Food Parenting Behaviors: How Becoming a Good Feeder Will Help You Raise A Good Eater!
It might surprise you to know that your food parenting behaviors (your food-related choices and habits) have a huge impact on the relationship your child will develop with food!
As parents, we have so much influence over our kids. And even though this can be kind of intimidating to think about, it’s actually a great thing. With a little intention and the right tools in our toolboxes, we can do a lot to help them thrive as good eaters.
Today’s post is a list that I hope you’ll find helpful. It covers the best food parenting behaviors to adopt, the ones to limit, and the ones you should avoid altogether if your goal is to raise a healthy, happy eater. They were selected by me from a list of constructs researched in the article, “Fundamental Constructs in food parenting and practices: a content map to guide future research.”
Oh, and before we jump in, it’s important to note that most, if not all of these behaviors, come from the best of intentions. Our own experiences with food and the beliefs passed down to us from our families all play a part in determining how we “naturally” food parent our kids. But, that doesn’t mean we can’t make changes if we believe change is needed. So, as you read this post, I’d encourage you to reflect on your own food parenting behaviors and see if you want to tweak any of them. Know that it’s possible, it’s worth it, and your kids will benefit for years to come!
Food Parenting Behaviors to Adopt
(The Good Stuff!)
#1 Trust
Trust is the most important food parenting behavior to adopt when it comes to feeding! For a really healthy feeding environment, you need to have trust in your child and they need to have trust in you. And for your child to develop healthy eating habits for life, it’s crucial that they also trust themselves.
Teach your child to trust you with feeding by providing regular meals and snacks at predictable times, in predictable places, using a consistent feeding approach, with a variety of foods that they both enjoy and are learning to like.
Teach yourself to trust your child in feeding by remembering that they know what and how much they need to eat based on their unique biological needs. Practice trusting them by letting them make these decisions for themselves. By doing this, you also teach your child to trust themselves to eat according to their own hunger and fullness cues.
#2 Giving Choice
Allowing your child to choose what they eat gives them a sense of self-agency, which fosters trust and encourages your child to be an active participant in their own feeding.
As the parent, you’re responsible for making sure your child is well-nourished, so you can’t give up all control. But what you can do is give your child guided choice within age-appropriate limits. This way, you create a feeding environment based on shared decision-making, where your child gets to decide if, whether, and how much they eat. And, you still get to make sure you’re not giving them more freedom than they know how to handle.
An example of guided choice might be, instead of asking, “What do you want for dinner?” you instead give your child guided choices like, “Would you prefer broccoli or cauliflower for our veggie tonight?” or “Would you like long spaghetti noodles or short penne noodles for our pasta tonight?” This choice should be reduced to two options. Giving a child much more choice than that gives them a false sense of how much say they have in the matter (especially if/when it is something you are unable to then make/offer), which often blurs the lines of whose job it is to ultimately decide what is offered. Should your child have a menu request for a dinner (potentially in reply to your guided options, when they ask for something entirely different), you don’t need to cater to it in that moment or justify why that isn’t on the menu. Instead say, “These are our options for tonight. Let’s put [the requested food] on the menu for next week]!” This again supports considerate, responsive feeding while maintaining appropriate expectations on who’s job it is to ultimately decide what is being offered when.
#3 Sticking to a Routine
It’s important to create an environment that allows your child to both practice great mealtime habits and promotes eating competence through regular, routine eating opportunities. Setting up a mealtime structure that’s safe and predictable creates a “window of opportunity” where your child can begin to thrive more in their relationship with food (and your family, particularly if mealtimes used to be tense). By preventing grazing during the rest of the day, regular meal and snack routines help your child to develop appetite regulation. This helps them to eat better at meals and overall, have better growth than when they are allowed to eat on demand or graze all day.
For more on feeding structures and routines, make sure you are on my newsletter as this is an entire blog post coming soon! Sign up here.
#4 Modeling
Kids are always watching what we do. We know this because often they’re literally watching us (even when we could use a little privacy), and because sometimes they even mimic us, which is super adorable and super eye-opening! They want to be just like us and as lovely as that is, it’s also important to remember that they really are learning from our every move. That’s why when it comes to food, if we want our kids to practice good eating behaviors, we have to practice them ourselves.
