Читать книгу Feeding with Love and Good Sense:18 Months through 6 Years - Ellyn Satter - Страница 6

Dedication: This booklet is dedicated to you, the parent, and all the caring adults who are helping feed your child with love and good sense.

A message from Ellyn Satter

By the time your child is a toddler, you will have navigated a lot of pitfalls with respect to your child’s learning to eat grown-up food. Consider these scenarios:

Your child happily eats solid food. Or he doesn’t. But you are relaxed. Some children don’t get interested in solids until they can finger-feed themselves.

One day he refuses to let you feed him and grabs for the spoon. Through careful observation and deduction or sheer luck, you correctly figure out he wants to feed himself. Resisting the entirely natural response to play “here comes the airplane,” you let him.

She enthusiastically eats with her fingers almost everything that is offered. She loves joining in with family meals. Whew!

Suddenly, he gets picky. He eats very little, is skeptical of foods that he has eaten many times before, and reacts to the mildest suggestion about food as if you are Attila the Hun (with apologies to all Huns everywhere). Being by now a seasoned observer, you resist the impulse to make special food or try to get him to eat, and correctly interpret this behavior as being natural for a toddler.

Again suddenly, you sail into quiet waters. After months of skirmishing around food and everything else, your child becomes a preschooler and then a school-age child. She is more willing to try new food and is relaxing to have at family meals. There are pitfalls to come, but you can handle them!

On the other hand, you, like a lot of other parents, may have fallen into the pitfalls rather than steering around them. You are left with food hassles or a child who eats only a short list of foods. Family meals may be so unpleasant that you consider giving up on them.

It is not too late! Your child is still very young. If you change your ways with feeding and keep them changed, s/he will be a competent eater and you will enjoy feeding. This booklet tells you how.