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Transcript of “Stop Making Mealtime a Challenge”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I’m going to be answering a question about challenges around mealtime with our children. And what I hope to do is offer a perspective that helps take this challenge off of our plates, so to speak. We have enough challenges as parents as it is, and mealtimes don’t need to be a challenge.

Okay, so this question came to me on Facebook:

I’m hoping for some instructive insight. Mealtimes continue to be a challenge. Here’s a new one with our 27-month-old: he now refuses to come to the table and sit down in his chair during mealtimes. We’ve tried to let it be and pack up his food if he doesn’t come back again later, but he ends up hangry. So now we are feeding him basically through distraction at the windowsill and following him around the park or in his yes space while he’s playing, etc. When we do that, he finishes his entire meal, so clearly he is hungry. But I absolutely hate the fact that that’s what we have to do. Perhaps we can be more consistent with limit-setting, but when he gets hangry, it’s so difficult to get anything done.

Thanks so much.

So yes, this sounds like a kind of a cycle that’s happening between them. And it’s hard to say how it started exactly, but I’ll get into some specific advice for this parent and some thoughts about what they’re doing now.

But first, I want to try to give some advice that’s as simple as possible. Because I know that that helps me as a parent when I have a challenge and it helps other parents, I think, that I work with when we really bring it down to the basics. Mealtimes ideally never have to be a challenge. There need be no challenge involved. And the key is knowing what is our job in regard to eating and mealtimes and where our child needs to be trusted to do their job. And then from there, the only challenge is to keep staying in our lane and trusting.

And I know that trust around eating, it can be a big challenge for some of us. So that’s basically the job, is to really trust our child’s instincts around eating. Trusting them to listen to that message that only they can hear about their appetite, about satiation and what types of food they want to eat. That’s a message that we don’t control and only our child hears and that we want to encourage. And it can be kind of a delicate message that we, without meaning to, can get in the way of. We can muffle the message.

And that’s basically it when it comes to encouraging healthy eating and being able to avoid doing what, as this parent says, is hating the fact that she has to follow him around with food. We don’t want that job, right? Well, the good news is that’s not our job and we don’t have to take it on. And I’m going to be explaining why and what to do instead.

Our job is to set up the situation with expectations and rituals about the way we want mealtimes to go. That’s how we set ourselves, the whole family, and our kids up for success. And then letting go of the rest and employing trust in our child, because children need to be able to navigate the message that only they can receive about their hunger and satiation. First we’re going to talk about the “cure” for this issue and what trust and staying in our lane looks like. And then I’ll explain how what this parent is currently doing is perpetuating and maybe even adding to their problem, obviously unintentionally.

So how do we set ourselves up for success? We create rituals. Like the number one that I firmly believe in is sitting down. Because that encourages focus, mindfulness around eating, helping our child to be able to focus on that message that their body is sending them, which can get muffled when we’re multitasking. We’ve all probably heard the studies that we do everything less well when we’re multitasking. Well, that’s especially true for young children. They are much more easily overstimulated and distracted. And so if we want them to be able to eat in a healthy manner and get all the nutrients they need at that time, then we want to eliminate distractions, if we can help it. There will be some that we can’t help, like their siblings, what they’re doing, and what other children are doing in the park or whatever. But we can start the habit of sitting. Sitting is also a safety measure. When our child is running around or playing while they eat, they can choke. We don’t want that to happen. On top of that, we’re teaching basic manners when we ask children to sit down while they’re eating or drinking, and we start this ritual as early as possible.

So our child is sitting down and staying sitting down until they’re done. And no throwing food, no playing with food, other things that show that our child is too distracted and they’re not paying attention to what’s happening in that moment. And it might be just for two minutes that they’re eating or one minute, but at least for that amount of time, we’re helping them to form the habit of paying attention and being present while they do that. So if we find our child is playing with food or throwing it down, we can start early with receiving that as a message—which it almost always is, at least at first—that our child is showing that they’re done, that those moments of wanting to eat have passed.

And yes, our child might explore this with us in the beginning. Oh, what am I allowed to do while I’m eating? That’s really healthy learning for them. And ideally we want to be responsive with a clear message, not an angry message or an annoyed message, but just a clear response. “Oh, I don’t want you to throw when you’re eating. That shows me that you’re done. Are you done?” And then just asking that question will give our child the chance to answer, even when this is an 11-month-old child.

Children when they’re even 10, 11 months, almost as soon as they’re able to sit independently (meaning get into the sitting position all by themselves), they are capable of sitting down, staying in one spot while they’re ingesting food. Not for 10 minutes before and then 10 minutes after or hanging out and dining with the family. No, we can’t expect them to be able to do that because they can be, especially some children, they want to be on the go, so they’re not going to just stop everything and sit there. They want to get up and do the next thing. But it is perfectly reasonable to expect that while they’re putting that food in their mouth, they’re sitting. Maybe it’s on our lap, maybe it’s in the park on the grass, maybe it’s outside on a step, in a child-sized chair with a small table, in a high chair. All we ask is that they stay sitting and that they’re showing that they’re actually in eating mode, not playing mode. And that’s it.

And then we offer food that we’ve deemed healthy for our child, in small portions of each so they don’t get overwhelmed. And maybe we have an extra container on the table or containers for children to be able to get more of the foods that we’re comfortable with them having more of. That can go a lot of different ways depending on how we feel about it. But sitting, if we make it consistent, that is a habit that I highly recommend.

However, like all rituals and rules, we have to believe in them. So if you don’t believe that kids should have to sit while they’re eating or it feels too strict for you, don’t do it. Do what you believe. I will tell you that from many years of experience with children ranging from the most active and distractible temperaments to the calmer and more centered types, they can all do this. They can sit for the entire time they’re eating, if we have that calm conviction in this ritual and belief in them and we’re consistent with it. Especially in the first few years while it’s becoming a habit, that’s when children kind of need it to be as consistent as possible, whatever we decide our rituals are. And then after that, we’ll find that our children actually want to sit while they’re eating or they want to recreate whatever rituals that we’ve given them.

And I’ve found that it’s easier to be so consistent that even when our child is drinking water, they’re sitting for a moment with that glass or that bottle of water. But of course, that’s up to you. Some people don’t take it to that extent and that’s fine. My goal is to make it as easy as possible for children to learn something, for it to just be what we do. So it’s not this rule every time that feels like a big deal to ask of our child. It’s just what they consider the norm. And then all we’re doing is we’re having that drink, we’re having that food, and being together, socializing maybe, but we’re not playing while we’re eating or running while we’re eating, etc.

And then when we offer the food—like in this parent’s case, she said her child won’t come to the table—I would take care to present the food as a, I mean, we could say it’s a privilege. Not try to push it, because children tend to read our agendas a mile away and some are more sensitive than others to them. It won’t do us any favors, it won’t help us get what we want, and it creates more challenge when we try to assert an agenda around even our child eating dinner. Instead, making it a program of attraction where we offer it and we have the ritual, we have the habit of this being for a limited time, so our child expects that. It’s dinnertime. We have your food for you right here. We hope you’ll join us or I hope you’ll join me.

Helping our child into a high chair if we’re using that. I like the small tables because the child will literally come over and sit in the seat or they’ll sit on the floor. In the beginning, with very young children, like 10-, 11-, 12-month olds or even 14-month olds, I like to use these breakfast-in-bed tables—I have these on my website if you want to find them—that have little legs that fold out. And that can make the perfect-sized table when we’re just giving our child a one-on-one meal or maybe there’s another person sitting there, but we’re not eating a big dinner all together.

Just offering them their food and helping them get into that habit of, You get to decide if you’re hungry and you get to decide when you’re done. We trust you. You know yourself best. That’s a message that will take us very far in the right direction. But it’s a hard one, I know, because we worry as parents, right? So, presenting the food in a positive way for a limited time. Join us or not. If you’re not hungry, you don’t have to. And then from there, the mealtime has really nothing to do with us. It’s between our child and their tummy. We’re letting our child decide how much they want to eat and we’re leaving it at that, trusting our child to handle the eating part of mealtime. Because anything else we try to do can create challenges. There needn’t be any struggles at mealtime. And usually, if we think about it, the struggles come from our worries or our agendas. Understandable, right? But they’re going to get in our way.

We’re going to notice that our children’s appetites and tastes shift naturally. They’ll go through phases where they don’t seem to be eating very much or they’re just eating one food group, it seems. Trust these phases. And we can still offer other options on their plate, but at least one “safe food,” as Ellyn Satter calls it. I really like that term, she was a guest on this podcast. And the safe food is one that we know that they like. So if they only eat that safe food, we trust that. And it’s that trust that allows children to pass through all their personal eating stages and tastes.

So, that’s the model I recommend: setting ourselves up for success with some basic rituals and rules. And just to tell you, I have an extremely active youngest son. I always felt like if he could sit while he’s eating, any child can. And I have children in my classes, active children, and they’re literally sitting there. I don’t ask them to, but they know I’m going to be serving snack in the classroom, we’re going to be having these rituals together. And they love them. They will actually sit on their stools around the snack table where we all have snack together, and all we have is banana in our classes, and they will sit there and wait for me to bring everything over. They’re not asked to come sit until they want to eat something, and then I ask that they please sit. What they get to do is they get to choose a bib, they get to wash their hands with a wet washcloth, they each wipe their hands. And then they sit waiting while I offer each child a piece. And sometimes they’re sitting there waiting for a bit. They do it, they show this incredible patience, because that’s how much children love familiar rituals. And an adult who cares enough to believe that they can rise up to these rules and rituals. Sometimes they’ll check it out and they’ll try to get up, and I’ll stop them gently, I’ll put my hand on their shoulder and say, “Ooh, it looks like you want to get up. Are you done?” And then right there, they’ll make a choice, very clear, that they’re done or they’re not done.

And I always recommend with parents when they haven’t been consistent with these kinds of rules, that they try it with snacks first, where they’re not invested and worried about their child eating enough. Because if your child won’t sit and starts to leave when they’re just having a snack, we can let go of that more easily, right? And that helps us practice trust at mealtimes.

But yes, this surprised me a lot, how much children seem to crave these familiar steps and somebody caring enough to not just sort of let them get away with silly stuff that they know isn’t what they’re supposed to do. This may have been one of the biggest surprises to me about this approach when I was first learning it, how beautifully it works. How we can trust children to be able to do this from a very young age, and the younger that we start, the easier it is for the child. But we can start later, it just takes more commitment on our part, more conviction. Calm conviction, happy conviction, none of it is heavy or stern or challenging to the child. We’re not trying to put them on the defensive. We’re just gently, kindly offering rules that will help them to stay safe, stay focused on their message from their tummies, have wonderful eating habits and manners that will take them far with other children and other families later on. Helping us to take this job off our plate of having to get food inside our child. This is a job we do not need to take on.

Now I want to talk about this family, where they’ve gone and how to shift this cycle that they’re in with their child. It sounds like, I don’t know if it’s both the parents, but they seem invested in their child eating a certain amount and feeling like it’s their job to get the food into him. They said, “he refuses to come to the table and sit down in his chair during mealtimes. We’ve tried to let it be and pack up his food if he doesn’t come back again later, but he ends up hangry.” So if they offered the mealtime very openly, just were offering it, “You don’t have to come if you’re not hungry.” I’m not sure if they did that, but that’s where I would start this.

And then if this certain amount of time has passed, maybe it’s 10 minutes if the parents are not eating themselves or maybe everybody’s eating, so you wait until you’re all done eating, and he still hasn’t come. And we haven’t repeated it to him, we haven’t nagged him in any way or pushed our agenda. Then let’s say he doesn’t come and now he’s hangry. That’s a tough one, right? That can happen when we are shifting a pattern, that our child has to keep finding out if this is really going to be true, are we really going to hold to this or are we going to be worried about him not eating enough? And then that may be the result, that he’s hungry.

And what I would do then is really try to allow him to share those feelings and know that while hunger may be a part of it, there’s something there that he probably does need to express about, I don’t know what, because I don’t know much about what’s going on in this family. But it could just be this dynamic that’s uncomfortable where he feels this pressure coming from us, or there are other things that he wants to take control of, that he needs to control, like the eating stuff. Maybe he’s felt too much of our agenda and he needs to resist that. There’s a reason that he has the feelings that go beyond hunger, so I would encourage him to share the feelings however he does. “Oh, now you didn’t get your food and now you seem really hungry or you seem mad.” And whatever those specifics are where he’s showing this feeling, you could talk about that a little. Not a lot of talking, really just accepting those feelings. And trying to trust that, just as with everything that I share here, when we accept the feelings, that’s how our child moves through to the other side. If we feel like we have to fix the feelings, Ooh, now we’ve got to make sure he’s going to eat enough that he doesn’t feel like this, and this is our job, we’re taking on this role that really doesn’t belong to us, that’s when we start the cycle where now we have to help him avoid a certain feeling. We’re taking that as our job, instead of allowing all feelings to be shared. It’s hard for me to explain because I don’t know how this is playing out with this family, how he’s showing his feelings, but I would accept that.

And then as soon as he’s done, even if he has a tantrum or this period where he does seem dysregulated, I wouldn’t rush to get him food then. I would wait until it passes, especially if it’s a tantrum. And then gently offer him something. Maybe not a formal, we’re all sitting down together for food again, but just, “Come, I have some food for you,” some kind of snack or something that you’re comfortable with him eating. “Would you like to sit on my lap?” Not urgently trying to change his feeling, but still helping him get something to eat, with that gentle requirement that he sits on your lap. “Okay, you want to sit next to me? I do ask that you sit. I know. You don’t want to sit. You really don’t want to sit. You seem so mad,” or whatever. Again, reacting to those specifics is always the safest thing. “You’re yelling at us, you don’t like that we said that,” or “You’re having such a hard time. When you’re ready, please come sit next to me,” or “Please come sit on my lap.”

But not letting go of the sitting. Because if we let go of the sitting and start doing what these parents have gotten caught up in, now we are changing the role and we’re changing his expectation. So the expectation is becoming, My parents will chase me around or make sure that they put food into me. And if we think about that, it really doesn’t make sense on any human or mammal level that our job is to make sure somebody gets enough food in them. That’s not going to be a working relationship and a workable approach to food. It’s not going to be a successful approach. Because whatever we do, of course, teaches our child something about what to expect. And in this case, expecting that I don’t really pay attention to food. It just comes to me, whatever I’m doing. And that becomes what he’s used to. So, that isn’t sustainable.

And they say they hate it. They can stop this any time by dialing back to calmly setting these rules, making eating something that’s available for a certain amount of time, that you welcome him to partake in, but you’re not pushing it. You’re not trying to get him to eat. And if you’re not trying to get him to eat, he can’t refuse, right? So the way this parent frames it is, “he now refuses to come to the table.” So if we’re not asking him to, he can’t refuse. If we’re offering it, he can choose not to, but that will help him go in a healthy direction.

Alternatively, if we let him know loud and clear, Here’s our agenda!, now you, as a child who’s developmentally inclined at 27 months to resist parent agendas, you’re going to switch into that resistant mode. Even if you don’t want to, even if you’re really, really hungry. This need to resist can be very strong in a child this age. That’s why people call it the terrible twos. But it can also be this incredible time of life, the development of will, the development of personality, of holding onto their autonomy. And they don’t have that much, but they do have it around what they put into their mouths. And they need to. So it’s not going to serve us or him to get in the way of that. We want to encourage his autonomy. “Do you want to come to eat? We’ve got some great food for you here.” Not trying to sell it, but, “It’s here for a little bit. Hope you’ll join us.” It’s okay if you don’t, that might be our subtext. Fine if you do, fine if you don’t. We trust you. If you’re hungry, you’ll come. And then he will reconnect with owning his choice and he will come.

