Feeding Roles

Sticking to our own feeding roles can be challenging. If we stick to our feeding roles, we can avoid some of the battles and stress of feeding.

What are the feeding roles?

‘How’ we feed our children is summarised with the ‘feeding roles’. The feeding roles are the roles our child and us (parent/carer) need to be in charge of in feeding.

Neither you nor your child should have any say in the others role. This is really important to stick to in your child’s feeding journey. 

Parents and carers decide…
Which foods to provide
When and where food is served (mealtimes).

Our children decide…
Whether to eat any of the food provided or not
How much they’ll eat from food served
Which foods to eat from food served. 

These roles don’t change until our children move into their teenage years, become more independent, spend more time away from home and start controlling all the feeding roles. By then, if you’ve both stuck to these feeding roles, you’ll have given them a great start. 

If we stick to our feeding roles, we can help our child to grow up…

• eating the right amount of food for their growth and development
• eating a greater variety of food
• having a better relationship and more enjoyment of food.

  

Parents decide which foods are served up

We (parents) are in charge of which foods to provide children and therefore we decide the nutrition. We have the best knowledge of nutrition and foods to provide. 

Your child just isn’t qualified to be choosing the menu! Children are more likely to choose foods that are less challenging in taste and texture, easier to chew and higher in salt, fat and sugar. Children need to learn to eat what adults eat.

We can sometimes worry about their eating when they reject food. If we then provide a different food that we know they’ll eat… they are choosing the menu and taking over our role.  

A great example of letting children be in charge of the ‘WHAT to eat’ is the kids menu at restaurants and cafes. The kid’s menu is often full of less challenging foods, less variety and is usually poorer in nutrition content than the adult’s menu.

Children will often only eat familiar foods that are less challenging, while leaving other foods on the plate. Choose a mix of foods they know and have eaten before, while exposing them to some new foods they are still getting used to. 

Its important children learn that you won’t provide them another food if they reject the food you’ve served them.

We do need to make sure there is an ‘accepted food’ that our child eats regularly on the plate. We can then feel better about not offering an alternative if they haven’t eaten much. Sometimes they just don’t get their favourite foods!

Parents are in charge of setting the mealtimes

Adults decide when meals and snacks are provided. This allows children time to get hungry and then leave the meal satisfied. A regular and consistent mealtime routine helps children know they can rely on meals being provided. They can then eat enough at each meal until they are satisfied.

If children are allowed to decide when they are served food, eating will become continuous and unpredictable, as they graze over the day. This adds to your workload, they are less likely to eat meals, nutrition suffers, and it is more difficult for them to learn about hunger and fullness. For more information visit structured meals and meal environment.

Feeding children whenever they want just adds to our workload… We can do without that!

Children control their eating 

They might eat… they might not 

After we have served up, we leave them to eat without pressure. We don’t give any encouragement or guidance on what to eat from their plate, aside from help them cut foods up or help in other ways. 

If our child…

Doesn’t eat or doesn’t eat much… they may not have felt like eating… they’ll get another opportunity to eat at the next meal.

If they only eat from one food group… They will gradually increase the variety they eat at future meals, as they get familiar with the new more challenging foods.

When the roles get mixed up

It’s very common for parents/carers to try to get children to eat foods they haven’t eaten. This is us taking over their role by pressuring them to eat more. We can also control their eating by restricting how much they eat. These are both likely to have the opposite effect to what we want to achieve. 

We can run into problems such as: 

Short term

• Greater stress at meals (for you and them).
• Becoming a ‘fussy eater’.

Long term

• Losing the ability to know when they are full.
• Eating less variety of food.
• Eating a less nutritious diet.

You may not notice the progress in your child’s eating, but they will be increasing their skills, courage and food variety over time.

It is neither a good nor a bad thing whether our child eats or not. We need courage and trust when they seem to eat too little (our opinion!) and when they seem to eat too much (our opinion again!). 

Our bodies are very good at letting us know when we are hungry and full. Constant interfering, by asking children to eat when they no longer want to, can disrupt this. Out child eating when hungry and stopping when full, is something we want to protect. Always allow children to decide when to stop eating.

For a more detailed look of parents the impact of parents taking over the child’s role go to ‘Avoiding pressure to eat’ and ‘Food Restriction’. 

 

References