talking about how the day has been. Meal times are important as the child then copies and learns from other family members when eating. They learn how to eat a variety of foods, use cutlery and develop skills they need as adults. Meals can also reinforce the feeling of comfort, but the type of offds served will have a great impact on habits as the child grows. If sweets, snacks and sugary drinks always are present in the evening during meals, then the child will learn to expect this as a part of normality. 

 

A useful exercise for the parents/caregivers is to look at which habits exist within the family unit. Are these habits that will add to more well-being and health, or are there habits that can be addressed as they have a negative impact on health? Please discuss if food is used as reward or punishment, if food plays a role in regulating emotions and how food is talked when sitting at the table.