But we have to clear out all this agenda stuff and also, at the same time, welcome his feelings in the transition. Because there will be feelings that come up for him as he’s now letting go of holding onto this kind of control with us that we’re doing anything to get him to eat. It’s not a comfortable feeling for him, but he’s gotten stuck there and we’ve gotten stuck there. So as he’s letting go of that, there will be feelings. I would be ready for them, I would welcome them. I would see them as part of the solution, not part of the problem. And help yourself not have to do these jobs that are really impossible for us and that get harder and harder the more we try to do them.

As we’re doing this transition, I would express it to your child, setting up beforehand the rules and rituals that we’re going to follow at mealtime. Maybe say, “We’re going to be having dinner in a few minutes,” and admitting, “We know that we’ve let you move around and we’ve tried these different things with you. We’re not going to do that anymore. That’s not healthy for you. So we expect you to sit for however long you want to be eating, and as soon as you’re done, please feel free to get up and go.” If he’s in a high chair, “We’ll help you down right away. If you get up during mealtime, though, we’re going to know that that means you’re done eating.” Be very clear ahead of time. This is for him, but it’s also for you to sink into feeling very comfortable in following through so you can get to that place where you really can let go and stick with your plan. You’ve been clear with him. You’ve done all the things that you need to do to be fair and clear. It’s not unkind, it’s very kind to help children with these kinds of dynamics. Allowing him to have whatever feelings he has, not trying to control those or fix those.

And then I would be paying attention to him during mealtime. Children at this age, they really do need our presence at mealtime to help them to stay focused. Sometimes a family meal doesn’t work as well at this age as it does for a four- or five-year-old. But paying attention regardless, even if there’s other people there, I would try to be paying attention to him, at least in this transitional period. And you can see when he starts to get up, remind him, “Oh, it looks like you’re trying to get up. Remember, we don’t want you to get up until you’re done. Oh, are you saying you’re done?” Then right there, we’ve got our hand gently on him, hopefully we’re close enough. And then he’ll clearly show us that he’s done or he’s going to sit down and eat some more. And even if he gets up all the way, we weren’t able to sort of hold him back in time and he gets up, I would definitely give him that one opportunity, especially in the beginning, to come sit down and eat some more. But not popping up and down like a jack-in-the-box. That’s going to get him stuck there, in testing that. So trust him, believe him, believe what he tells you.

Of course, he may get up before he is done again, because it’s been so different these other times and he needs to check this out again. So, if he does: “Okay, I’m going to help you get down. Thanks for letting us know you’re done.” There’s no reason to be mad at him. No reason to be disappointed in him or worried about him. He knows what he’s doing in terms of eating, we’ve got to believe that. All children do, it’s natural. And if he does get hangry, acknowledge: “Now you’re saying you want to eat. Wow, you’re really hungry now.” Even though it’s just a couple minutes after you left the table. But we don’t have to say that part, that’s just for us to know how many minutes since he left the table and that we accept that. He’s in learning mode and he’s relearning. “Oh, now you’re saying you’re really, really hungry. We’re not going to give you food again right now. In a few minutes you can come sit with me and get some food.”

And know that he really does know what he’s doing. Our honesty, being upfront, and following through, he can’t learn another way. And I know a lot of us get afraid and we worry, Oh, what if he was really hungry and he just forgot what he’s supposed to do?, but we had already given him that chance, we had reminded him. We have to believe that he is a bright guy who knows what’s going on and that this is what he needs to be able to learn. He’s not a bad guy, he’s impulsive.

If we can be 100%, or at least 60%, comfortable with how we’ve laid it out, then children get this gift of being able to learn a wonderful ritual that’s going to be a lifelong ritual around eating, and to be able to express feelings that are about more than not getting what they want in that moment. They’re about this power dynamic or this over-control that he feels in this area or something that we can trust. And we don’t want to keep teaching him to be distracted, to eat when he doesn’t even really know he’s eating, that he shouldn’t pay attention to life right now or be present with what’s happening to his body. And we can easily teach those things through our fear, I totally understand that and can relate to that. But then we end up actually creating the issues that we wish to avoid.

So let the feelings be, let him be hangry. When we’ve done our best to present food to him, we’ve been very clear, we’ve been very honest. “I know we used to do that. We’re not doing it anymore. We love you too much. This is our job, to do what’s best for you.” Let him do his job, you do your job. And know that a big part of his job at this age is not only to eat what he needs, but to express feelings. And young children are very, very good at this. And that you’re helping him by eliminating all these distractions of figuring out his dynamic with you, his dynamic with food, your dynamic with rules. Clarify it, simplify it, so he can feel free to eat and to sleep and to play and to be a little kid and not try to be the leader in these areas that aren’t going to work for him or for you.

I really hope some of this helps.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. And my books, No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame, and Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting, you can get them in paperback at Amazon and in ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and apple.com.

Thanks so much for listening. We can do this.

The post Stop Making Mealtime a Challenge appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Concerned About Your Child’s Eating Habits? Ellyn Satter Has Answers”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury welcome to Unruffled. Today I’m thrilled to welcome Ellyn Satter to the podcast. Whenever the topic of mealtimes and eating comes up, someone invariably mentions Ellyn, and what she calls the “Satter Division of Responsibility in Feeding.” Ellyn is an internationally recognized authority on eating and feeding. She’s a nutritionist, a family therapist who’s devoted her long career to uplifting the mealtime experience. Ellen’s teachings free parents and children from mealtime struggles and conflicts by helping us to reimagine and reshape our relationships with food. Simply put Ellyn changes lives. She’s an icon. So I’m honored to have her on the podcast to share a bit of her wisdom. Welcome Ellyn, thank you so much for being here.

Ellyn Satter:  Well, thanks, Janet. It’s a privilege to spend this time with you.

Janet Lansbury:  I’ve been aware of your work for a long time because parents have made me aware of it, which is wonderful. Whenever I post any perspective on feeding or eating or mealtime issues with children, invariably, at least several times in the comments, your name comes up, and people are linking to you. You are, I feel, a legend in my communities, and I know you’re internationally recognized as an authority in feeding and healthy eating.

So one of the things you’re most well known for is your Division of Responsibility in Feeding. I would love for you to share a little about what that is, why it matters and how parents can use this to have more pleasant mealtimes.

Ellyn Satter:  Yeah, well, I discovered the Division of Responsibility, I’d say 10 years into my career as an outpatient dietician at a private group medical practice. I had this mother and little boy, eight years old, kind of chubby, cute as a bug, referred to me and the referral note from the doctor was “weight issues.” Now, I don’t know what he meant by that. I suspect he meant this mother is preoccupied with weight, do something about it.

And at that point, I was coming off of being prescriptive with respect to what and how much children should eat. I definitely was clear that weight reduction dieting for children was bad and terrible and totally awful and I wasn’t going to do that, but I didn’t know what to do instead. And so I was sort of flailing about, talking about, food groups and she’d react. And she said, “Well, I’m doing that.”

And I talk about having meals and she said, “Well, I’m doing that.” And so it went on, and with everything, she said, “I’m doing that.” And she was getting madder and madder at me.

Finally, she said, “Well, what am I supposed to do? I have one at home who doesn’t eat enough. And I have this one in here, this little boy….” I mean, he’s totally cowed. He’s sliding down in his chair. He looks absolutely miserable. “…and I have this one who eats too much. So what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to get one to eat more? And the other one to eat less?”

Long silence.

Finally, I said, “Well, I don’t think it’s your job to get this boy to eat less and the other one to eat more. I think your job is the one you’re already doing. And that is doing a good job with choosing food for these kids, putting meals on the table. And after that, it’s up to them how much they eat and how they grow.”

Oh, she looked madder than ever. And I thought, holy smokes, is that really true? But it was the only intelligent thing I’d said that day. So I let it stand. And afterward, I started thinking about it and sort of applying the principle to situations with other children and reading the literature.

There were people out there who were doing research on feeding, and I realized that it was true that feeding children demands a division of responsibility: that the parents do the what, when and where of feeding. And they trust the child to do the how much and whether of eating.

Oh, and by the way, Janet, the little boy, he perked up, he looked interested for the first time all day, he straightened up in his chair. And I always figure that kids know. They are amazingly, instinctively wise and they know when something makes sense. And he was responding to that. He liked the sounds of that very much.

Janet Lansbury:  Empowering him to be trusted. And yeah-

Ellyn Satter:  Well, yeah, in my dreams, I mean, this is an example, I’m afraid, of advice that didn’t take. But if it had, it would certainly have been life-changing for him and his brother who was continually being pressured to eat more than he really wanted to eat.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. It works both ways. Yeah, trust is this powerful, magical thing that’s so simple in a way, but can be so challenging for us as parents. It’s very much centered in everything that I teach: trusting your child to be a competent person, trusting that they’re capable.

Ellyn Satter:  Exactly. And, that’s what I like about your work, Janet, among many things, is the whole idea of child competence. There’s so much that goes on today in the medical and nutrition world that is predicated on child deficit. “We have to get children to eat certain foods and if we don’t, entice or coerce them in some way, then they simply won’t. We have to get children to grow in a particular way because if we don’t, they’re going to be too fat or they’re going to be too thin.” And that’s just not true.

Children come sort of prepackaged with the desire to eat, the drive to eat as much as they need to to survive and to grow and to be healthy. They are hardwired with the desire to explore their world and master their world, and this applies to the food that’s in their world right along with everything else. If parents are enjoying their food and putting food on the table that they themselves enjoy, then the child is going to figure, well, this is what I’m going to learn to eat as well.

And so the parents don’t say a word about it, but they make this sort of tacit mastery demonstration. This is what it means to be a grown-up with eating. And the child sees that and thinks in his child’s mind: well, this is what I’m going to grow up to do and eat.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. And this is another aspect of your work that so closely aligns with everything I learned from my mentor Magda Gerber and everything that I teach — this authenticity that you talk about for us to not be, “oh, I love this wonderful broccoli. Look at this fun tree I’m going to eat!” and instead we can just put it out there and act natural and not have all this pressure on ourselves to try to make things happen and-

Ellyn Satter:  Oh right. And just enjoy it or if you don’t, you say, “Well, I don’t much care for broccoli, but mom enjoys it. And so it’s on the table and I’m going to try it a little bit in hopes that someday I enjoy it too.”

Janet Lansbury:  Right. And she’s not pushing it on me. Another thing I’ve found interesting is with the parents that I interact with, there seem to be kind of almost two types of parents around feeding and eating issues. There are parents that find it a very ho-hum topic. Like they don’t think twice about it and it’s just not a deal to them at all. And there are other parents who are very focused on it, very focused on what their child is eating. I mean, is there a reason for that? Is it our upbringing? Is it our culture? Do you notice this yourself that there are some people that just, it’s just totally natural for them and others that really struggle?

Ellyn Satter:  Well, yes, I have. I have noticed that and certainly, both types of parents can be very successful with feeding their children as long as the not-so-interested-in-food-and-eating ones don’t go to the extreme of being neglectful with feeding. And so long as the worried-and-focused-on-it ones don’t go to the extreme of being controlling with eating. It’s like everything else in parenting, the important thing is finding the middle ground, and that middle ground is being able to put a meal on the table and be reliable about feeding your kids.

And I’m talking about toddlers and older, I’m not talking about structure for babies or kids before the age of two, but being reliable about feeding your kids and reassuring them that they are going to be fed is the bottom line for both sets of parents. For the ones who are ho-hum about feeding, they sort of drag their guts through getting a meal on the table. They choose food that they enjoy so they can sit down and enjoy their children during meal times. They get the job done.

Whereas the folks at the other extreme, well, they’re going to do the same thing. And those folks are going to have to resist their tendency to be interfering with their child’s what and how much the child eats because they themselves perhaps have a long list of good food, bad food, eat this, don’t eat that, worry about my weight and continue to try to get it down.

Which brings us to the whole topic of eating competence and whether or not the parent is in a position to be relaxed and positive about their own eating and trust themselves to eat what and how much they need in order to do well.

Janet Lansbury:  Oh, yes. It always comes down to us first. Doesn’t it? Darn!

Ellyn Satter:  Oh, it does. Well, it’s a cycle, isn’t it? Because we eat the way we were fed and we feed the way we eat. And so, sooner or later, as we say when we go into therapy, this cycle has to stop

Janet Lansbury: If we want it to. Yeah.

Ellyn Satter:  Well, if therapy is successful, the cycle stops and therefore your children and grandchildren have access to better parenting than you did.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. Your work is about changing a cycle, really, where we’re sort of functioning as parents… it may be that we’re not staying in our lane in terms of what our job is versus what our child’s job is in regard to eating. And you’re helping parents to stay in their lane and feel secure in that lane.

Ellyn Satter:  Yes. And therein lies reward, relaxation, and joyful eating and parenting. Over and over again. I hear from these parents who talk about the struggles they’re having with their children around eating, and then they embrace the Division of Responsibility with Feeding. And within days, the child becomes happier, more relaxed, and willing to come to the table. Family meal times become enjoyable for the first time in however long, and the parents say, “he feels better, I feel better. And together we feel better all day long.”

It’s not just at mealtime that this has an impact, but all day long, because, well, probably because together they’ve been dreading mealtime all day long and that predictable struggle that’s going to erupt there.

So the feelings come fast and the relationship comes fast. And once that’s in place, parents are able to relax and let time take care of the child’s getting to the point where they can eat a variety of food. Those feelings and relaxed meal times persist. But if the parent gets caught up again with their agenda, then those good feelings go away pretty fast. In today’s world, it’s darn hard not to get caught up with agendas because there is so much interference with sensible feeding.

Janet Lansbury:  Can you be specific about that?

Ellyn Satter:  Yeah. “Getting your child to eat his fruits and vegetables is tremendously important. If he doesn’t, he’s going to die young.”

Janet Lansbury:  Boy.

Ellyn Satter:  “Don’t let your child weigh more than the 85th percentile, because if he does he’s overweight and you have to do something about it, you have to get him to slim down.” That kind of interference is really standard. Isn’t it Janet?

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. So how can parents get over this hump to trusting? What is the process, or what are some of the ways that you’ve helped parents to see the light or to free themselves of all this burden that they’re putting on themselves to try to control things that we really don’t control?

Ellyn Satter:  Well, if I’ve got the time clinically and, I’m long past doing clinical intervention, but my colleagues and the people we train do clinical intervention where they sit down with the parent and they take a close look at what’s going on with feeding. They’re probably going to do video tapes and sort of analyze what those mealtime interactions are like. They take a look at what happened when the child was a baby and the kind of advice that parents got way back then, whether the child was just a typical kid or whether he had some medical or neurological developmental issues, and what kind of advice they got with feeding way back then. Many times parents come along carrying the baggage of all the advice they’ve gotten ever since their child was a baby. “You have to get him to eat. Get it into him. I don’t care how you do it.” Or, “you mustn’t let him eat that because he’s getting too fat.” Or, “you have to cut down on the amount that he’s eating because he is getting too fat.”

