Many of you might have read my review of Ellyn Satter’s Secrets to Feeding a Healthy Family. If not, take a moment to check it out. If you have read the book or my review then you are aware that Satter presents the effects of parental restrictive mindsets towards foods, and how this may impact a child’s natural born intuitive eating skills. Being that I am an adult that has spent a lot of time adhering to food rules, I felt it important to give Satter’s recommendations a try to see if more peace could be had at our family table. We have three children, ages 10 and under, so realistically I would just be happy if there was generally less complaining about the food. I also wanted to enjoy my own meal without this constant urge to micromanage what everyone else is eating. You will be encouraged to know that Satter’s guidelines DID help in these areas, but implementing them wasn’t without some bumps along the way. It required me to stop looking at my children’s eating for today as 100% indicative of how they will eat when they are adults. Yes, habits are important to start at a young age, but I was taking a sprinter’s perspective of teaching these habits versus seeing learning to eat as a marathon. It was adding a lot of unnecessary anxiety over planning each and every meal.
Many of our behaviors are driven by our beliefs. Sometimes those beliefs are on point, and sometimes they can be way off base. When I really slowed down to examine the beliefs that were motivating my parenting strategies around food, I was a bit dismayed at what I found. Here were some beliefs that needed to be challenged:
- If I don’t make my kids try vegetables at every meal, they will never learn to like them.
- I can’t trust my kids to know when they have had enough.
- I can’t trust that my kids know what their bodies really need and what their hunger is telling them.
- If my kids grow up to be overweight or obese, it will be my fault for not teaching them to do better.
Can you tell I might have a little issue with control and trust? Not that it really surprises me. It is always there, it just manifests itself in different ways in different areas of my life. But, when I know better, I do better. So I started applying a bit of what I learned in my reading to our family mealtimes and snacks. Reading a book about how to change long-standing habits and ACTUALLY changing those habits are very different things. I thought it may be helpful for you to see how trying to implement a different set of rules really looked over the course of time in our family.
Cookies & Milk
Satter suggests that a balanced diet includes what she calls play food. Play food is better known by our culture as “junk” food or I guess if you are adhering to the “clean” eating mindset, it would be called “dirty” food. Satter encourages parents to offer milk and cookies as a snack at least once a week, and to offer an abundance so as not to set-off overeating because of food scarcity. I’ll admit, the thought of just setting a package of cookies on the table caused my heart to beat a bit faster. I imagined things going a bit like this:
As I placed the milk, glasses and package of Keebler M&M cookies on the table, I waited to see if my kids indeed could eat intuitively. My kids were astonished. In fact, my youngest exclaimed “This is the best snack EVER!” I told them they could have as much as they were hungry for. Mind you, the package had 21 cookies originally. The kids sat happily, while I tried to distract myself from what I was sure to be an epic glutton session. Imagine my surprise to come back to the table to find a couple half eaten cookies on the table, and 8 cookies left in the package, abandoned by my children as they ran outside together to play a game of backyard soccer. That’s an average of 4 cookies apiece, maybe less if counting the cookie remnants left on the table. I was pleasantly surprised. I may have originally limited the kids to 2 cookies, but I could accept 3-4 cookies if that meant there was no grumbling or begging for more and that my kids could actually walk away from the package satisfied.
Man Cannot Live by Bread Alone
So Satter encourages her readers to utilize the bread basket in mealtimes when there is uncertainty that any other food will be willingly consumed. I think she is in cahoots with my oldest child on this point as he LOVES bread. My husband and I have always tried to use the bread as a negotiation tool for getting our oldest to finish his serving of veggies or protein. Since this is a no-no in Satter’s book, we let go of holding the bread hostage. Much to my dismay, the first meal we allowed unmitigated access to the bread resulted in my son smugly consuming 5, yes that is 5 slices of bread only. Inside I was fuming, but I smiled and played along. My son was testing me to see if I would stick to the division of responsibility, which is me providing the food and him choosing what and how much to eat. Bread loving son scores 1 point, parents 0. HOWEVER, next meal resulted in only 3 slices of bread, and then low and behold his bread consumption normalized to only 1-2 slices of bread with subsequent meals. I think he realized that maybe he didn’t feel all that good when meals only consisted of bread, and once the rules were lifted, the forbidden aspect of the food no longer existed to entice him into overeating it.
