I get ready to interview one of my heroes, Ellyn Satter, internationally recognized authority on eating and feeding and author of several books including Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense and Your Child’s Weight: Helping Without Harming. I wanted to find out what she thought the biggest feeding mistake parents make. So once we get talking, that is my first question.
“Not knowing how important they [parents] are,” she answers. “Children have the drive to grow up to be just like their parents.”
I knew that parents were important but never considered us the “most” important factor. What we talked about next made sense.
The Importance of Family Meals
Satter doesn’t push parents to eat or prepare ultra-healthy meals. Instead, she emphasizes family dinners as the holy grail of raising good eaters. “There’s too much guilt and anxiety with the virtue of meals,” she says. “Parents get caught up in the what of feeding when they really need to pay attention to the how.”
Satter asks busy parents to make only one change at first: eat together as a family. So whether they’re eating fast food or frozen meals, all they need to do initially is gather at the table. On her website, she has a step-by-step guide for serving family-style meals. And she makes the focus pleasure, not nutrition.
So her first piece of advice: start with the foods your family enjoys and build on from there. This doesn’t mean pleasure and nutrition can’t coexist, they definitely can. But Satter points out that if the meals you prepare aren’t rewarding, they won’t seem worth the effort.
Getting Kids to Eat Vegetables
In addition to being an internationally recognized feeding expert, Satter is also a mom of three (now grown) kids. When her daughter was little she wouldn’t touch a vegetable but Satter took it in stride. When she brought the topic up with other moms she found them in hysterics about their non-vegetable-eating kids.
“Don’t let vegetables be the deal breaker,” Satter says, leading to her second piece of advice for families. “Once family meals become a habit, naturally find ways to add more variety to meals, including vegetables.”
Satter says the best way to get kids to eat vegetables or any food for that matter is for parents to eat it and enjoy it themselves. Of course, she talks about the division of responsibility – parents decide the what, when and where of feeding and children decide the whether and how much of eating. She also explains the importance of “neutral,” repeated food exposure. The bottom line: kids do best when exposed to a variety of foods with absolutely no pressure to eat.
When Satter’s daughter hit early adolescence she took up a new hobby: devouring vegetables. She noticed everyone else in her family enjoying them and realized she was missing out. She is an avid-vegetable eater today not because her parents tricked her into eating greens, but because she got to the point where she wanted to eat them.
How to Handle Dessert
The next question I have for Satter is about sweet foods: how often should parents serve dessert? She says frequency isn’t as important as how it is served. Too often, she explains, dessert is the unspoken reward that kids’ can fixate on at mealtime.
To solve this age-old dessert problem, Satter advises parents to serve a single serving of dessert with the meal. “Some kids will save it, others will eat it first and some will eat it right along with the other food,” she says. She points out that this is the one time she deviates from the division of responsibility because she advises parents to only allow their kids a single serving of dessert.
“To avoid scarcity with sweet foods,” she adds, “Make sure there’s another time (snack time for example) when they can eat all they want of the item.”
Who eats dessert with dinner? Isn’t that crazy?
Let’s think about it. What this feeding strategy shows children is that sweet foods, already palatable and easy to like, are not such a big deal. They are just part of the meal like vegetables, grains, and protein.
Make Eating Well a “Want” Versus a “Should”
If you think about the nature of nutrition and behavior you can see how her approach makes perfect sense. We live in a culture where the “shoulds” of eating are all around us. Eat more fruits and vegetables. Watch sugar. And make sure you skip the tasty dessert at after dinner.
Yet despite all of this scolding, recent studies show only about 3 percent of Americans lead a healthy lifestyle. Let’s face it, it’s human nature to rebel against what you should be doing (kind of like cleaning out the sock drawer). If parents can learn to feed in a positive way, their children will grow into adults who eat nutritious foods not because they feel obligated, but because they enjoy eating them.
“The data is clear – pressure children to eat, and they’ll lose interest in food; restrict their access to palatable foods and they’ll become preoccupied with them,” Satter explains. “Just provide a variety of foods with structure, eat with your kids, and trust that they know exactly how much to eat.”