So the assessment helps them to see that, to see the handicaps they’ve been working with and how they’ve gotten to the point where they are. And then we introduce the concept: The Division of Responsibility in Feeding, and we’ve helped them to understand their child’s competence with eating. We make a recommendation that they follow and tell them, “we’ll walk along with you while you do this,” because it is scary. I mean, if the child has been having struggles when they’re doing what they’re doing, how dare they give it up for fear that those struggles are going to get worse? And so we work with them while they make the transition.

But you are absolutely right, Janet. It does take steady nerves and a leap of faith in order for parents to go with the Division of Responsibility and trust their child to eat as much and whether they are willing to eat.

Janet Lansbury:  Yes, that leap of faith. So many aspects of parenting I think are centered around that. But it’s scary. A couple of things that you advise… I mean, even to me, these are scary and I love it, but I want to hear a little more about it. That’s where you say to offer sweets and desserts with the meal…

Ellyn Satter:  Well, I kind of keep my fingers crossed about the meal, because I say at mealtime, if you’re having dessert, let everybody have a single serving of dessert, a child-size serving for kids, and a grown-up-size for adults and that’s it. No second servings of dessert. But then you are creating scarcity. Anytime you have scarcity, a kid’s going to get preoccupied with it. So you have to neutralize the scarcity and you do that at snack time. And that is sit-down snacks, not running around and eating snacks, but sit-down snacks where periodically, you put out a plate of cookies and some milk and let the child eat as many cookies as they want. Or other sweets — put the child’s favorite sweet here.

And at first, kids eat those sweets like there’s no tomorrow. I mean, it’s like, they can’t get enough. But you, again, have to keep your nerve while they do that because after you do this a few times, they are going to eat a couple, and then they’re going to run off and do something else. The sweets lose their magnetic attraction for the child. It’s the scarcity that makes kids eat large quantities of these foods.

And the thing is, I mean, at the same time, it seems scary and unnecessary because after all, you can keep the lid on sweets when the child is at home and little, but you’re going to lose that control when the child gets to be 11, 12 years old and is walking to school and goes right by the corner grocery store, goes to a friend’s house or in other ways gets access to sweets. And at that point, they’re going to eat them like there’s no tomorrow. So what you’re doing with these meal and snack strategies with sweets is equipping your child to manage the world, to not be overwhelmed by the food in the outside world that you’ve been restricting at home.

Janet Lansbury: And is there any research on that working?

Ellyn Satter:  The research talks about how children whose sweets intake is restricted become food preoccupied and eat more when they get the chance and are heavier over time. This is all of the eating in the absence of hunger studies that were directed mostly by Leann Birch, who’s done a lot of the child feeding research over the years. Her studies would bring kids into the laboratory and feed them lunch, ordinary foods that kids feel comfortable eating, and then check and double check to make sure that they weren’t hungry anymore, that they had enough to eat.

These studies were done with girls, I guess. So they take the girls into another room where there are a lot of sweets sitting around on tables. And then they had little projects for the girls and they said they wanted them to do the project. And the girls could eat as many sweets and other snack foods as they liked. And then the researchers would monitor how much each of the children ate. And they found that the girls who were restricted at home ate more in the absence of hunger than the girls who were not restricted. And they followed these kids over a decade or more and they found that over time, these restricted girls, their BMI went up compared with the girls who were not restricted at home.

Janet Lansbury:  Wow. And then this whole idea of putting dessert with the meal. So it’s just, sort of, on the plate with food that you’re offering? See, I can barely say this…

Ellyn Satter: Take a deep breath, Janet.

(Laughter)

Janet Lansbury: You mean, are you seriously saying-

Ellyn Satter:  Kids push themselves along to learn and grow, but they also take the easy way out if it’s offered. And with respect to the foods offered at mealtime, dessert is the easy way out because it is easier to like the sweet, high-fat cakes and cookies.

Janet Lansbury:  Right, what’s not to like?

Ellyn Satter:  And so dessert and these sweets really compete unfairly with the other food that’s at the mealtime. And so when kids see vegetables and protein foods and a variety of other foods at the mealtime over and over again, eventually they’ll get to eat those foods and enjoy them. But if there’s always a lot of dessert sitting there and they can fill up on dessert instead of learning to enjoy these other foods, then they’re going to go for the dessert. So that’s why I say one serving because dessert can competes unfairly with other nutritious foods.

Janet Lansbury:  But then with the other foods on the plate… you would allow them to have seconds on as much bread as they want, or…?

Ellyn Satter:  Yeah. Yeah.

Janet Lansbury:  …butter? Okay. So you don’t see a competition with that.

Ellyn Satter:  Well, people tell me, and I’ve seen this with my own kids. The kids will take a bite of dessert, then a bite of broccoli and a bite of potatoes, and then a bite of dessert, or they’ll eat the dessert first and then eat everything else. They have their own ways of doing this. It’s only for grownups that dessert signals the end of the meal. Children have no such compunction.

Janet Lansbury:  That reminds me of this place my children loved. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant, and they would love it because they could get all this food, and then they could get ice cream, and then they could get more soup after the ice cream. Only at this kind of place did that seem to happen.

Ellyn Satter:  Yeah. Well, tell me what allowed you to just sort of let them go and see what happened?

Janet Lansbury:  Well, I don’t even like to say this because parents share so many struggles with me that they have, but I never really thought much about this. I knew to offer healthy foods. I don’t have issues with eating personally. And I don’t know, it just seemed natural for me to kind of pass that on. We did have some stuff, but nothing was a big focus or a big deal. And, Magda Gerber taught me about trust and that to me was very easy to do around eating. I trusted them… so it was nice.

Ellyn Satter:  And how much more fun it was for you to go to that buffet restaurant than if you were worrying about whether they were eating the right things?

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. I never really worried about them eating. The only one I even thought about at all was my son who was so active and he ate the least of any of my children as a toddler. And this guy was, he almost couldn’t stop him moving. He was so active and it was puzzling, but he’s six foot four now and really, really healthy and-

Ellyn Satter:  Well, when he was little, was he growing consistently?

Janet Lansbury:  Yes. Yes. He was growing. He was doing fine, but it would seem like he ate nothing. So it was interesting. And I did think a little about it, but I just had to trust him because, yeah, he seemed fine. But I know a lot of parents that their doctors are telling them there’s a problem. Everyone’s telling them there’s a problem.

I would like, if you don’t mind, to read a question to you…

Ellyn Satter:  Well, before you do, I want to comment on your son.

Janet Lansbury:  Okay. Yes, please.

Ellyn Satter:  I’ll see if I can look up this reference: Stanger, Springer, I can never remember the guy’s name, but he published this wonderful summary of children’s range of calorie intake. And they were astonishing ranges like for a toddler boy, the range was between 400 calories a day and 4,000 calories a day.

Janet Lansbury: Goodness.

Ellyn Satter:  And the child who was eating 400 calories was presumably healthy like your little boy who was such an easy keeper that he was seemingly getting along on air, doing well on a very low level of calories. Whereas other children who seemingly eat an enormous amount of calories regulate perfectly well and grow consistently at this upper range.

So again, it’s this child competence thing that children come pre-wired with their homeostatic mechanisms, with their need for a certain level of energy in order to keep them going. And that might be a high need or a low need.

Janet Lansbury:  And they know themselves better than we know them. I think that’s in that too.

Ellyn Satter:  Oh, absolutely. They instinctively know, but they don’t know with their heads. Anytime you try to put something in a child’s head and teach them to manage themselves, things don’t go well. But if you observe their instinctive capabilities, they’re definitely there.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. So a lot of times I’ll hear from parents: “What should I do? My child is telling me they only want dessert, asking how many bites they have to eat to get the dessert.” And your solution to put it on the meal plate really solves that, right?

Ellyn Satter:  Yeah. Yeah.

Janet Lansbury:  Because I would just say if dessert’s not working, if it’s just becoming this distracting thing for your child, then maybe you don’t need to have desserts for a while, not as a punishment, but maybe it’s not necessary. If it’s becoming a bargaining tool or something, then it’s not working for your family.

Ellyn Satter:  Well, I think that certainly is one solution. The other solution would be to say, well, the dessert’s there. Eat it or not. The same kid who wants you to bargain is going to eat his dessert and say, “can I have more dessert?” And you’re going to say no. And he says, “Well, then I’m not going to eat anymore.” And so he threatens you, right?

Janet Lansbury:  And then what do you do?

Ellyn Satter:  You say, “okay, I’ll see you at snack time.”

Janet Lansbury:  Okay. And then what if he starts whining? You put the food away and he’s saying, “I’m hungry. I’m so hungry.”

Ellyn Satter:  “Yeah. Okay. I hear what you’re saying. Snacks in a couple of hours.”

Janet Lansbury:  Right? That’s a hard one for parents because of this whole idea of I’m leaving my child hungry. I mean, I could see how that’s very triggering, that would be triggering for me.

Ellyn Satter:  Generally speaking, I’m not in favor of starving children into submission, but you’re not doing that. I mean, you are offering a variety of food. And from my point of view, the essential meal planning perspective is that you need to be considerate without catering. That is, you need to put on a variety of foods that you enjoy. And by a variety, I mean like a main dish or fruit or vegetable or a couple of carbs, milk. And then you need to put one or two foods in the meal that your child generally eats. It might be bread. It might be rice. It might be fruit. The parents on their Facebook site call these “safe foods.” What they mean is that when the child comes to the meal and sees those foods, he feels safe or they feel safe. How they feel like, okay, there’s something there that I can eat. And contrary to the standard expectation that if something is there that they can eat, that’s all they’ll eat. In reality, children generally feel more adventurous when they feel safer. Well, you know that Janet.

Janet Lansbury: Yes.

Ellyn Satter:  This is a way then of supporting them so they can feel more adventurous with their eating.

Now, this little kid who only will eat his dessert, we have to take a look at the meal as well and say, well, is dessert the only thing at that meal that appeals to him? Is there also bread? Is there also rice? Are there other foods that the child can generally eat? And when parents are making the transition from being sort of coercive and controlling to the division of responsibility and they do this considerate without catering bit with meal planning, they do find that their child is going to spend a week or two weeks eating bread, and that’s all they really want to eat at the mealtime. But eventually, they get tired of eating their favorite foods and they start to look around for something different. But the parent really has to clench their teeth and keep doing the division of responsibility because if they sort of lose their nerve and say, “Wow, why don’t you try this?” Or, “don’t you think that’s enough bread?” Then it goes on longer.

Janet Lansbury:  Right. Because the children, they’re right in there with what we’re feeling all the time. And I was going to say, even clenching our teeth they can feel sometimes.

Ellyn Satter:  They do.

Janet Lansbury:  So trying to breathe through the fear, I guess, or something.

Ellyn Satter:  Yeah. Or saying to the child, “I am going to let you eat as much as you want. It’s hard for me to just see you eating this bread all the time. But I know that you’ll do what you need to do with your eating.”

Janet Lansbury:  Putting those elephants in the room out there. I love that. Yeah. It’s so freeing because children are feeling it right?

Ellyn Satter:  Oh, yeah.

Janet Lansbury:  They’re feeling it. If we say it, it’s like yep, there I am. Here I am with you.

Ellyn Satter:  Right. If it’s out there, you can laugh about it and you can laugh at yourselves about it. And you say, “well, I love bread too so go for it.”

But then you have to be careful not to go to the other extreme of giving your child a lot of inadvertent attention for their eating extremes. You know what I mean, right? Because sometimes when kids eat a lot and an audience gathers and everybody is so fascinated and appalled by how much the kid is eating, actually, they react to that and overeat.

Janet Lansbury:  Yeah. That’s a brilliant idea to just put it out there. If we’re feeling it, just say it like, “Wow, okay, great. More bread. I’m going with this, a little scary for me, but I’m going with it.” It will help us, I think, to relax too, a little.

Ellyn Satter:  That’s right.

Janet Lansbury:  Okay. So if you don’t mind, I would love to ask you this question. It’s a bit long, but it represents the many comments I’ll get similar to this. Every time I post something about eating people are commenting, “Ellyn Satter, Division of Responsibility.” And then there’ll be a parent that says, “Well, this doesn’t work for my child. My child will not eat unless I make it happen.” So here’s the note:

I’m reaching out to you with a dynamic that has been present since my older daughter was 12 weeks old. She’s now two-and-a-half. After consultations with specialists, ENT, gastroenterology, occupational and physical therapy, we felt like she really was starving herself. At eight months old, we finally figured out that she had oversized adenoids, which forced her to breathe through her mouth and made it nearly impossible to close her mouth to drink from a bottle. While it was so, so helpful to have an answer, I feel like the damage had already been done. I have vivid memories of using a syringe to drop milliliters of formula in her so as to prevent a hospitalization. Feeding for the first year of her life had so clearly been a distressing, traumatizing experience for us all.

While things have gotten better, we have yet to round a corner where eating feels good or even natural for her. Not only is she a very picky eater, but she eats tiny amounts of the foods that she’s willing to eat. Hunger seems like a foreign concept.

Sitting at the table is a success if we can make it last five to 10 minutes. And preparing meals for her, trying to get her to eat is such a battle that it’s my least favorite part of the day. I know that she can pick up on this and that it is definitely contributing to our ongoing cycle. What I’m doing is not working. Some weeks are better than others, but it doesn’t seem to correlate to anything that we’re doing as parents.

Here’s what we’ve tried: At our best, we feel motivated and energized to expose her to different foods even though she won’t eat them and try to make mealtime as routine and fun as possible, and play music she likes. All of us sit down together and eat the same thing without putting too much focus on how much she’s actually eating. Other times I find myself offering her the same exact foods that she’s eaten in the past in an effort to get some, any, calories in her.

At my worst, I feel desperate or I’m noticing a trend towards less and less intake or feel like she is losing weight, I will resort to bribing and rewarding her for eating. “If you eat growing foods, then we can have a treat. If you have one more bite of oatmeal, then we can watch something.” I know this isn’t right. It doesn’t ever feel right and it certainly doesn’t feel sustainable, but I still feel so worried about making sure she eats enough food that backing off and relinquishing control feels nearly impossible.

Ellyn Satter:  Yeah. Yeah.

Janet Lansbury:  And she’s worried. She says: “I’m worried I’ve already caused so much damage that it’s irreversible or if I don’t keep pushing, she’ll stop eating, lose weight, fall off the growth curve and we’ll be back at square one.”

Ellyn Satter:  Oh dear. Yeah. This whole feeding thing has really taken over their lives. Hasn’t it? I mean, I feel for them all. I mean, there is a lot of misery in that message. This is a complex issue that is not going to respond to simple advice. I mean, we could SDOR (Satter Division of Responsibility), but at her best, the mom is following SDOR and it’s really not addressing the issue. So this is one of those cases that I was telling you about earlier on. If we have time to sit down with somebody and do a complete assessment and to really understand fully what the parents are saying about their history with feeding the child, what they’ve been through, what’s happening now, what are all the forces that are being brought to bear on this situation, and then come up with the treatment plan and then work with them as they move through that treatment plan.

Janet Lansbury:  And your institute does this, right?