This continued to happen in one form or another as time went on, but always seemed to resolve in a return to balanced consumption of a variety of food. Once I made a beautiful meal of pork roast, roasted carrots and broccoli, mashed potatoes and watermelon. Two of my three children turned their noses up at all presented except for the watermelon. They gleefully filled their plates with watermelon, and I let them despite the urge to push for more variety. They left the table after a couple of servings of watermelon, but it wasn’t long before they were back complaining of hunger. They were dismayed to find out they would indeed have to wait until the afternoon snack was offered a couple hours later. Then when the identical meal was presented the next day in form of leftovers, they again attempted to fill up only on watermelon. I observed a change in behavior this time around because after the first large helping, they soon decided that 1. The watermelon was kind of getting old to their taste buds, and 2. They could tell it wasn’t really going to satisfy their hunger. It was then they started to ask for helpings of the meat and the potatoes. Veggies still got rejected, but I knew they preferred their carrots raw rather than cooked so this really didn’t surprise me.
Asking for the Good Stuff
I was so encouraged one morning after a conversation with my oldest child when he came to the table for breakfast. His breakfast choice was a toaster strudel as it had been the day before. He was observing me cooking myself a couple of eggs and said “mom, yesterday I noticed that my toaster strudels didn’t really keep me full. I was pretty hungry by lunch time.” Aha! My opportunity for a little nutritional heart to heart had presented itself. In the past I may have encouraged him to discard the toaster strudel altogether, but recognizing that this food was enjoyable to him AND he didn’t typically eat it every single day of the week, I instead suggested that we add a little protein into the mix. “How about I cook you up an egg or two to go along with your breakfast because the protein will help you stay full longer?” He was all for it, and readily ate two scrambled eggs in addition to his beloved toaster strudel. Later that day when I picked him up from school, I checked in with him to see if he noticed his hunger as much by lunchtime. He happily reported he felt much better after adding the eggs.
Just Keep Eating….Just Keep Eating
Now some people would shake their heads at my parental choice of allowing my children access to foods that aren’t deemed as “healthy” or “clean”, but I’m trying to look at the bigger picture. My son is learning to pay attention to how his body feels when he eats certain things and not others. He is young and still learning. I loved toaster strudels when I was his age too. Now as an adult, I prefer my eggs and sprouted toast, not because I don’t love the taste of toaster strudels, but because I simply feel better when I eat the eggs and toast. I will continue to offer a variety of foods. I will model nutritious eating by the foods I consume and cook for family meals. I will refuse to label foods as “good” or “bad”, but instead as the gatekeeper of food in my home, present an overabundance of highly nutritious foods along with opportunities to enjoy play foods as well. I will look at this thing called learning to eat as a marathon and not a sprint. I will remember that I didn’t like tomatoes, or kale, or bean soup until I was an adult, and that there may be foods that my children may not like until they are adults as well. I will remember that sometimes my children will make mistakes with their food choices and sometimes those provide more of an impact than anything I could ever say as their parent. I will remember at some point, my children’s health and eating will be completely their own responsibility. For now, I’m going to do the best I can with what I know, realizing that it may or may not be enough and that only time will tell.
***DISCLAIMER: As a pediatric occupational therapist with 10+ years of experience in working with children that are “problem” eaters (accepts 20 foods or less) versus “picky” eaters (finicky but still accept a variety greater than 20 foods) I feel it is important to point out that Satter’s book has limitations that she herself acknowledges. If you suspect your child of having a sensory processing disorder, learning disability or on the autism spectrum, please seek professional help from a trained feeding therapist (typically Occupational or Speech Language Pathologists) in your area versus attempting the methods mentioned above based on Satter’s book. There are about 3-5% of children that do not have a good sense of innate hunger and will fixate on only 1 or 2 food groups, lacking the ability to accept a variety of foods. Feeding your child can be an extreme source of stress and frustration, please don’t struggle alone. You can find a qualified therapist listed near you at the SOS Approach to Feeding Website here: https://sosapproach-conferences.com/parentscaregivers/therapist-referrals/.