You can demonstrate a healthy relationship with food in the food choices you make and the eating behaviors you practice. It’s worth taking the time to self-monitor in this area, because it has a big impact! Your child will benefit from copying the positive things you model through adolescence, and even into adulthood. If you haven’t already, consider your own underlying food-related anxieties from feeding yourself and/or your child. These are often the subconscious guiding how you feed your family and self. Additionally, you can consider your own eating competence to identify ways to further develop in your own relationship with food (so that you can further model a healthy relationship to your kids!).
#5 Providing Variety
This one is seemingly nice and simple. As parents, our job is to make different types of foods available to our children. This includes making available known preferred foods while also exposing them to foods that may be non-preferred. Even though it’s straightforward, this behavior’s power is in the mindset it creates around food: having a wide variety in your child’s diet shows them that their favorite foods are available regularly, which can reduce stress around food if they’ve ever felt restricted. Having foods that they have yet to learn to like also available further shapes a mindset that we can all adapt our eating habits and adopt new tastes for new foods over time.
#6 Giving Access
Give your child access to a variety of foods. Expose them to lots of foods they love, and even to the ones they like, and are still learning. It will come as no surprise that I want you to make lots of healthy options available, but you may not expect to hear that you should also make their preferred, less-nutritious foods accessible from time to time. While we do not want to retreat to endless access of “forbidden foods” like sweets, treats, or high-fat foods, there is a happy medium we can achieve will giving regular, reliable chances to enjoy such foods (as Ellyn Satter Institute shares more on here).
#7 Prepping Food
Feeding can be stressful, and trying to concoct the perfect meal or snack when everyone’s already hungry doesn’t help. Practice giving yourself the gift of preparing and cooking meals in advance as much as possible. This way, you can plan, prep and make simple, healthy, and balanced meals and snacks when you have energy. Even if done in short stints of time or to complete simple steps like making a marinade in advance or prepping veggies for dinner, small steps to prep in advance will give you back much sanity in the moment! If finding time is a challenge, consider if and how you could involve your child in this behavior as well. Having them help prep food gives them a valuable opportunity to learn to like elements of the foods being prepared in advance of the table!
#8 Involving Your Child
As much as you can, practice involving your child in all aspects of feeding and eating. Think of ways you can include them during meal planning, grocery shopping, meal prep, and mealtimes. This is so beneficial because just like with choice, it gives your child a sense of shared decision-making. It also gives you the chance to pass down family traditions and gives your child the chance to become more familiar with new foods alongside you. (They’ll be much more likely to try a new veggie if they picked it out themselves and chose a recipe to use!)
Food Parenting Behaviors to Avoid
(The Not-So-Good Stuff)
#1 Lack of Structure or Expectations
Unstructured practices don’t help you succeed in feeding. In fact, they hold you back. Without structure, both you and your child are often working with a moving target. You as the parent don’t gain insight on your child’s true feeding habits because so few things about eating of the food being offered are habitual. Are they tired? Over-hungry? Didn’t prefer what was offered and were asking for something else? Unsure what was expected of them at the table? A combination of all these? This creates unnecessary stress and confusion for the parent.
Kids also do better with routines and an understanding of what’s expected of them - including at the table. Think to how your child’s school can keep all those kids in line and confined for an entire snack or meal. The routine of meals and snacks is clear, as are the expectations of them during those eating times.
So save yourself from the drama of unstructured feeding practices (as explained in greater detail here). Instead, explore how added structure can actually help versus make things in your and your child’s feeding relationship harder.
“Many of the behaviors parents struggle with most at mealtimes stem from a lack of structure.”
#2 Restricting Foods
I totally understand that it usually comes from wanting to control how much unhealthy food your child eats, and I know as a parent your intentions are good with this one! But it’s important to realize that restricting almost always leads to an increased interest, or even an obsession, with those foods. This may compel your child to overeat them in the long run.
This kind of excessive restriction with your child’s access to certain foods, or their opportunities to consume such foods, is problematic for a couple of reasons. One, the initial assumption and underlying concern is how such “forbidden foods” can impact weight (since many tend to be high-calorie and yet nutrient-poor). However, the other side of the coin that is equally if not more important to also consider is how restrictive feeding behaviors can cause children to become mentally obsessed with such foods. In attempts to consider the whole child, a mental pre-occupation with any food (be it a “healthy” option or not) can create an unhealthy relationship around such foods with or without their weight status indicating an issue. This reflects the other angle of the issue from a mental health and eating disorder prevention standpoint of wanting to equip kids with an eating competence towards all foods.