Ellyn Satter:  Yes. The institute makes available online coaching to do just this, do the complete assessment, do the treatment plan, and then work with parents as they move through the treatment plan. And yeah, I think this mom is an excellent candidate for that. This is a service that costs money, but I think in comparison with some of the other routes that she’s gone down it is probably something that is accessible.

Janet Lansbury:  And then you have resources that obviously wouldn’t be conducive to helping this parent with what she needs, but you have a lot of resources with information for people that want to learn more about your work and you’ve written books.

Ellyn Satter:  The Ellyn Satter Institute has a website that is just packed with information. If your listeners pull up “Ellyn Satter Institute,” they’re going to get to the website, even if they misspell my first name.

Janet Lansbury:  E-L-L-Y-N.

Ellyn Satter:  Yep. That’s right.

Janet Lansbury:  S-A-T-T-E-R.

Ellyn Satter:  And they can click on “how to feed” and they’re going to find a bunch of 250-word articles about different issues with feeding. If they click on “shop books and videos,” they’re going to find a series of 50-page booklets that are stage-related: the first two years, 18 months through six years, six through 13, and 12 through 18, as well as Feeding Yourself with Love and Good Sense. So those are probably the good starter packages.

Janet Lansbury:  Wonderful. Well, I am so grateful that you are out there doing this incredible work for parents. And your reassuring manner, your empathetic manner is just a, you’re a joy to be with.

Ellyn Satter:  Well, thank you so much, Janet. It has been wonderful to be with you. And I really hope that your listeners will be able to discover the joy of feeding and the joy of eating.

Janet Lansbury:  Thank you. That was so helpful.

Ellyn is the author of “Child of Mine – Feeding with Love and Good Sense” along with scores of other books, videos, and healthy eating guides. Her website (www.ellynsatterinstitute.org/) offers a wealth of resources on not only food, eating, and feeding, but emotional health and positive family relationships as well.

For more advice about common parent-child dynamics please check out the other posts and podcasts on my website: janetlansbury.com. There are many of them, and they’re all indexed by subject and category so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. And both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon: No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting.  You can get them in eBook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play or barnesandnoble.com, and in audio at Audible.com. Actually, you can get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the link in the liner notes of this podcast.

And if you find this podcast helpful, you can help it to continue by giving it a positive review on iTunes and by supporting my sponsors.

Thank you again, we can do this.

The post Concerned About Your Child’s Eating Habits? Ellyn Satter Has Answers appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Mealtime Manners Begin with Babies”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today, I’m going to be talking about the mealtime challenges parents face, behaviors like throwing food down, children getting up from the table and wanting to come back and get up and come back, refusing food, picky eating. I don’t even want to eat, or sometimes when children seem to be taking forever at the table, and we’re sitting for a very long time wondering what to do because our child is still seeming to want to eat. And then another parent also asked, “How do I teach my child table manners?” So I’m going to be attempting to cover all of these issues in this podcast.

So just to let you know a little about my process, this may end up on the cutting room floor, but I was thinking about this and just kind of laughing at myself. So, I got this question that I’m going to read, very simple, straightforward, short question, and I thought: Great. I’m going to address that on my podcast this week. And then the more I started thinking about it, what I would say, and how I would help this parent with her issue, I realized I could do at least a five part series of webinars on this topic. And probably still not say everything I want to say. So I get a little overwhelmed, and then I realize: okay, just go for it and share what seems most important. And hopefully it’ll be helpful to people.

Here’s the question I received:

Hi Janet. It was a pleasure reading your book. I have one question. When we say toddler, what age are we referring to, to do specific disciplining, like throwing food on the floor? My baby is one year old and she constantly throws food on the floor. Do you mean I need to not serve food even with a one-year-old?

So this parent has obviously heard my advice about ending a meal if a child is showing you that they’re done, by doing things that they know they’re not supposed to do, like playing around with food or jumping up and coming back.

And for me, this exemplifies the challenge of communicating Magda Gerber‘s approach, which is very nuanced, and can’t really be shared in an Instagram post manner. It’s not about: if you say this thing or have this strategy every time your child does a certain thing, then this will work. This approach is primarily about the way we perceive a child from birth. And if we perceive a person from birth, as Magda suggested that we do, and that this is an aware person… If we perceive that, then the way that we engage with our child, our baby, has to be nuanced. Because as people we have layers; we are in a relationship. Babies want to be in a relationship with us right from the beginning, a person-to-person human relationship where they are active partners.

So it makes sense to me that a lot of things that I share get misconstrued as a one-year-old baby is throwing food on the floor. So you say, “Okay, I’m not going to serve you any more food.” I mean, that sounds abominable, right? It sounds so harsh. And how could you treat a baby that way? And isn’t that a punishment? All of these things come up when we aren’t quite understanding the basis of this approach, which is tuning in to your child, the person.

The wonderful thing about that, well, there’s many wonderful things: parenting is much deeper and more enjoyable and more interesting when we’re actually engaging with a person, rather than a very needy, somewhat passive baby. But it also clarifies so many things when we start to tune in to this person.

So in this case, what is going on when a baby, who is one-year-old, is throwing food down?

The first time that happens, it’s very likely an experiment. Let’s see what happens, cause and effect. Dropping this food, oh, it goes on the floor.  Because babies are explorers and learners and they’re experimenting all the time.

So our baby does that and maybe they feel something from us. They probably do feel something from us, because Alison Gopnik‘s extensive studies show that children are born with a lantern-type attention, as opposed to what we start to develop more as we mature, which is a spotlight attention.

So with a spotlight attention, we can get distracted and miss something going on over here, because I’m focusing over here.

Well, a baby actually can’t do that. They are taking in everything all the time. So even if they’re not looking at us, they’re feeling us, they’re sensing our emotions. They’re sensing if we’re comfortable, for sure. And it’s not something that they can turn on and off. This lantern is always on. They’re always taking us in.

But if we don’t see this as a basically competent person that we’re dealing with, then we’re probably going to be less likely to be attuned.

So if we’re not being that attuned in the situation, if we’re not tuning into the person then, to us, it might seem like she’s just randomly throwing food. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. Just sort of more absent-minded, I’m not intentional, I’m not aware.

But what our baby is actually doing there, even the first time that this happens, where we might say, “Oh, whoops, you dropped that down and it went all the way down to the floor. While you’re eating, I want you to keep the food at the table, please.”

And I’m approaching this whole activity as an intimate activity. I’m not distracting my child and I’m not going to be distracted myself. These are prime caregiving times where children really need our full attention. And we will get more out of it too, that way, than if we’re just trying to get food into a baby. We’re actually kind of teaching, we’re engaging, we’re present, they’re responding to us. And it will feel more satisfying for us as well.

So feeding with the RIE approach, with Magda Gerber’s approach, it’s not just about fueling our child with food, it’s about fueling our relationship.

So when my baby tossed the food down, of course I’m not angry about it and I’m not going to punish her or him. And if my baby starts to do this again, I’m looking in their eyes. And I see that they’re asking a question with this behavior. I sense that you were slightly riled up by this on some level. This is interesting. And I want to know how you feel about this. Am I allowed to do this?

Those are the kinds of questions that they’re asking with that behavior, even the first time. So that’s why I would respond with. “That’s interesting.” Seeing their point of view, and: “Wow, that went down, and now it’s on the floor, splat. Made a little spot there.” But I would be clear even there, “I want you to keep the food either on the table or in your mouth, please.”

I’m letting my child know the answer to their question and their behavior.

If we’re letting this go on and go on, because we’re not sure if our child is present with us or not, or really knows what’s going on, then our child’s question is going unanswered. But again, if we tune in, we will see, they’re not just looking over somewhere else and like tossing food and not aware of what they’re doing. If we’re tuning into them, we’ll see that they are aware. They’ll be looking at us, kind of a question in their eyes.

I mean, the wonderful thing about young children is they don’t wear these masks that we wear as we get older. You can see them. You can see what they’re thinking if we tune in.

If we do tune in, we’re going to see the question in their eyes, somewhere, somehow, we’re going to sense them asking: What do you think of this? And if we continue to let it go on, again, and we’re kind of getting annoyed or we’re puzzled, or we don’t know what to do, but it’s not fun, right? We don’t like it. Our child is going to feel that mixed message coming from us.

The other part of this is that oftentimes when I work with parents or come to houses to do home consultations, I notice that they’re doing something that I’m sure I would have done if I hadn’t learned about this approach and that babies are aware people. They kind of put food in the baby’s mouth while the baby is looking another way. And the babies are not really paying attention.

And it works much better, for a million different reasons, mostly the connection, that we’re actually connecting, that we slow down and say, “Oh, I’ve got this food.” Let’s say we’re, spoon-feeding, “Here’s this food on this spoon. Are you interested in more of this? Do you want this?”

And if they’re looking the other way, we wait until they look. We don’t just put it in their mouth.

So we are asking for their attention on this task, which is important to pay attention to, especially when we’re young, and developing habits — attention to what we’re eating, and that food going into our bodies isn’t just this unconscious situation. We are intentional about it.

This is also why Magda Gerber would say, “Children are ready to eat. They’re not ready to dine.” Meaning, toddlers, they’re not really ready for there to be family meals every time, because with family meals, we’re going to be distracted by the other adult.

We can do a situation where we have multiple children there, and we’re just staying there attuned to all the children as best we can. I do that all the time in the parent — infant, and toddler classes, where we start at 10 or 11 months with children coming to sit on the floor to get their snack. Sometimes there’ll be eight of them and just me. And it’s not perfect, you do miss things, but they have that sense that this is a special time that we’re all paying attention to. And I’m with them a 100%. That’s a part of what we want to nurture here.

Then again, it will be so clear that our baby is showing that they’re done, because we’ll say, “When you throw food down, it seems like you don’t want the food anymore. That’s telling me you’re done eating right?” And we can be holding our child’s hand very slightly, or just putting our hand at the side of their small hand to keep them from grabbing something and throwing something else down. We can stop them right there and say, “Ah, looks like you want to throw that too. So that means you’re done?”

And we wait. And our child will either now put food in their mouth, or they will try that again. And if they try that again, really, they deserve an answer to this question: What happens if I do do it again? Are you going to mean what you say? That’s what they want to know.

So then you would say, “Okay, looks like you are done. You wanted to throw that one down. Okay, thanks for letting me know. I’m going to help you down and put the food away.”

So that’s the level of engagement that I’m suggesting, especially in these beginnings, when babies are learning so many things, so many messages they’re getting through these experiences with us.

Then if you are worried that your child didn’t eat enough, you could have another meal later, an hour and a half later if you feel you need to. That’s always possible. But children do need… they deserve to know the rules, that there are rules, and to have their questions answered.

So let’s say an older child is doing this still. They haven’t gotten the clear message. Then I would do the same thing. Once they know this rule… and we only have to share it once… You can give your child another chance if you feel like they’re not quite getting it. But I would do that again with a lot of attunement. “I’m stopping you. Oops. It looks like you’re trying to take that away. Okay. That’s showing me you’re done. Are you sure?”

They will give us the answer if we are communicating with them as people who want to pay attention to all these things.

These might be the boring things for us. Oh, let me just get this eating thing done. So we can go out and do something. But to young children, every aspect of their life is fascinating, like a novel. What’s going to happen now? What does my parents think? And what’s the rule here?

They feel really good when they know the rule. Then they want to sometimes ask again, is this really a rule? Is this still a rule even though you’re tired? They want that consistency. They crave it. And yes, they are ready for it at a year old.

And so the same approach, if a child was starting to get up from the table, “Oops, looks like you want to get up. I want you to stay sitting until you’re all done.” And maybe you’ve politely shared these rules ahead of time. “Okay, now we’re going to eat. I know sometimes you enjoy throwing food. I don’t want you to drop the food. And I want you to stay here at the table until you’re all done. And if you feel that you need to get up or you feel you need to throw food, then we’ll stop the meal right there until next time.”

It’s not this challenging, punitive thing, which we might tend to do that if, I guess, we’re less confident. Or maybe that was modeled for us, that when you give rules, you have to give it like, “Well, if you don’t do this, then we’re not going to do that.” But we want to be in a partnership with children. That’s what’s going to help them and help us overall with their behavior and all of those specific things, but also develop our relationship in the direction we want it to go, where they don’t need to test out these things as much.

So no, there’s no child that needs to get up and down, run away and come back with eating. I had a very, very active youngest child. But when he was eating, he could sit till he was done. He didn’t sit for very long. My daughters would more linger and they could sit for a longer time. He didn’t want to. But he sat as long as he was eating and then he shot up and off he went. Children can do this. We’ve got to believe in them. They are very aware people, more aware than we are.

So then some other issues that parents have: a child won’t come to eat, or they won’t eat certain food that we want them to eat.

So here’s where children need clarity. What’s the rule? Not just sometimes, I need to know what is it really? And how do you feel about it? And are you going to be okay if I do the normal thing and try other things out to see if you really mean it? Are you comfortable with this rule? Or are you afraid that by having rules around table manners or focusing on eating that I’m not going to eat enough?

I mean, that gets in our way as parents, for sure. The fear, right? We’re afraid. And that’s usually underneath when parents are having issues with mealtime stuff, underneath is this fear that my child won’t eat enough. And it’s really something to look at, because we can’t just wave a wand and make it go away, as we can’t wave a wand and make any feeling we have go away and just be unruffled. I’m fine. If we’re not, we’re not.

The cure for that is to understand it, and then practice focusing on trust that your child does want to thrive, that your child knows their body, and their nutritional needs really better than we do a lot at the time. And that when given healthy options, our child can make those choices and needs to. They need to feel autonomy at mealtime.

So I would set this up as Magda suggested, which is using a small table, which children love when they’re very little, because they get so much autonomy by being able to have their feet on the floor, and get up when they’re done immediately. I have a whole article about that, that I’ll link to called “Baby Table Manners,” I think it is.

But in general, and even when children are having family dinners, it’s wonderful to have bowls of the different types of food that we’re offering. So we’re going to offer maybe three different types of food. At least one that we know our child usually likes, at least one. And then we’re going to just have a little bit on their plate. This really helps with younger children. They can’t dump this whole huge plate of stuff out without us catching it in time.

So having a little bit on their plate, the extra in bowls, so that they can ask for more, or they can point and we help them with the bowl, and they can put a little more on their plate. That way they’re not looking at this overwhelming plate of food that maybe is too much for them at that particular interval. And they have that sense of: I’m deciding that I want to eat this. I’m deciding I want to eat that. Children, especially toddlers, toddlers on up actually, really want that autonomy. And this is the place to give it.

We present the options that we’re comfortable with. From there, we let them decide. And we have in these bowls the most that we would want them to have of that particular item. So if they wanted to eat all of that, then we’re okay with it.

We’re setting ourselves up for success. We’re setting them up for autonomy within the boundaries. Freedom and autonomy have to come for children within boundaries. They don’t feel it when things aren’t clear, when the rules aren’t clear, when they feel these mixed messages from us, or that we have an agenda for them that is maybe infringing on their need for autonomy.

So we really do have to trust, ideally, and it’s hard. I know it’s hard sometimes. But if we really trust, we won’t have these issues. We won’t be here in the position where a child refuses food, because we’re not pushing any particular food, and we’re not pushing them to eat more of a certain food or less of another food that we’ve offered.

We are in charge of a lot here, but from there, children need us to let go. And we kind of have to not just act it, but really be it, be that trusting person. Because even if we’re not saying: Oh, I hope he eats that piece of broccoli there. Children can actually feel that with their lantern attention. And their need for autonomy makes them not choose that even though they might.

