ParentingHub

Someday you will call your child to dinner and she will come willingly. Someday you will encourage her to taste a new food and it won’t precipitate a power struggle…” Ellyn Satter, author of “Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense.”

WHAT IS SUCCESS?

Before you develop a timeline in your head about when you should start seeing results with regard to your child’s eating habits, it’s important to determine exactly what your idea of success is. As you can see from the above quote, “someday” is about the best word we can use to answer the question: “When will my child finally start eating more/less/different kinds of food?!?” There is no expert that can tell you exactly how many days it will take for your two-year-old to finally eat broccoli. Nobody can tell you exactly when your three-year old will come to the table and heap his little plate with foreign-looking food. Every child is different, and every child has a different history of eating habits.

So what exactly do you think will be the definitive moment for you? When your child eats anything you serve without complaint? When you take him to a spicy Szechwan restaurant, and he doesn’t order the chicken nugget kid meal option? Think about it for a minute…. Does it really matter if your child still has strong food aversions? Does he really need to eat everything on his plate? Or are those your expectations? In terms of physical and emotional health, there are two really important factors: a healthy child and a healthy family dynamic. Both of these can be achieved.

Without a doubt, you will start to see improvements to the family dynamics around the dinner table as you start to follow the guidelines and don’t engage in power struggles with your child around food. And yes, it can take a while to see changes to your child’s actual eating patterns, and unfortunately nobody can tell you exactly how long. But there are a few factors that can determine the length of the road to success.

The longer the bad habits, the longer it will take to develop good ones

It only makes sense that if a child is taught good eating habits early on in life, eating well will simply be the norm, and there shouldn’t be much struggle. If you start off feeding your six-month-old baby only the foods that you deem appropriately healthy and nutritious, you can carry this plan into toddlerhood and the preschooler years without ever catering to your child or pressuring or bribing her to eat. Obviously, she will learn that you trust her to eat what she needs. Of course, she will have his own personal likes and dislikes, and you may never see her go for the cauliflower casserole, but the chances are excellent that she will eat a wide variety of foods. This should not in any way be discouraging for those of you who have started off on the wrong foot, which many parents do. In fact, if anything, you should be encouraged.
If you’ve spent the last three years bribing, threatening, pleading, coaxing, and disguising food in attempts to get your stubborn preschooler to eat his dinner, then you are probably exhausted, frustrated, and desperate. This is the beginning of a beautiful relationship between you, your child, and food. You can relax now. You have all the skills you need to make mealtimes pleasant and devoid of pressure and anxiety. And even if it takes a few months or even a year before your child starts trying new foods and really liking them, it will be a year well spent. Your only job will be to provide healthy meals at specific times. You can leave the rest entirely up to your child.

Consistency

Okay, this one’s all up to you. Some parents are far better at being consistent than others, but it’s no mystery why most parenting books will tell you it’s one of the most important things when it comes to discipline and children. And it applies to food, too. If you are consistent, whether it’s with your household rules, chores, or consequences for behaviors, the children know exactly what their limits are. If you stray from your rules and consequences, even once, the child doesn’t know when she will get away with something and when she won’t. These are general guidelines, of course, and there are always exceptions.
However, one thing is clear: If you want your child to realize that you are the one who decides what and when he eats, you want him to know you trust him to be the one who decides how much or whether he eats at all, and you want him to know without a shadow of a doubt that you will not be his short-order cook anymore, you absolutely have to be consistent.

Here’s an example: You are currently caught up in a power struggle with your preschooler about treats, and you decide to implement the “one treat a day” rule. One rainy Sunday you are trying to get some work done, and your child keeps hounding you for a cookie. Now, he had his “one treat” after breakfast, and you know you shouldn’t give in, but you just want some peace, so you get up and tell yourself, “It’s only one cookie. It won’t kill him, for heaven’s sake. He’s a kid, and kids love cookies!” or whatever else you use to justify your lapse. You give him the cookie and think it should be fine. But you’ve just signed yourself up for a few more days of misery because your crafty kid is now thinking, “It’s not really a ‘one treat a day rule.’ Maybe some days it is, but when Mom’s busy and she wants me to leave her alone, she might give me one… or if she’s distracted…or if she’s happy and feeling generous….” In short, the rules don’t mean a thing because sometimes you break them yourself.
You will see progress much more quickly if you stick to the program as firmly as you possibly can. The more you give in and cater to your child, the longer it will take for him to start eating on his own.

FIVE “DO AND DON’T” REMINDERS

Do
1. Offer nutritious food
2. Have at least one sit-down family meal a day
3. Have planned, healthy snacks halfway between meals
4. Offer the “one treat a day” rule to discourage eating dinner to get dessert
5. Let your child determine how much and whether she eats at all

Don’t
1. Bribe, threaten, coax, plead, or disguise food
2. Prepare special meals for your child if she doesn’t like what you’re having for dinner
3. Offer snacks throughout the day, even if your child didn’t eat much during mealtime
4. Engage in arguments or negotiations about food with your child
5. Don’t give up!