To do this, you want to find ways to include such foods into your family’s diet in a way that drives eating competence. This isn’t a black and white approach, but rather one that takes you tuning into the “forbidden foods” your child cares most about with the intent of driving intuitive eating and intrinsic self-regulation around such foods. Then, make an effort to make these regularly available rather than restricted. This can help to put trust back into the feeding relationship around foods that historically might have been obsessed over, binged on, or excessively restricted.
“Restricted children eat more high-calorie snack foods and are fatter than children who are allowed regular access the those foods.”
#3 Pressuring Your Child
As I mentioned above, the best thing you can do for your child is to help them trust themselves around food.
By insisting, demanding, or physically struggling with your child to get them to eat a food, or more food, you’re ultimately interfering with their self-regulation and intrinsic motivation to eat. Instead, practice trusting them to decide if/whether and how much they eat. This is reviewed in more context when discussing different food parenting approaches, such as those that use pressure and force as frequent behaviors to drive the feeding relationship.
#4 Threatening or Bribing
Similar to pressure, threats and bribes undermine your child’s internal motivation around food. They might get your child to eat in the moment, but they also encourage the mindset that if there’s no external benefit to eating something, then there’s no reason to eat it. Often times what parents see is that with threats or bribes, their child does eat “better.” However, when the threat or bribe is removed, their child eats worse. This often suggests that the threat or bribe is interfering with your child’s ability to develop eating competence and is thus, best avoided. Additionally, this form of behavior management can undermine internal forms of motivation for your child to eat healthy foods and instead increase preference for the food used as a reward. An excellent podcast on the subject can be found here.
Instead, parents ought to consider if and how food has historically been used as a reward. Since food should not be a transaction of, “if [this], you can have [this],” families need to transition to more of an authoritative feeding approach that utilizes more appropriate internal and external motivations to eat.
#5 Using Food to Control Negative Emotions
Emotional eating is fairly common in adults, but it is easy to see where we begin to set the stage for this early on. When you use food to manage or calm your child when he or she is upset, fussy, angry, hurt, or bored, it can use food for non-nutritive purposes. While food has many values outside of how it nutritionally breaks down in our bodies such as through nostalgia and family togetherness to being a token used at special celebrations, we want to ensure that we are not using food in a way that promotes emotional eating.
Food Parenting Behaviors to Limit
(The Maybes)
Interestingly, there’s research to both support and counter the arguments for each of the following behaviors. Since there’s no clear right or wrong in the research as it is now, I’ve outlined the behaviors themselves, along with any considerations I want you to take note of, and recommendations for if and how these behaviors can be used to support healthy eating habits in children.
#1 Monitoring
Monitoring your child’s growth and feeding habits is a good thing! It encourages balance and variety in a way that promotes growth and development, without becoming too obsessive. Tracking your child’s growth and development in relation to their age, and keeping tabs on the foods and behaviors that seem to help them make healthy choices are all things I would encourage you to keep doing!
Considerations
Monitoring mainly becomes an issue when it’s done in excess. It often stems from a parent being over-protective out of some feeding-based fears or underlying anxiety. Although some of these are more founded than others, over-monitoring our child’s intake is often counter-productive and can create perceived pressure.
My Recommendation
Track your child’s growth and diet in a high-level, general sense, but avoid monitoring their every bite each day. I will be sharing more on this in coming weeks as we discuss The Division of Responsibility (sDOR) and Growth (as well as another post on sDOR and Appetite!).
#2 Encouraging
Gently suggesting specific foods to your child can serve as a prompt for them to eat. In this case, encouraging can be a good thing.
Considerations
However, encouraging can also be interpreted as pressure. Some children, particularly picky eaters, are more likely to shut down instead of opening up when encouragement is used.
The recent publication, Anxious Eaters, Anxious Mealtimes, also shares how parents might be more effective in “encouraging children to try more foods, using food trying skill training, encouraging words, choices and novelty when making the offer.” This resource, however, shares throughout the examples and insights given that there is a difference between encouragement that offers and asks and that which demands, stating that the more appropriate “active encouragement” is “an ask with a choice.”
My Recommendation
If your child is sensitive to food encouragement, or if you just want to be cautious about it, offer food without saying anything at all (beyond the words you use to actually offer it). This can be the better option because it prevents you from saying too much, using a tone of voice that feels pressuring, or interfering with your child’s own internal motivation to eat.