So I guess this seems a bit like a poker game, but that’s going to make it flow the best. That’s going to make this all easiest for us. We’re not afraid of the boundaries. And we’re also not afraid of letting go, where our child needs us to let them choose.

And there’s this other issue that parents have brought up with me a lot, where their child is sitting there still wanting to eat and maybe 40 minutes has gone by, or less than that. But we have the sense that our child isn’t really needing to do this, but they’re kind of keeping us there, because they know we really want them to eat and it’s important and we don’t want to rush them. So they’re kind of exploring their power on some level, as children will do. It’s very, very healthy for them to do these things, as learners.

But there, again, if we’re attuned, we will get the answer to what’s going on. We will see our child is actually in slow motion all of a sudden. Our child is looking at us, checking out if we’re feeling impatient, while they pick up food, put it down, take the tiniest bite. We can sense when they’re stalling.

Again, I love young children. They’re so transparent.

If we’re tuning in, and if we trust that there’s a person there, that’s not just out to lunch (I guess that’s a good metaphor for this), then we can sense and trust they are stalling this. And if we’re not afraid of our child not eating enough, if we’ve been focusing on working on that trust overall in them as competent people that want to thrive, then we will be able to say, “It feels like there’s a lot of slowing down going on here,” or, “I think you’re done. So I’m going to put this away.”

Then maybe our child gets upset with us. And very likely those feelings are about something more, are about the baby we’re expecting, or about something that isn’t actually to do with: I really needed to eat more and now you’re not letting me. Trust what you’re seeing there when you’re tuning in.

And yes, there are children who have issues. There was a parent who reached out to me. Her child had a rare disorder and needed certain protein nutrition, or it could be very detrimental to their health. And it was interesting, because she was asking me what to do. She was trying to get her child to eat these certain things and they wouldn’t eat them.

Then she called it at the end of the note, she said, “I have a feeling you’re going to say to approach this as I would medicine or something like that, that your child has to do.” And I said, “Yes, that’s exactly what I would do.” I would make that food into a smoothie or a bar or whatever, I think there was a bar that they could eat, and not let that get in the way of mealtime. Let mealtime be your child’s autonomous decisions. And then before the meal or after whenever you need to, at a time your child isn’t too tired. (That’s another thing, we don’t want mealtimes to be when our child is tired, because tiredness usually takes over hunger. We don’t have as good an appetite when we’re tired, especially children.)

So partner with your child, explore ways for them to feel autonomous in this situation. Make plans together. Listen to their feelings. “Oh, I know you don’t want to do it. Ah, I hear you. It’s a pain, right, to have to do this for your health. You don’t like this. It’s too important. I love you too much. Got to do it.” Partnering with your child.

And she got back to me later and said that was working and thanked me.

So (1) attunement, that’s one aspect of this, (2) clarity and (3) autonomy. Those are the three things our child needs around mealtimes for them to go smoothly.

I really hope some of that helps.

Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. There are many of them, and they’re all indexed by subject and category so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. Both of my books are available in paperback at Amazon: No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame and Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting.  You can get them in eBook at Amazon, Apple, Google Play or barnesandnoble.com, and an audio at Audible.com. Actually, you can get a free audio copy of either book at Audible by following the link in the liner notes of this podcast.

Thank you so much for listening and all your kind support. We can do this.

The post Mealtime Manners Begin with Babies appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “No Bad Kids: Questions about Tantrums, Mealtimes, and Cleaning Up”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today, I’m doing something a little bit different. I have a note I received from a parent, a dad actually, who has read my book, No Bad Kids, and he has three different areas that he wants clarification on. So I’m going to do that and I’ll take the questions one by one.

Here’s the note I received:

“Hi, Janet. I just finished reading your book, No Bad Kids, and it was truly eye-opening. Coming from a disciplinarian family and not wanting to expose my children to the same feelings of shame and mistrust, this was exactly the guidance I was seeking. I do have a few practical questions as I felt the book dealt mostly with initial boundary setting and interactions, and there are inevitably slips and tantrums.

1. Question one: The book describes simply being present during a tantrum. Do most tantrums truly self-resolve and how long do you allow for them? While my wife and I don’t use distraction as a standard technique, we have certainly found that our daughter requires some level of ‘problem-solving’ or suggestions to help her wind down from a tantrum. Would you not recommend this?”

Okay, so there’s actually some interesting science on this, that it is not helpful to talk to a child during a tantrum, that that actually can increase the discomfort that they feel and make it harder for them to pass through these states. This matches up with what I’ve experienced over 25 years with my own children and in classrooms with parents and toddlers. I’ve witnessed many, many, many tantrums, and in my experience, they always self-resolve. And by self-resolve, I don’t mean the child doesn’t have our support. We are open, we are empathetic, we understand that this is a normal state of overwhelm that our child is in, that what’s going on here is healthy and important for them. So not only would I not distract and try to bring my child out of the tantrum, I wouldn’t do problem-solving at that time. When my child is in the eye of the storm, I would let it be.

It certainly requires a lot of trust as a parent to be able to let go of our feelings of wanting to put a timer on it and wanting to fix it. But letting that go and trusting that it will last as long as it needs to last…  And if this is going on and on, we may be playing into it by being an impatient presence.

We can see when our child comes out of that state that they get lost in, in the tantrum, that they’re starting to come back to a consciousness where we can then maybe problem-solve or say, “Come here. I want to hold you. That was really hard. That was really uncomfortable.”

I’m not sure what problem-solving this father’s been doing. I’m not sure what that looks like or the suggestions, but I would be careful because that can prolong the feelings, make our child feel unsafe going there into the tantrum, and feel our judgment or lack of acceptance of it.

I have a lot of podcasts around this topic, a lot of written posts as well, because it does take practice. It does take a perception of the feelings and the tantrums as positive for a child and even necessary.

They can be very positive for our relationship as well if we can handle them with patience and trust. It is important for us to get to that frame of mind where we can allow this. And then you’ll see your child, and maybe this dad is seeing this, you’ll see your child come out of the state where everything seemed wrong and our world seemed all wrong, and they just kind of turn on a dime and they’re fine. We see that they have cleared something that they need to clear, they’re back to themselves. Now they want to play and off they go.

So that can help us, too, seeing: Oh gosh, she’s fine. She just needed to go there. It’s safe. The more that happens, the easier it is for us to trust and not get into problem-solving or helping her come out of it. So really this is less work for us. It’s maybe more mental work in our perception, that challenge of letting go. But we can let go of it being our job to do something here, which takes pressure off of us, actually.

2. Okay, so here’s his second question: He says, “Food and meal time have always been a struggle for us. Our daughter fell off the weight curve at one point, so it’s a mental barrier to discontinue a meal and she’s proven fully capable of skipping them. Your book discusses ending meals upon repeated boundary testing. Do you have a recommendation on when it is appropriate to re-offer food?”

So I’m just going to skip to that first. There’s no specific timeframe, in an hour, maybe, in 45 minutes. The point of this meal time approach that I recommend (and others recommend) is that we are clearing away all the emotions and power struggles — the agendas that we have around something that really does belong to our child and our child needs to completely control, and that’s what she eats and how much she eats with the healthy options that we’re providing. But within those options, our child needs to be the boss.

If we think about it, what’s our goal? What’s our goal for our child’s eating habits? It’s really the same as our goal for ourselves: that we listen to our bodies, that we can clear away all the noise and hear when we’re full and feel what our body needs to eat.

Children have this ability. We all do, but it can get lost in the noise and the emotions. And this is especially important if our child is off the weight curve or there are other issues. It’s especially important and, of course, much more challenging for us to trust her, let our child do her job to eat what she needs to eat. And if we’ve created a little bit of power struggle around this, then it’s going to be a little harder to dial it back. But it’s crucial that we let her know that we’re giving her this trust, that it’s not about us and we’re not interested in coaxing her to eat more or less or different. It’s not about pleasing us, it’s about the feeling that she has within herself.

This dad says it’s a mental barrier to discontinue a meal. So my advice around discontinuing a meal is to be reading our child in those moments. And if we are concerned about our child eating, it’s going to be harder for us to have some basic rules around it that are very common sense and reasonable. Like, “If you’re throwing your food on the floor, if you’re playing with your food, if you’re dumping out your drink, you’re showing me that you’re done with food for now. You’re not interested in eating anymore.”

And in the beginning when children first do these things, it would be rare for them to do them if they were actually quite hungry. When they’re hungry, they eat. When they’re done, then they try out things as a toddler. Oh, what do they think about this? What happens here? But if we’re concerned right there and we want them to eat more, then we are going to let them keep eating, which tells them this is okay. It is okay for me to stand up and run around with the food or to throw it down or play with it.

And right there, we’re taking our child’s mind out of what they’re doing into exploring with us: Hmm, what do they allow and what do they not allow and how many times will they allow me to do this? I sense that they really want me to stay here and keep eating, but as a healthy toddler, I’m going to be exploring why they’re pushing this. And even if we’re not pushing it, if we’re coaxing or if we’re just hoping that they’ll keep eating, most children will feel that.

So allowing those things that might feel kinder to us: Oh, we’ll give our child another chance or maybe they didn’t mean it, actually gets in our child’s way and then makes our job harder, because our child isn’t just eating purely from their own need anymore, they’re playing these games with us. They’re exploring with us. So I would encourage this dad and any parent to look at that mental barrier that he has, it really requires being kind of strict about these meal time behaviors.

And all of these rules that I recommend: sitting while they eat, not playing around, staying focused on the food, these are actually all centered around creating the healthiest eating habits. We as adults, we can multitask. Studies show that we don’t really do anything very well when we do that, and we might eat too much or not enough because we’re thinking about other things or doing other things while we’re eating. But young children, we have this opportunity to foster their mindfulness in what they’re doing. That means staying focused. Now’s the time we eat and, yes, we talk and we socialize and you have my full attention. I don’t have my phone here at meal times. I’m here for you and we’re here to eat, and that’s it.

In those moments when we’re setting the limit, we might say, “Oops, are you done? Because that’s showing me that you’re done.” And ideally, we’ll be there with our hand able to stop the action while it’s happening. So then right there, we’re going to get a very clear answer. Our child will either stop what they’re doing (getting up or playing with the food) and keep eating, or they will continue to do those behaviors. So when it’s really clear, then we can say, “Okay, it looks like you’re playing. That shows me you’re done. All right, my love, we’re done. We’ll try again later.” I wouldn’t be mean. I would be tuned in.

So it’s interesting because both these questions this dad has are actually about one of the main challenges for us and important goals for us as parents: trust, trust in our child to do what they’re capable of doing, expressing emotions fully, eating what they need. Both of those are about trust.

3. And the third question he has is a little different. He says, “Finally, your book discusses boundary setting, which with toddlers probably covers most of the corrective actions a parent needs to take. But what are your suggestions as far as behaviors you would like your child to actively learn? Specifically, my daughter has refused cleaning up after her messes and she won’t apologize. And those are certainly the types of values, etiquette I’d like her to learn. Outside of a direct request, it often feels like our only options are to let her move on, which feels too passive, or coerce her, which we fear leads to shame or the wrong lesson learned. Thank you for your wonderful book.”

Okay, so what my mind’s going to with the way that he describes the cleaning up, it sounds a little different from cleaning up toys. I’m wondering if this is messes around meal time. I’m not sure what other kinds of messes she might be making, but generally I would set a child up for success so that they’re not making the kind of messes that are going to upset us. So if that is around meal time, again, I would be stopping my child with my hand when they’re starting to dump something, because I am being attentive, and then seeing that for what it is, which is my child saying: I’m done. I’m testing now. I’m not eating anymore. How are you going to handle that? That’s basically what’s going on there. And again, if I’m worried my child isn’t eating enough, so I’m not comfortable ending the meal, then I’m going to be accepting the mess.

This dad is absolutely right. He says, “the boundary setting mostly covers corrective actions a parent needs to take” where we’re actually physically stopping our child while we’re letting them know, “We can’t let you, this isn’t safe,” but cooperation is voluntary. We can’t make a child clean up. Yes, we could threaten and bribe and do a lot of things that I don’t sense this dad wants to do, but those things will actually make our child feel less genuinely cooperative and will distance us in our relationship. And our relationship is the best tool we have for our child’s success in life and behavior and everything. So we don’t want to threaten that.

Apologizing takes a lot. For us as adults, saying sorry is an uncomfortable place to go to. It’s vulnerable, and that’s a lot to ask of a young child. But she will do it if she sees it modeled a lot and if we trust her to do it when she genuinely feels it.

To help encourage our child to clean up or do any voluntary activity, we have to be willing to do it with them, keep it light, not make a big heavy deal out of it. Again, set ourselves up for success. So if this is with toys, we don’t give our children access to a zillion small pieces that we don’t want to have all over the floor. We might say, “Well, if you want to help put these away, then we can take those other things out.”

We also don’t leave cleaning up for when a child is going to be tired, and we all know this is hard for us too. Late in the afternoon, that time between their nap and dinner, it’s a rough time to ask somebody to clean up. And then at night when they’re going to bed, very tough. Nobody wants to clean up then. So setting ourselves up for success might mean cleaning up earlier in the day and then not having, again, a million things out for them. Maybe leaving a mess until the next morning.

But if this is more like an immediate mess that happened during mealtime, then I would consider what I’m doing that might be creating this kind of testing. I’m assuming that these aren’t just accidents. If a child has an accident, I would say, “Oops.” And again, I wouldn’t expect them, “Well, now clean that up.” If a child did it on purpose, I still wouldn’t expect that they’re going to be able to clean it up themselves. In fact, I’d probably expect it less, and I would make even less of it so as not to give that behavior a lot of power.

And then I would, instead of saying, “Okay, you’ve got to clean this up,” I would request help with the details and that means I’m already committed to be helping here. She isn’t just going to be able to do it all on her own. They might be physically capable, but they need that helping hand. And as this dad is spot on in saying, “Coercing her, we fear that leads to shame or the wrong lesson learned.” So I’d say, “Okay, I’m going to get the cloth. Can you rub that part and I’ll rub this part?” Very communal, light, voluntary. If it’s cleaning up toys, “Oh, where do you want these? Should we put these over here? Can you put some of those in that bin for me? Thank you so much.” And what that does is it helps our child to want to do these things, especially when we really need them to. They come through, because we’re not nitpicking, because we’re not making a power struggle out of everything.

And all the time we’re doing that, we’re teaching. That’s how children learn. They learn through us. They learn: Oh, so when there are messes, we help. Because that’s what my mom does, that’s what my dad does.

So this dad’s right that a direct request won’t often be the ticket. The ticket is a request, a joining, us demonstrating what cooperation looks like.

Lisa Sunbury Gerber has a wonderful piece on her website regarding baby.org, it’s called “Clean Up, Clean Up,” and I’ll link to it in the transcript of this podcast, but you can also Google it. I recommend it.

I want to congratulate this dad and any parent who is shifting cycles from the way they were raised to the way they want to raise their children. It is challenging. I love that this dad is asking for these clarifications. Because oftentimes, we want to do it differently, but we feel frozen and it’s hard to know what it looks and feels like to be a respectful parent with very clear boundaries. I’m glad this dad thought my book was a good start and, yes, I would keep reading, keep listening, keep practicing. It’s a process for all of us.