The Biggest Feeding Mistake
Parents can fixate on a child’s eating habits when they might be better off evaluating their own. Because often we project on our kids or own anxieties about food. For instance, restricting a child may be more about not trusting ourselves around sweets.
What stuck with me is what Ellyn Satter said at the beginning of the interview: “Children have the drive to grow up to be just like their parents.” Not knowing and acting on that is the biggest feeding mistake parents make.
I love the emphasis on time together and pleasure being associated with food. It makes me think of the French and how they supposedly take time to actually enjoy food more than Americans do (and how they aren’t as fat and live longer). That really would be a most valuable trait for children to garner from their parents. I spend too much time reading articles that are fixated on minor things regarding nutrition.
I agree Cindy. There have actually been studies showing that Americans worry more about their diet — and get less pleasure from eating — than other countries. I think the how of eating is totally overlooked in the obesity epidemic. I’m working on a post about this topic!
Regarding “trust the child will know exactly how much to eat,” How do you ensure then that when your child is eating at structured times due to school and social schedules that they actually eat enough? I don’t worry so much about dinner because I know from experience that young kids just don’t have the same appetite and attention for food at the end of the day, but if my kindergartner ate like your daughter did with the lamb lentil meal at lunch he would be too ravenous to learn how to read, write and follow the teacher’s instructions. When there are serious gaps in key nutrients (like satters daughter who didn’t eat veggies until adolescence or many kids who choose to eat little else besides starchy carbs) at what point do you go beyond “making the food available” and actually encouraging them with other methods that are effective before a decade passes, to eat a fair amount of what is served (enough so that performing at life isn’t compromised) when it is served (when the eater has little control over whether or not (s)he is hungry or wants to eat what is served when the meal is offered. I absolutely buy into the eat til you’re satiated philosophy, but I think kids do need help knowing how much is enough to last until the next meal, and teaching them how to eat when it’s meal time so they don’t miss a “fueling the body” opportunity by picking over the food they don’t prefer to eat.
Jenna,
Thanks for the comment/question. I think the take-home message of this interview is children learn to like a variety of foods by exposure and role modeling. Here’s a great review summarizing the research on food acceptance in children — http://www.bentham.org/cnf/sample/cnf3-1/D0005NF.pdf This doesn’t mean parents should never talk to their children about eating. I think it’s very reasonable to talk to your school age child about re-fueling at mealtime. My daughter still eats at home most of the time so she eats every 2-3 hours with regular meals and snacks.
The example of Satter’s daughter waiting to try vegetables is atypical but it demonstrates a point. Too many times parents worry about their children not eating vegetables so they use pressure. Studies show this makes children less interested in eating such foods. Also, it is possible for kids to meet their nutrition needs without eating vegetables. If parents serve a variety of fruits like cantaloupe that has both vitamin C and A, kids will be okay until their palates come around. Of course having children help with meal prep, shopping and other fun meal stuff may help them try foods earlier. As long as it stays positive I’m all for it.
As far as knowing when kids are really full that’s a tough one. I think if parents provide them with a variety of foods, many that they like and accept, we have to trust that they will get what they need. Of course we need them to eat at the table without distraction. Here’s a good post on knowing when your child is full from the site Dinner Together http://dinnertogether.blogspot.com/2009/10/are-they-really-full.html
If you want to talk further you can contact me directly. Thanks!
Hi,
Our son is a single parent of a soon to be 6 yr. old Evan, and the other granddad lives with them as the caregiver while he is at work. Both seem to be caring, and good at discipline, and Evan is a mostly good kid, and smart, but cases problems in school, and I wonder if that could be diet related that is a huge concern. Since a baby, he will only eat chicken nuggets, and french fries almost exclusively! Our son claims they try very hard everyday, every meal! He seems to be health, and energetic. Before school he was hardly ever around other kids, and has not had a mother figure hardly at all. Is there any suggestions I might pass to them? They now live in Corona, CA., and wonder if there might be some kind of help there for them.
Many thanks!