Whether your children are overweight, underweight, or perfectly fine, you probably still worry about how they’re eating. Here are 7 common mistakes parents make and how to avoid them.
Mistake #1: Encouraging Kids to Join the “Clean Plate Club”
For the most part, healthy young children eat when they’re hungry and stop when they’re full. They’re following their natural, internal cues, and you shouldn’t mess around with that by encouraging them to eat past the point of fullness. Teaching your kids to be in tune with their own hunger and fullness cues will allow them to have a comfortable relationship with food and avoid overeating as they grow older.
Recent studies have also shown that all children, regardless of age, eat more when served larger portions. In other words, the more we put on their plates, the more they will eat — regardless of how full they are.
The two takeaways from this?
1. Do not encourage or bribe your kids to clean their plate.
2. Provide small to moderate portions at meals (except vegetables — those are unlimited, of course). Encourage them to eat until they are comfortably full, and allow them additional servings if they request them.
Mistake #2: Offering Sweet Rewards
Trying to get children to eat their vegetables can be downright frustrating, and parents often resort to bribery: “Eat your broccoli and you can have ice cream for dessert.” Unfortunately, this technique teaches our kids that broccoli and other vegetables are less appealing (because their consumption requires a reward) and that dessert is the prize, something to be valued over other foods. Multiple studies have shown that, in the long run, preference for foods decreases when kids are given rewards for eating them.
What to do? Keep dessert a separate entity, and don’t make it the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Mistake #3: Depriving Kids of All Sweets
With all the loud, well-deserved messages about pediatric obesity, it’s no surprise that some parents have completely outlawed sweets. But that’s a pretty extreme measure. In order to help our kids have a healthy relationship with food (desserts included), we have to meet somewhere in the middle. While there is nothing wrong with limiting sweets and controlling the amount kids have access to, you certainly don’t want to outlaw them altogether. In fact, studies out of Penn State University have found that when kids are restricted from eating cookies or other snack foods, their desire to eat the snacks increases, and they’re likely to overeat them every chance they get.
Personally, I think it’s perfectly OK to allow school-age kids a fun food snack with their school lunch and some type of dessert after dinner. The key is to control what you can and to let them have reasonable dessert independence when you’re out and about.
- Limit snacks/desserts to 150 calories (that’s two cookies or an ice-cream pop)
- Read labels and choose healthy ingredients.
- If you can sneak in a little nutrition along with the sugar, it’s a bonus. For example, low-fat puddings and ice cream provide calcium; strawberries with whipped cream provide fiber and vitamin C.
The bottom line? Control what you can, and allow your kids some freedom of choice — within reason.