So I hope that perspective helps a little bit.

And by the way, if my podcasts are helpful to you, you can help the podcast continue by giving it a positive review on iTunes. So grateful to all of you for listening! And please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, JanetLansbury.com. They’re all indexed by subject and category, so you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in.

And both of my books are available on audio, please check them out. Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting and No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame. You can even get them for free from Audible by following the link in the liner notes of this podcast, or you can go to the books section of my website and find them there. You can also get them in paperback at Amazon, and in ebook at Amazon, Barnes And Noble, and apple.com.

Thanks again for listening. We can do this.

The post No Bad Kids: Questions about Tantrums, Mealtimes, and Cleaning Up appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

But this post isn’t about the art of food presentation and colorful garnishes (a hilarious thought, really, considering my lack of talent in the kitchen). Instead, I’ve collected some simple suggestions for instilling healthy habits and a positive, mindful approach to eating.

Tummy Wisdom

We’re born with the ability to listen to our tummies, and the key to healthy eating is to keep doing that.  Our job as parents is to ensure that this important message doesn’t get obstructed by extraneous issues like our worries that children aren’t going to eat enough (or at all) without our nudging.

Trust in our children is the key to almost every aspect of parenting, but it’s especially essential at mealtime. Since children take their cues from us, our calm, trusting attitude will keep this channel between our child’s mind and tummy clear.  Present a few healthy options, let go, let your children do the rest, and they will be able to stay in tune with their physical needs for food.

The one thing that the many parents who contact me about food issues have in common – they are acting out of worry rather than trust.

When They’re Done, They’re Done

Remove “clean your plate” from your vocabulary. Don’t coax “just one more bite” or “here comes the airplane!”  Take the safest, most child-centered route by offering small portions and allowing your child to ask for more.

Breasts and Bottles

In the early months we must trust babies to communicate their needs and do our best to tune in and understand. Studies show that it is easier not to overfeed breastfed babies, because they have to suckle to get more milk, and they’ll usually stop as soon as they’re satiated. Bottle feeding requires even more attunement. The safest bet is to pay close attention and not give babies a drop more than they seem to “request.” Never try to overfill babies so that they’ll last longer between feedings.

When introducing solids to babies, be mindful of being responsive, never directive. Always let the child lead. She knows her tummy, you don’t. Even pre-verbal children will let us know when they are hungry and when they’ve had enough — if we make it easy for them. Assure children that you want that information.

Let your child out of her highchair as soon as you receive the slightest signal that she is done. (Consider using a small table and chair or stool to give a toddler more autonomy.)

Toddlers are often picky eaters. Some children remain that way. Even if your child eats next to nothing for a meal or two, trust him. When we panic, problems can begin.

Encourage Attentiveness

Infant specialist Magda Gerber recommended feeding infants on our lap to encourage attunement, attentiveness and intimacy. For the first few years at least, insist that children sit while they eat, whether you are at home, a friend’s house, the park, or anywhere else. This is a simple boundary that children as young as 9 or 10 months can understand and accept as long as you are consistent. Sitting is good manners, it’s safer than playing with food in your mouth, and it encourages focus on eating.

Don’t show TV and videos to get children to eat. This, again, stems from worrying rather than trusting, and it creates the habit of not paying attention to food and his or her own tummy wisdom.

Be attentive to children whenever they eat so that they can stay focused, relaxed and refueled by both the food and your connection. This is the best way to enable continued “tummy listening” and will pave the way for togetherness at mealtimes for years to come.

Eryn shared her experience:

Just finished lunch with my two-year-old and wanted to say a big THANK YOU for the encouragement to make meals a time of connecting, with zero distractions or agenda about what gets eaten, firm boundaries around leaving the table, throwing food, etc. Carving out the time to eat together this way is easier said than done, but the effect is that mealtimes are going to be some of my favorite memories of this age with my son!

For more, you might wish to check out the “feeding” and “mealtimes” sections here on my website.

I also recommend the book: French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Le Billon.

Thank you, Eryn, for sharing your story and photo!

(Adapted from an article originally published on eHow)

The post Giving Children the Gift of Healthy Eating appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “High Energy Boy Won’t Cooperate”

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. Today, I’m responding to an email from a mom with an energetic three year old, who says she’s always loved and encouraged her son’s physicality, but now that he has a baby sister, he’s less cooperative and constantly testing, and she’s having a really difficult time keeping her cool with him.

Here’s the email I received:

“Hello Janet, I have an almost three year old son. He’s always had an incredible amount of energy. Began walking at 10 months, began riding a balance bike at 21 months, mastered the pedal bike without training wheels, at two-and-three-quarters, climbs anything and everything, runs nonstop, you get it. This kid has to move his body, which I’ve always loved and encouraged.

Now, he has a four month old sister, and we do get out daily, but he’s having more and more trouble with sitting and listening, and we seem to have regressed in all aspects of the toddler’s independent activities.

An example is when I help him dress. He won’t stand still as I attempt to put clothes on. He constantly moves, leans on me, basically anything else that won’t aid with dressing. This is the same with sitting to eat, no matter where we are. He’s still in a high chair, because he constantly slides out of a chair, and won’t eat. I ask him to help with his first time listening, follow my, or my partner’s or teachers’, directions the first time. I’m constantly threatening, by taking away his bike, or not going to the park, or not going on a walk if he doesn’t listen to me.

It’s driving me crazy, especially when having to care for a baby, and getting ready to go anywhere. I feel like I’ve lost control of myself, and I’m yelling so much, or physically holding him in place to put clothes on. This is not how I saw myself with him, and I’m disappointed with myself. Thank you for any help.”

Okay, so the first thing that struck me reading this, as a parent of an active boy myself, and working with a lot of these children, we have to understand that they actually can sit and focus. They’re not inclined to, but they can, if we make our expectations clear, and I’m going to explain how to do that.

But, what happens is that we treat our child as if it’s painful for him to sit still. This mother says, “He has to move his body.” Well, he wants to move his body, but he actually doesn’t have to move his body, in terms of jumping up out of his seat, or falling out of his seat, while he’s still eating. Even wild animals will stop and groom, and eat their food, and focus, so this guy sounds amazing. He’s so accomplished physically, and he probably will be an athlete of some kind, or at least have that as one of the things he does, but he can still be present and focus.

What’s going on here, though, is the new baby, the four-month-old sister. Oh my gosh. So, this guy is bursting at the seams right now, because it’s so exciting. It’s so scary. There’s such a big change happening in his family, and now his mother’s, you know, getting cross with him, and losing her temper, which is all normal stuff that we do in these situations, but all of that, he’s absorbing, and it’s just bursting out of his body.

So yes, it is a lot harder for him to focus right now, so the way to help him … First of all, I’m going to start with eating, because that’s the one that’s really, really clear. The high chair’s fine, but you know, I don’t know that he needs it, and what I heard here in this note is that he won’t eat, and that, right there, is a perception of the situation that I would take a look at. He will eat. It’s not our job to get our children to eat, and that has to be really clear. It is our job to present healthy food, and be very, very clear about the boundaries around eating. That means that, if they don’t sit, they’re going to be done for that meal.

We have to be clear. We have to be 100% on this. Why? Because it’s actually unfair to a child to fudge on the rules, and shift the rules, because we’re worried that he can’t do it, that he has to move, so now we’re not having boundaries, basically. Boundaries are either there or they’re not there, and they can’t really be there if we’re also invested in that it’s our responsibility, it’s our job to get him to eat. It can create a lot of little issues and difficulties with eating, if we take that on as our role, that it’s up to us to make sure our children eat enough. Only they can know how much food they need, and if they’re actually hungry, and when their tummies are full. We have to give that to them.

In my classes, with parents and toddlers, we do snack time, and I’m very tough on them. I mean, not tough in an angry, mad way at all, but I really don’t let them slide. You know, the first time that they’ve ever tried this, if they haven’t done it at home, then I might say, “Oh, okay, looks like you’re trying to get up, and I want you to stay here until you’re done. Are you done?”

Now, ahead of time, I’ve made the rules very clear, which I recommend doing, even reminding him, you know, he’s in a kind of a state of madness right now. It’s going to be difficult for him to do things that might have been easier for him before, because of his emotional state, so I would say ahead of time, “Now we’re going to eat. Please don’t fall out of your chair. If you start to squeeze out of your chair, then that’s going to show me that you’re done.”

So we don’t have to say it with this warning kind of tone. We can say it very lovingly, but very clearly. That’s what children need, especially when they’re going through huge life changes like this. You know, this is why I recommend, actually, when you’re first starting with these kinds of limits, doing them for a snack time, when you’re not so invested. That will be easier for you. That’s easier for us, as parents, if we’re not worried, “Oh, now he’s not going to eat for several hours, and that was his dinner, you know, that I spent a lot of time making.” I don’t recommend spending a lot of time making their dinner at this age, or at this time of life.

This is an overwhelmed family. This is a family that has to kind of huddle around and keep their life a little smaller, and get through this passage, into easier times. So I would do less, and worry about less, but keep these boundaries really solid for him, because when you’re feeling wobbly, and then the boundaries are wobbly, it actually creates more stress, so we might think, “Oh, I’m trying to cater to him a little, because he’s just so active right now, he’s having such a hard time,” and that’s actually what makes it worse.

So being clear, “I don’t want you to get up until you’re done.” You see him starting to get up … Be present when he’s eating. Be fully present if you can. If you see him starting to squeeze out of his high chair, or whatever, or flop over, “Oops, that’s showing me that you’re saying you’re done. I want you to stay sitting, and stay settled in your seat while you’re eating, so you can focus on your food.” It could be for one second. It could be for two bites. It doesn’t matter. It’s all about giving him the consistent, clear boundaries.

That’s how I would handle that part, and he does need your full attention periodically, and I know that’s hard with a four month old, and you know, it’s not going to happen every time, probably. As much as possible, remember that those are important touchpoints throughout the day, the meals, the dressing, which I’m going to talk about now, the transitions, getting into the car, helping him get to bed. All of those things are time to pay attention to him, if you can. Other times throughout the day, you may not have a chance. That’s okay.

So, she talks a lot about getting his clothes on. When there’s a new baby, the older child sees all this physical care going to this little, adorable person, and they feel a little less adorable at this time, and they really need that reining in, not just with the boundaries at mealtime I’m describing, but in all these other things too, all the ways he’s going to test, you know? He’s testing you.

And, he is having a hard time holding it together for dressing, so this is where I would, first of all, see this as quality time, that you are going to dress him. You’re not going to expect him to be able to do it for himself at this time of life. Maybe he could do it a bit for himself before, but right now, he’s going to need your assistance, so I would block out these few minutes together, where you’re going to help him.

And I would expect a little rascally guy that’s going to be thumping out all over the place, and I would be the mama bear, but not the angry mama bear, that yells because he’s not listening, the mama bear that understands, “Oh, whoa. This guy is going through something. It’s not always going to be like this. He really needs extra help. He needs me to hold him in tight, you know, while he’s leaning on me, and make sure I’m able to push him away enough to help him get those arms in. He needs me to acknowledge, ‘Wow! You’re really having a rough time with this. I see a lot of feelings coming out here. What’s going on? You got all this wild energy.'”

It’s going to be your attitude that changes everything. Yes, he’s still going to resist. He’s still going to push, but when he feels you expecting this, when he feels you totally willing to play your role as the loving mama bear, that’s doing a lot of physical care with him, he will melt a little into that, and it will calm his heart and ease his mind about what’s going on in his family right now. It will make it a little easier for him.

So instead of kind of working against him, by, “You’ve got to listen, and if you don’t listen, we’re not going to do this, we’re going to do that,” or, “I’m going to take this away,” work with him. This is when he needs that extra. And if you don’t want to do that, honestly, don’t go out. Don’t go out as much. I wouldn’t at this stage of life, with your family. Make your life as easy for you as you possibly can, because every transition, every dressing, it is going to be a bit of a scene that hopefully you can meet with a lot of empathy, and humor, and understanding that this is normal. This is par for the course for what’s going on with him.

And, for the fact that he’s an active guy anyway, so if you’re caring for both of them, and you’re not able to get this together, don’t. Stay home. Let him be rascally at home, instead. Take care of yourself, and then when you can, show him that you can take care of him, even when he’s mad as a hatter. And don’t worry about the eating. He will eat when the limits are clear, and he doesn’t have this distraction of having to test you in that area.

So I think what’s really the issue here is our expectation. It sounds like this loving mother’s expectations are just a little bit off. She’s expecting he’s going to be able to listen and be a helpful guy right now, and I don’t think he can. I mean, there’s always a reason when children behave like this, but this one is pretty clear. It is so common, I can’t even tell you.

And this dressing thing may be your playtime with him, your actually, focused playtime with him. I mean, children don’t know the difference. Time together is time together. You know, there are people, I’m not one of them, but there are people that recommend, you know, you wrestle with your child every day, or whatever. This is a real organic time to engage with your child physically, and do it from a positive place, fully willing to face all his activity and his energy.

You can do this. He’s still a little guy. And then I think she won’t be disappointed with herself. I think she’ll see her role a little differently, her expectations will be different, and she’ll get to be kind of a hero in these moments. You know, maybe it just happens once a day, getting him dressed, or maybe not at all. I’m up for pajama days, too.

I hope that helps.

If you enjoyed this podcast, there are lots more to choose from on my website, at janetlansbury.com. Also, both of my books are available on audio at Audible, Elevating Child Care and No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame. You can get both audio books for free with a 30-day trial membership by using the link in the liner notes of this podcast. You can also get them in paperback at Amazon and an ebook at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple.com.

I also have an audio series, called Sessions. These are individual recordings of private consultations I’ve had with parents, where we work through their parenting dilemmas, and these are available by going to sessionsaudio.com. You can read a description of each episode, and order them individually, or you can get all of them, which is actually about three hours of audio, for just under $20, sessionsaudio.com.

Thanks for listening. We can do this.

The post High Energy Boy Won’t Cooperate appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Transcript of “Setting Limits That Make Mealtimes Enjoyable”

Hi. This is Janet Lansbury, and welcome to Unruffled. Today, I’m responding to an email I received from a mom who says that she and her husband are experiencing a lot of stress and frustration around their 23-month-old at meal times. They’ve tried a number of different strategies to get him to sit peacefully and eat, but everything they’ve tried so far eventually seems to end up in him having tantrums, or throwing food all over their dining room. It’s not working out.

Here’s the email I received:

“Hi, Janet. We’re having some trouble during meal times with our 23-month-old. I’m aware of the advantages of a chair he can get in and out of himself, and have read your articles as well as Magda Gerber’s on the advantages of such a setup. However, this method seems to have created its own problems. At six months, we started our son off in a regular booster high chair, strapped in. Around 15 months, he started throwing tantrums constantly around meal time, including throwing food, et cetera. Then, he went through a phase where he wouldn’t go into the booster at all, and would only eat on my husband’s lap. This was not feasible for several reasons, but if he didn’t get to sit in my husband’s lap, he would scream interminably, and we’d all be late to work in the morning. After reading Gerber’s and your thoughts on the subject, we transitioned him to a toddler table about four months ago, and it helped stopped the tantrums and food throwing.

