Mealtime

 
There are many horror stories that abound regarding children and mealtime.  They encompass stories about children who will only eat specific types of food, children who throw tantrums while eating their food, and more often, and the extent of frustration that each parent feels when they are unable to get their children to eat.

Every parent has a natural and, almost instinctive, need to feed their children properly and adequately.  In fact, our society demands it of parents, and the peer pressure is enormous.  So there is a great deal of emphasis placed upon the parent to feed their children properly.

As a consequence, I often find that there are many parents who take up this challenge with zeal and enthusiasm that would make any Olympic champion proud.  Unfortunately, taking the bull had a gate approach is not always a guarantee of success.  Even more unfortunately, it usually brings about the exact opposite of the goal of the parent.

Coaxing children to eat is a sophisticated process that is best achieved by those who do not try to hard.  Sometimes, we simply can rely on nature to be the motivating factor in encouraging how children to eat.  Specifically, hunger can certainly encourage many a child to eat their dinner!  However, the likelihood of a successful meal being eaten is significantly reduced if the mealtime is at a bad time, or the child has been fed sweets or other lollies before they are having their main meal.

Further, children are unlikely to be good eaters if they are not trained to eat a wide variety of food early in their lives.  In fact, to give you a good example of how effective training children to eat can be, of observed the reaction of your children next time you go past a McDonald's restaurant.  That cute little toys in the meal has no nutritional value, but it sure is a very good training tool!

And, as usual, this brings me to my point!  The most common reason that children are not good eaters at mealtime is because they had been trained not to be good eaters at mealtime!

Now this brings us to the problem of identifying how they been trained, and who has done the training? Well, a good candidate is one or both of the parents!  Oh, I should say that there is a very small percentage of children who do not eat well because they are suffering from illness or disease.  But, generally most eating problems that occur with children are related to the training that they have received by their parents, and other family members, at the dinner table.

So, my intention is to raise awareness in those parents have had difficulty with their children not eating, or not eating properly, that the problem may be more than the fact that the child is being "difficult".  The parent may be dealing with a child that has learnt that mealtime is a process of stress, confrontation, conflict and rebellion.  Hardly an environment conducive to appetite.

If you feel that you may fall into this category with your child, then have a think about what strategies you have been employing to correct the problem, and recognise that to date, those strategies have not worked! 

Think about it.

Mealtime - Part 2