#3 Praising
It might be surprising to learn that praise isn’t always a good thing. When used correctly, it may positively reinforce kids’ willingness to learn and explore. But used incorrectly, it can leave kids, particularly those who are apprehensive eaters, feeling this way:
“Too many of our anxious eaters unfortunately get the impression that they are less, inadequate, wrong. If praise, by definition, suggests approval, worries eaters can feel that they are disappointing us meal after meal and constantly being judged. Praise can focus on the right or wrongness of the eating, the goodness or badness, the pride or disappointment, the perfection rather than the process. When children eat for praise, they are eating to please YOU and not to satisfy their physiological needs or enjoyment value. The motivation becomes external, even though we were aiming for internal!””
Considerations
If using praise, do not tie your child’s worth to whether they eat or don’t. Using phrases like “you’re a good boy,” or “you’re a good girl” implies that whether they’re good or bad is conditional, and suggests that they themselves are either good and capable, or bad and incapable. Additionally, this can create challenges when one child is praised and a sibling is not. What does that say about the other child who is without the praise? Are they not as good? Do they bring their parents less pride in eating? We want to avoid praise being used as a form of potential pressure.
My Recommendation
Praise the process, not the person. Process-focused praise can increase your child’s acceptance of new foods, and it creates positive reinforcement for their involvement in the process of eating.
You can (and should!) praise your child’s willingness to learn new things. Things like allowing a new food on their plate, touching it, tasting it, or even deciding they’re still learning to like it (and ultimately not eating it) can all fall under this category.
“Avoid tying your child’s worth to whether they eat or don’t.”
#4 Giving Nutrition Education
Nutritional education can help children to make informed choices about the foods they eat, especially as they get older.
Considerations
Although there are some benefits in certain situations, in general, most of the nutrition-based information that parents share with their children is not age-appropriate. This is problematic because kids just can’t grasp the concepts, and not understanding or knowing how to use the nutrition-related information may do more harm for them than good. Usually, there is usually too much nutrition talk happening at the table and not enough “education” happening away from it (where it can actually have the greatest impact!).
My Recommendation
It’s best to avoid talking about the healthfulness of foods, especially as a way to reason or pressure your child to eat (or avoid) them. Instead, expose your child to what a healthy diet is, and let them learn from experience. This is far more effective than trying to have and use “the right words.” Rather than tell them what is healthy, SHOW THEM.
#5 Reasoning
It’s common for parents to try and reason with their kids, telling them why they should or shouldn’t eat certain foods. Sometimes this takes the form of nutrition education, but it also shows up as referring to some foods as “bad” and some as “good,” or really anytime we try to “get our kids to eat” the way we want them to.
Considerations
We don’t yet know all of the impacts and implications of reasoning on our kids’ relationships with food. However, we do know that reasoning may cause children to subscribe to the belief that foods that don’t taste good require reasoning (“Eat your broccoli because it’s good for you!”), whereas foods that taste good don’t require any reasoning at all.
Studies summarize, “There is some evidence that reasoning is associated with increased fruit and vegetable intake, but less evidence that it is associated with decreased sweet and snack intake.”
This is partly due to the way reasoning is used between households. Since many parents select their own reasoning for why their child should eat a given food or way of conveying such reasons with their child, the manner in which this behavior is murks the overall efficacy of if and how reasoning is best used (or avoided).
My Recommendation
Avoid describing healthy foods as “good” and unhealthy ones as “bad.” In general, avoid anything done with a tone, intention, or motivation of “getting your child to eat.” Instead, focus on talking about a food’s attributes in ways your child will understand (their shape, texture, taste, origin, etc.), which has a better chance of helping your child learn to like them.
#6 Negotiation
While research is unclear on exactly how negotiation impacts a child’s long term diet, it seems that in some cases, negotiation can be a good thing. Some families are successful in coming to an agreement about what or how much the child will eat. When this happens in a calm and respectful way, it may actually supports a child’s eating autonomy. It leaves space for the child to express their desires and preferences for if/whether and how much they will eat.
Considerations
That said, not all negotiations are created equal. If in your house, negotiations tend to involve pressure or if they cause conflict, they’ll probably make your child even less willing to eat on their own.
My Recommendation
Any negotiations that create conflict at the table (i.e. a three bite rule or no thank you bite) are best avoided. More often than not, they derail families who’d be more effective and potentially less counter-productive with a Division of Responsibility in Feeding approach.
Ready to make a change?
Changing our parent feeding behaviors is tricky, but it’s totally possible. And, you don’t have to go it alone!
If you find yourself falling back on the less-ideal behaviors we covered in this post, my “What To Say When” script will help give you suggestions for responses to use instead-- ones that support healthy eating habits in children and what behaviors we as parents can do to support them.