He definitely seems to enjoy meal time more, however, meal time is still quite stressful for us. He gets up all the time and walks around with food, spilling it everywhere, and eating all over the place. He gets up and walks around with his fork, which makes us nervous. We have to constantly remind him to sit down, or else be all done. It’s stressful for my husband and me, because we’re constantly hounding him to sit, and constantly cleaning up food all over the dining room. I don’t enjoy the meals. In addition, we’re not sitting with him. Either my husband or I have to perch uncomfortably in the tiny toddler chair to eat with him, which we sometimes do, or else we’re sitting at the adult table nearby, but then he’s eating alone. He doesn’t seem to mind that setup, but I find it hard to model eating behavior, impossible to eat family-style, and it just feels like we’re isolating him.

I’m not sure where to go from here. I’m tempted to drop $250 on a Stokke Tripp Trapp, swayed by its promise of growing with the child, and lured in by the pictures of the children eating happily with the whole family at the table, but as he’ll still be strapped in, will we then be back to tantrums and food throwing? We would appreciate any advice. Thanks in advance.”

Okay, so I’m hearing some misconceptions here about Magda Gerber’s approach. Also, there’s an underlying issue that I’m sensing here. That is whose responsibility eating food is. If we take that on as our responsibility for our child, rather than trusting him to know what his body needs in terms of the amounts that he’s eating and what he chooses of the healthy choices that we offer, the selection that we offer him, then, in a sense, our child has us over a barrel in that that’s our priority, because we feel it’s our responsibility to get our child to eat, and to get them to eat enough. That will create a lot of problems, because it puts this sense of urgency and stress around eating for both of us, for us and for our child. It takes our child out of being in tune with his tummy, and his needs.

It just adds all this distraction around a message that our child needs to hear in himself, that, “I need food now,” and then, “Actually, my tummy’s full. I’ve had enough.”

It’s an important and kind of delicate message, but it’s between our child and his tummy. It’s really none of our business. If we make it our business, we’re going to create stress and problems for ourselves and for our child.

Keeping that in mind, our job is to set up the way that we want eating to go in terms of the rules that we want to have around this experience. Again, none of those rules can be about how much he chooses to eat, or if he even chooses to eat at that meal time, but they can and need to be around the behavior that we’ll accept in the way that he’s handling food.

The approach that I believe in, Magda Gerber’s approach, is actually quite strict in this area. It’s not strict with sternness and seriousness and unkindness, but it’s very strict in terms of the boundaries being very, very clear, and us really needing to be consistent and stick to them. And this wonderful rule that I believe is so helpful for so many reasons: sitting while they eat.

Children need, I believe, to have the limit that they have to sit while they’re eating. That can be, if you’re in the park, you’re sitting in the grass, you’re sitting on a bench, you’re sitting somewhere to have water, to have snacks, to have meals, for everything.

What this does is it encourages children to listen to their tummies and make this a focused time, so that they’re not doing this while they’re doing other things, they’re not multitasking, and therefore not really tuning in to their biological needs.

It’s also safer in that children aren’t running around with food. And it gives children a sense of manners around food so that they’re not putting food all over the house, they’re not going to a friend’s house and walking around with their food and dropping it everywhere.

I’ve discovered children really do love this kind of care that we give them when we’re strict about them focusing on their meal, focusing on food when it’s served, and it not just being this halfway thing that they do. It’s special, and it’s a time to give our undivided attention.

The reason that children resist being strapped into high chairs a lot of the time is that parents tend to put the baby in the high chair, and now they’re going off and they’re getting the food, and the baby’s stuck there longer than the baby wants to be. A baby can handle that while he or she is actually hungry and eating without attention from us, with the calm, peaceful sense of focus around it, but when they feel that, as maybe in this family’s case, “We’re putting you in here, and now we really want you to eat.” There’s that agenda, there’s that feeling coming from us that we have this expectation of them to eat the food, and the pressure around that, children will resist. They also resist when they’re stuck and we’re not really paying full attention to them.

These are some of the reasons that Magda Gerber said, “Young children are ready to eat, but they’re not ready to dine,” meaning they’re not ready to sit and linger at the table and have coffee and hang out. They can be there to eat, and when they’re done, they want to move on. That’s developmentally appropriate for them. Later on, they’ll be able to sit politely for a bit longer while other people are finishing, but in these early years, Magda believed, and I have experienced this to be true, children should have this sense of autonomy that they get to decide when they’re done, and that they shouldn’t have to sit and wait for everybody else. That’s when you’ll see throwing food and other kinds of acting out behavior.

With that in mind, I’m not sure exactly why this little boy was throwing tantrums around meal time and throwing food, but I would not have allowed him to throw food. I would be there, paying attention, sitting with him and then, ideally, we see that hand that’s getting ready to throw the food, and we’re able to stop our child right there with our hand, touching them and say, “Ooh, looks like you’re going to throw that food. I don’t want you to throw the food. Are you saying that you’re done?”

Then, right there, we will get a very clear response that we can feel confident about. Either our child will stop and settle in and eat some more, or they will continue in that motion to show us that they’re done. Then, we can say, “Okay, thanks. Looks like you’re done. Now, I’m going to take you out of your chair.”

Magda Gerber did also advise a different way that I practiced with my children, and to great success. It really worked for us. That is that once a child is able to sit independently, meaning, getting into a sitting position all on their own, then they can start being ready to eat at a small table.

In the beginning, we used, and a lot of people use a bed and breakfast tray that has legs, so that’s a very small, short table. We sit across the table from them, and we sit on the floor. We have the food on the table, and our child comes crawling over, or maybe we bring the child over in the beginning, and say, “Okay, now I’m going to offer you some food. Are you interested in this food?” At that point, the child will either sit and have some of the food, or not.

We recommend starting this with snacks so that we don’t feel, “Oh-oh, our child’s learning something new, and they may not eat enough because they’re not used to this, and it’s a meal time,” and then, it’s a little more difficult for us to feel firm about limits. Trying this for a snack is ideal. Then, we don’t have to worry if our child eats at that moment or not, and we can help them to learn the expectation that we have, which is, “You got to stay sitting at this table while you’re eating, and you’re welcome to move away at any time, but that’s going to tell me that you’re done eating.”

Then, again, in that interaction, we can anticipate, we can see our child is starting to move away, and we say, “Oh, looks like you’re starting to move away.” Maybe we put our hand on them gently, and we ask, “Are you saying that you’re done?” Then, right there, we will get this very clear, wonderful answer.

This is mostly for us more than our child. It’s more for us to feel sure and to feel confident in our limits, which is so important with any kind of limits that we set. We have to be confident. We have to be certain that we’re doing the right thing, or at least more certain than doubtful.

If the child goes away and we start to pick up the food and the child comes back, this is holding a limit. We have to say, “Oh, wow. You came back. Looks like you’re asking for more food. You changed your mind. You left and you came back. We’ll have food again later, but I’m not going to give you more now, because you showed me you were done.” These exact words certainly don’t matter, just something very comfortable, very confident, but not, “Well, I told you.” Not like that kind of thing. Upbeat, but at the same time firm. That’s how children learn.

This parent’s description is a misunderstanding of what the autonomy involved in the child size table is about, because it’s certainly not about getting up with food, and moving around. I would never let that happen. If that is happening, then the child is struggling. They’re very distracted. They’re not able to sit and focus on their food, because they’ve got all these distractions of what’s allowed here?, and, Now I’m going to do this. Now I’m going to do that.

I would advise these parents to be up front about, “We let you walk around with the food. We’re not going to do that anymore.” I would say this ahead of time. “It’s important that you sit while you eat. If you feel like standing up, that’s going to show us you’re done, and we’re going to put the food away.” If he tries to get up with the food in his hand, you got to take the food out of his hand right away, not angrily, not with annoyance, just, “Oops, I’m going to keep this food at the table. The food’s going to stay here, but you can leave. You can go.”

Right there, we’re giving our child that choice. They can get up and leave and not eat more food, or they can stay and follow the boundaries around eating. These are very reasonable, age-appropriate boundaries.

Sometimes it feels very strict, because children do come back and test them, and they’ll often say things that just go right to your heart. Once they’re verbal, they’ll say, “Oh, I’m thirsty. I need something.” This happens to me a lot because I do snack time with children in my classes, and they seem to come back after I know … I really do know that they got it, that they know the rules, but they’ll come back with that look in their eyes and it’s very hard to say no. But when I do, and this is just about a snack. It’s not something that they need. It’s not their nutrition for the day or something, but they’ll give me that look and I’ll feel terrible, and then I’ll see them turn away when I say, “You know what? You left, and I’m sorry you changed your mind, but I’m not going to give you more.”

They’ll turn away, and then they’re just fine. They go back off to play. They’re just asking. They’re just testing to see if these boundaries are real and if they can depend on them. I strongly believe that children really want to be able to depend on them. They want them to be real. If they’re not consistent, then they’re not there at all. Then, the child has to keep testing and testing.

Another thing that children test is playing with the food, so if we’re paying attention, we can actually see, we can sense when our child is done with that part where they’re hungry, and they’re really eating, they’re enjoying the food, and then it slows down, and now they’re playing with the food. We can stop that right away and say, “It looks like you’re playing with the food. I think you’re done eating.” Again, right there, we will get a clear answer if our child immediately goes back into, “Now I’m seriously eating here,” or if they continue in that testing behavior where we feel, “Oh, I’m getting played with here.” If we feel that, it’s almost always true.

We should never feel guilty or bad about stopping something that we sense is gone over a line from honest hunger to testing. Then, she said he gets up and walks around with his fork. Okay, I wouldn’t let him do that either. Fork stays at the table. The food stays at the table. It all stays at the table, but then he can get up any time. Then, the food’s going to go away for a while until the next meal time.

She says, “We have to constantly remind him to sit down or else be all done.” You don’t need to remind children, especially not a 23-month-old. They really do know. If you’re consistent about these boundaries, they don’t need to be told to sit back down. They’re very smart, much smarter than we give them credit for, generally.

“Stressful for my husband and me.” Yes, I can imagine, “because we’re constantly hounding him to sit.” Should never have to happen.

“I’m constantly cleaning up food all over the dining room.” Doesn’t need to happen.

“I don’t enjoy the meals.” Right. That’s important. These are times for connection. These are anchoring times in our day with our child where we should give our full attention, and really connect for however long it goes on. It could be very brief, or a bit longer, but it’s the quality of the connection that matters. It’s 100% we don’t have our phones, we don’t have distractions, and it has to be enjoyable for both of us. If we’re not enjoying it, it’s probably because we’re afraid to set boundaries, because either we’re too invested in our child eating more than our child seems to want to eat, or we don’t believe our child is capable of understanding rules. Neither of those are true.

Another reason this family isn’t enjoying the meals is because they’re not sitting with him. They’re perched uncomfortably in a tiny toddler chair, or they’re sitting at the adult table nearby. Neither of those are a workable solution. I actually looked up on the internet “low slung chairs,” and I found a lot of chairs, starting from a $20 camping chair.

So get a chair. Get a comfortable chair. You don’t have to keep it out. If it’s ugly, you can put it away and bring it out just for meal times. If you do leave it out, this is just for a short phase in your family’s life, so get a low slung chair.

I had one that was a vintage patio chair with rattan, but it had a cushioned seat. It was very, very comfortable, very low. I wasn’t as low as my child in her chair, but I was low enough that I could sit with her. This isn’t at the bed and breakfast tray table, when I was sitting on the floor. This is when she graduated to being able to sit in a small, child size chair, and had a bigger table that my husband actually made, but there are a lot of ways that you can do this. You can buy a table like this family did, or you can cut off the legs of a table, an old table.

These tables are wonderful, because children end up using them for art projects and block building, and all kinds of things. It’s a very good investment. This is important. It’s important that we’re comfortable so that we can savor these times together. That’s what our child needs. Our child needs clear boundaries and rules, and also for us to be there, present, and not try to rush it through and get it over with, and stressed. Really comfortable and able to be there.

If we do this in these early years, it doesn’t even have to be all the time. We can still have a high chair around. This is what we did. We had a hand-me-down high chair around that we would use if we had a family gathering or something, we would have our child sit there. It was special, but again, our child already had these rules instilled about sitting when they eat, not getting up with food, and not getting up until they were done.

You can do both. If you want to do some family meals, you definitely can, and you can still give your child the autonomy and the respect of having their child-sized time where they can have their feet on the floor and be truly comfortable. We can be comfortable with them, and enjoy the moment.

Once again, number one, let go of your agenda around him eating. He’s going to eat enough. He’s going to eat the perfect amount for him if you can trust him. I understand that it’s scary, but it’s really important that children get to own this message that they receive from their bodies, and that we don’t add all this stress and agenda around that. Then, rules about how eating goes in your family. That’s up to us. Children are very capable of learning these from a young age if we’re consistent, if we’re kind, if we do it with love.

I hope that helps.

Also, please check out some of my other podcasts on my website, janetlansbury.com. I also have lots of articles about meal time, and both of my books, they’re available on audio at audible.com: No Bad Kids, Toddler Discipline Without Shame. There’s a lot about boundaries there and how to teach them. Elevating Child Care, A Guide To Respectful Parenting is my other book. You can get them in paperback at Amazon, and an ebook at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and apple.com.

I also have an audio series called Sessions. These are individual recordings of my private consultations with parents where we discuss a lot of details that I’m not able to go into here on my podcasts, and these are available by going to my website, janetlansbury.com and clicking the button that says Sessions on the top toolbar. You can order the episodes individually and read the descriptions about each one, or you can get them all, about three hours of audio for just under $20.

Thanks for listening. We can do this.

The post Setting Limits That Make Mealtimes Enjoyable appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Problems occur when our highly aware young children sense our concerns, because they can be compelled to test and exploit them. Kids always seem to know when they have us over a barrel (or, in this case, a bowl), and the uncomfortable yet tantalizing feeling of power they wield over “the giants” can distract and even unnerve them.

In other words, when our children resist our eating agendas, it isn’t a sign that they’re ungrateful, cruel or manipulative. Rather, it is a reflection of their innate need to test both our leadership and their power. And that means that if we let our anxiety around food consume us (sorry, couldn’t resist), we might actually create the problems we wish to avoid: a child with habits and emotions that interfere with healthy eating. We do this when we believe it our job to get kids to eat and perhaps resort to:

• Coaxing, bribing, rewarding (“Just one more bite… Yum, this is delicious!”)
• Relinquishing behavior boundaries at mealtimes (letting kids stand while they eat, throw or play with food or drinks, or ping-pong back and forth from the table)
• Feeding distracted children (by following them around to give them bites, or using TV or other screens to “get them to eat”)

I recently enjoyed a phone consultation with a lovely mother with concerns about her toddler’s eating. I urged her to consider releasing her agenda by simply being clear about mealtime behavior – basic manners — and letting her child do the rest. She kindly allowed me to share her process:

Hi Janet,

It’s been a week and I wanted to let you know that meal times have been going so much better after talking with you. Sarah happily sits for the entire meal, and meals are shorter (they used to just drag on and on) and much more enjoyable now.

I really can’t believe how quickly it became a non-issue. Seeing us now, I’d never guess that meals used to be such a drama with so many acrobatics and performances going on. Neither of us, least of all Sarah, had to struggle much with the transition. It’s as if that first lunch (minutes after talking with you) — when I explained that standing up would tell me she was all done — took all the wind from the sails. A few meals in she did cry a bit when I followed through and put up her plate (even though she changed her mind), but I think she was just solidifying the new way of doing things for herself.

And she never went hungry! In fact, I almost (and I can’t think of the right word here) “look forward” to her letting me know she is done because I am interested and wanting to know what her body is telling her. So when the cue comes, my attitude is, “Great! We’ll listen to it! Thank you for telling me!” I don’t say all that, but I don’t worry that maybe she got it wrong.

Thanks so much!

~ Julia

Dear Janet,

Hi! It’s been a month or so since we talked about meals with my 21 month old Sarah, and things are still going great. It’s almost humorous to think how I was doing all that (following her around with plate and spoon, feeding dolls, holding food up for her to lap out of my hand like a dog, spotting her so she could stand to eat on her high chair tray etc.). She now she eats just as well (and more, really) without my shenanigans.

I wanted to let you know about an unexpected bonus from our consult; night weaning. You’d mentioned you wondered why food was such an area of control for me, and I’ve been doing some soul searching. I’m pretty sure it has to do with me still feeling horrible after finding out that she was labeled as IUGR when she was born. I was heartbroken by the thought of my baby having needed nourishment from me and me not giving it to her, and so I couldn’t convince myself that she was okay without a feeding or two overnight because I wasn’t trusting myself or my judgement, worrying I’d deprive her again.

I know there are very few 11-month-olds who aren’t able to go all night without a feeding, let alone a 21-month-old. Seeing that the worry came from me and not from her gave me the confidence in both of us that she would be just fine not nursing until morning; in fact, even better for the uninterrupted sleep.

And just like with meal times, she has amazed me. Last night was the second night, and she didn’t struggle at all. When she woke, I told her it was still time to sleep, not time to nurse yet, offered her a sip of water, and she went right back to sleep. The first night there was a mourning period of about half an hour, but it wasn’t the cries of a starving, abandoned child who was being deprived. She chanted, “No, no, no” a few times. Not like, “Mom, I NEEED this,” but more like she was complaining while processing it.  I know this was because I was able to be confident for her.

So I just wanted to thank you so much!

~ Julia

Here are some of the mealtime basics I shared with Julia:

1. Be clear with your child about your behavior expectations. Let her know ahead of time that you will expect her to sit while she eats and not leave the table until she is done. Eating the food options you’ve offered is totally her choice. She is welcome to have just a bite or two or nothing at all, as she wishes.
2. Sit with your child and give her your undivided attention. Make your child’s mealtimes a time of connection and intimacy (and this ideally includes breast or bottle feedings).
3. Remind her that if she gets up from the table or plays with food, it will demonstrate to you that she is finished eating and you will put her food away. And follow through.
4. Be calm, matter-of-fact and totally non-judgmental while consistently following through with establishing these behavior boundaries. Our clarity and honesty are gifts to our children.
5. Acknowledge her feelings and desires. “You want to come back to the table and eat more after you showed me you were done. I see how that upsets you! It will be time to eat again later.”
6. Trust your child do the rest. She’s capable of focusing on her meal and autonomously eating all she needs. Believe in her.

Thank you, Julia, for allowing me to share your story

At last! I’ve created the No Bad Kids Master Course to give you all the tools and perspective you need to not only understand  and respond effectively to your children’s behavior but also build positive, respectful, relationships with them for life! Check out all the details at nobadkidscourse.com.

(Photo by Donnie Ray Jones on Flickr)

The post Eating Isn’t Ours to Control – How One Parent Replaced Fear with Trust appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

Child specialist Magda Gerber encouraged parents to give infants and toddlers our focused attention at mealtimes whenever possible, beginning with breast or bottle feedings. As a parent and a parent-child class facilitator, over the years I’ve found Magda’s guidance beneficial for several fundamental reasons:

1. Paying attention helps us to spot testing behaviors early and gently nip them in the bud lonnnggg before we’re even close to getting annoyed or angry. As an added bonus, our calm, upbeat, early responses make testing far less interesting and therefore much rarer. Here’s how setting limits at mealtime might look:

We see signs of imminent food throwing, which will generally happen right around the time our child’s interest in eating has waned (which we’ve noticed, because we’ve been paying attention). We say to our child matter-of-factly, “I’m going to stop you from dropping that… Looks like you’re no longer interested in eating the food. Are you all finished?” Then, if our child indicates he isn’t, we might wait another moment to see if he returns to eating. If the test begins again, we can be certain he’s done. “Ah, you said you wanted more, but you are making it clear that you’re done now. I’ll help you down.”

2. Paying attention helps me to structure my day, focus and prioritize my energies (truly a godsend for a scattered person like me). As Magda wisely notes in Dear Parent: Caring for Infants With Respect, “What an infant needs—what every human being wants – is to experience the full undivided attention of a parent or other significant person.” And then her reassuring caveat, “But nobody can pay full attention all of the time.” Here’s the basic parenting framework she recommends in her book:

“During care activities (diapering, feeding, bathing, dressing, etc.), we encourage even the tiniest infant to become an active participant rather than a passive recipient of the activities. Parents create opportunities for interaction, cooperation, intimacy and mutual enjoyment by being wholeheartedly with the infant during the time they spend together anyway.

Refueled by such unhurried, pleasurable caring experiences, infants are ready to explore their environment with only minimal intervention by adults.”

What this means is that if we only have a limited amount of time to spend with a child, connected care activities like mealtimes are one of the most productive ways to use it. Here’s an example:

In the RIE Parent-Infant and Toddler Guidance classes I facilitate, we begin doing snack time once the babies are all mobile and able to sit independently. Up to this point, my role with the children has been as a mostly passive, though responsive, observer of their play. My attention is divided between watching them and engaging with their parents. With the addition of snack time, we really begin to get to know each other. I am their fully attentive leader. I invite them to participate, always meeting them where they are, while also gently insisting they follow the rules (see a video demonstration HERE). We develop rituals and in-jokes. I have the sense that our relationship shifts dramatically to one of far more trust on their end. We bond in this 15 or 20 minute period of focused time together each week.

3. Paying attention keeps us connected, builds and deepens our parent-child relationship. My children are now 22, 18, and 13, and I only recently realized that I’m still making a point of giving them my full attention at mealtime, although it looks a bit different now. Whenever any of them wake up at our home (with one a college grad and another a college sophomore, these days are rare and even more precious) and they’re ready to get something to eat in the kitchen, I try to put down whatever I might be doing to hang with them. With their full lives, there are days when this is the only time we really connect. I might offer to make them breakfast or just watch while they make their own. I might get to hear what they did the night before (if they returned home after my bedtime) or their plans for the day. Sometimes there’s a lot of dialogue and laughter. Other times, we don’t speak much at all. That’s okay. For me this will always be prime time, and the company is enough.

“The beauty of this special kind of availability is the way it affects the older child and later the adult who was raised with it. You will find that they do not feel forced to talk. They can peacefully sit with the parent and then open up if they want to. The child does not feel manipulated.” – Magda Gerber, Dear Parent: Caring for Infants With Respect

I share more of my experiences implementing Magda Gerber’s approach in my books, Elevating Child Care: A Guide to Respectful Parenting (now available in Spanish!) and No Bad Kids: Toddler Discipline Without Shame

(Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões on Flickr)

The post When Toddlers Throw Food (and Other Mealtime Mischief) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.

I guess you could say I have a mantra, words our family lives eats by:

Trust, Respect, Model, Accept, Slow Down and Enjoy.

Probably because of my family and cultural background (French), I was confident in my approach to food, and introducing it to my son felt natural. As I learned more about RIE (thanks to Janet), I realized I was applying a lot of the major principles of respectful, mindful parenting to my attitude toward food and mealtime with my toddler.

Trust

Since my son was an infant, I have trusted that he knows what his body needs, and that he is capable of determining how much of a food he should eat. I trust and know that children do not starve themselves. So I offer a variety of nutrient-dense, flavorful foods in reasonable quantities, letting him decide how much to eat, and at his own pace within the boundary of mealtimes.

Just as we don’t direct our child’s play, but rather trust him to choose activities that he needs in the moment, we should not direct our child’s eating, but rather trust his body. Our trust teaches our children to trust and listen to themselves.

Embracing this trust helps relieve the stress, anxiety or even panic of meals (is my child eating enough? Will he like what I make for him?). In this relaxed, stress free environment, children start to create positive associations with meals and food.

This trust has benefits, as well. As we trust our children and respect their desire or refusal of a food without drawing conclusions (like “He hates my cooking”, “she hates all vegetables”, “he’s picky”), we create an open-minded, safe, food environment, conducive to trying new things and hopefully stimulating curiosity about food.

Food is an obvious area for a lot of children to test their power and control. It is particularly important to not slip into that struggle with them. When you accept their decision not to eat something, you are telling them: “You are in control of your body, it belongs to you.”

They may also reject a food to see our reaction, using food as a testing tool. And it is an effective one. When tested in such a way, in order to maintain trust and open-mindedness about food, we have to remain nonchalant (i.e trusting), matter-of-fact. “You do not want to taste this right now. It doesn’t appeal to you. Maybe another day.”

Because many factors can be part of a food rejection — growth, teeth, mood, testing, agitation, fatigue — and not just a true like or dislike of a flavor , the key is to re-offer foods a number of times. If the rejection is repeated, then to try again a few months later as tastes evolve. I have applied this consistently with my son since he started solids at 6 months, and while he has some preferences, I’ve found there’s virtually no food he actually dislikes.

Respect

The respectful approach to food (and to all areas life for that matter) with our children is to avoid all manipulation: never using food to distract, to bribe, to punish, or as a means to any end. There should be no emotional entanglement attached to food. (Examples of this would be: “No dessert if you don’t eat your veggies”, “one last spoon for mommy”, offering snacks to keep a child occupied or distracted…)

Respecting our children also means avoiding labels.

The same way I find it limiting and unfair to label a child as “shy” if she’s being quiet, I don’t see anything positive in labeling a child as “a picky eater”. Such expectations tend to be self-fulfilling. If our children are not be in the mood for a food a certain day, it’s not to be taken personally. They’re not rejecting us or our hard work in the kitchen. They’re not being ungrateful or difficult. They’re listening to their bodies.

Respect is treating our baby or child as a whole person…

…not to be underestimated. He’s capable of enjoying vegetables and all kinds of (age appropriate) foods.

Being open and paying attention to our baby’s reaction to foods and putting ourselves in her shoes is also a fulfilling and fascinating exploration as a parent: to imagine what it must be like to taste a food for the first time. Narrating and sharing that back to them plants the seeds of mindful eating.

If a toddler shows interest in the kitchen, share what you are making, look at recipe books together, talk about ingredients, include them in the process and they will feel empowered and engaged.

Much like the best toys aren’t kids’ toys, the best foods aren’t kids’ foods. The idea of “kids foods” (this preconception that children naturally only like fried foods, sweet processed foods and pizza), or hiding broccoli and kale under a mound of pasta, lying about the presence of a vegetable, or even sweetening a baby food puree because we assume children only like it sweet, is disrespectful, a form of “dumbing down” that often is self-fulfilling.

Model

Modeling a healthy, joyful approach to food and our bodies: Being engaged in the enjoyment of food preparation and meals, being willing to try new foods ourselves, listening to our bodies and slowing down to experience food, seeing the family meal as an opportunity for connection and togetherness where everyone is an equal member and participant. Nurturing a healthy, joyful, positive relationship to the nourishment of our bodies is a key element, and responsibility, of parenting.

The dinner table can be a powerful place to model interacting with each other in a respectful manner, a mini version of life in society really. The family meal can be an opportunity to practice and model being in the moment with our loved ones, taking turns, sharing, listening, exchanging stories and thoughts. You know, the human experience.

Accept

…and acknowledge feelings. Don’t rush to fix them.

One of the things that help a child listen to his body and eat well is giving him an opportunity to feel hungry. I find that having clear limits on snacking improves the meal experience greatly. This may sound controversial, and many moms have a hard time saying no to a child asking for a snack. The instinct is to rush to satisfy that request for fear of the child sensing hunger for even a minute.

If a child asks for a snack 20 minutes before a meal, I think of it as an opportunity for him to be in his body and feel his body, to become aware of what his body needs. I acknowledge: “You’re feeling hungry right now, your body is ready for some food. Let’s look at what’s for dinner together. I’m hungry too and looking forward to sharing this meal with you.”

I trust that my child is capable of patience, of the pleasure of anticipation. I am ok with his feelings, and know he will benefit from this self-awareness.

Slow Down

Eating mindfully, without distractions, as an end in itself, as a moment to enjoy and focus on. Talk about the food we eat, the flavors, the sensations we experience. Slow down and enjoy the togetherness of a meal.

In our busy lives, the meal can be a moment to be completely present with our children and enjoy a shared experience with them.

Enjoy

…thanks to self-care and clear boundaries.

Because the table is an obvious place for children to test what they can and cannot do, self-care and clear boundaries are key. I cannot enjoy my meal if my toddler is walking with food around the house, throwing food or dipping his toys in the salad dressing.

My 2 ½ year old son recently tested this boundary. He wanted to leave the table to go play. I explained we must be at the table to eat, so if he’s still hungry, he should finish now and go play after. The meal is there for a given amount of time, then the meal is over and we clear the table.  “If you want to go play right now, you are telling me you are no longer hungry. I will put your plate away.” He decided to go play. I did put his plate away, and we continued eating. He came back 20 minutes later asking for his plate. I explained I put it away. I acknowledged his frustration and disappointment. Since we were at the cheese or fruit course, I did offer him a small piece of cheese or fruit if he was still really hungry. But he insisted on getting his plate back, which really showed me this exchange had nothing to do with food and hunger, but everything to do about his getting a clear answer on where the boundary stands.

When we are nervous or afraid that our children won’t eat, or not eat enough, we tend to be inconsistent with our boundaries.  It’s the same dynamic as the fear of a tantrum. We cannot set consistent boundaries that make our children feel safe if we are trying to avoid tantrums and strong feelings at all costs. Avoiding the tantrum suddenly takes priority over self-care, and that often ends in a lot of frustration on both ends.

Similarly, if “getting the child to eat” takes priority over self-care and the boundaries necessary to the family enjoying a meal, frustration ensues for the parent, as well as negative associations to mealtime (stress, power struggle, fuzzy boundaries, testing) for the child as a result.

These approaches are self-fulfilling because they create good associations with food. So changing or adjusting our perspectives as parents, with patience and trust, is so rewarding: instead of being synonymous with power struggle, fear, stress, manipulation, and isolation, our children will learn to associate food with pleasure, connection, and nourishment of body and soul.

Helene is the French mom of almost three year old Pablo, living in Los Angeles. Her blog, French Foodie Baby, chronicles her journey in the nurturing and expanding of her son’s tastebuds and love of life through good food. It includes baby and family cuisine recipes as well as musings on parenting, cooking, and the many life lessons learned in the kitchen and at the table.

Recommended:

French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Le Billon

The wonderful widsom and recipes Helene shares on her blog French Foodie Baby

Mindful Mouthfuls, Dodging a Toddler Food Fight and Parenting to Prevent Childhood Obesity on this site

(Photos by Helene Skantzikas!)

The post Secrets to Enjoying Healthy Meals With Our Children (Guest Post by Helene Skantzikas) appeared first on Janet Lansbury.