Читать книгу Feeding with Love and Good Sense:18 Months through 6 Years - Ellyn Satter - Страница 8

2. Follow the division of responsibility

The best way to feed your child—no matter her age—is to follow the division of responsibility. As a parent, you provide structure, support, and opportunities to learn. Your child chooses how much and whether to eat from what you provide. The division of responsibility in feeding encourages you to take leadership with feeding and give your child autonomy with eating.

Trust your child to grow in the best way

Your child has a natural way of growing that is right for her. Her natural growth is in balance with her eating and moving. Maintain the division of responsibility in feeding and in activity. Trust her to do her part with eating, moving, and growing.

Your child’s body shape and size are mostly inherited. The amounts she needs to eat are also inherited, and support her growing and moving in her own unique way. Her height and weight are normal for her as long as she grows consistently, even if her growth plots at the extreme upper or lower ends of the growth charts. Don’t let anyone make an issue of your child’s size, shape or weight, and beware of hidden messages. Children who are encouraged to eat or move in a certain way to be “healthy” get the idea that there is something wrong with their body, and they feel flawed in every way: not smart, not physically capable, and not worthy.

You won’t know how your child’s body will turn out until she is toward the end of her teen years. Trying to control or change it will likely create the very outcome you are trying to avoid! As long as you keep your nerve and maintain the division of responsibility with feeding and with activity, her growth may surprise you. The fat baby is likely to slim down. The small, ill, or growth-delayed child is likely to continue to do catch-up growth well into her teen years and has a good chance of being bigger than you may expect.

If your child’s weight or height abruptly shifts up or down on her growth chart, it can mean there is a problem. Consult a health professional who understands the feeding relationship to rule out feeding, health, or parenting problems.

Follow the division of responsibility in activity

As with feeding, do your jobs and let your children do theirs. You don’t have to make your child be active. Children are born loving their bodies. They are curious about their physical capabilities and inclined to be active in a way that is right for them. Each child is naturally more or less skilled, graceful, energetic, or aggressive. Good parenting with activity preserves those qualities and lets your child be all she can be.

The division of responsibility in activity

You are responsible for structure, safety, and opportunities.

Your child is responsible for how, how much, and whether she moves.

Do your jobs

Develop your tolerance for commotion—and your judgment about how much is too much.

Provide safe places for activity your child enjoys.

Find fun and rewarding family activities.

Set limits on TV but not on reading, writing, artwork, or other quiet activities.

Don’t let your child have a TV set in her room.

Don’t try to entertain your child—let her deal with her own boredom.

Trust your child to do her jobs

Your child will be active.

She will be active in a way that is right for her.

Her physical capabilities will grow and develop.

She will experiment and find activities that she enjoys and that are in concert with her capabilities.

The division of responsibility works

I fought about vegetables with my preschooler

Our four-year-old, Kevin, ate very few foods and he especially didn’t eat vegetables! So we tried to get him to eat vegetables and not so many carbohydrates and to eat more if we thought he hadn’t eaten enough and to stop eating when we thought he was eating too much. Every meal was such a hassle that we were about to give up on meals! But since we started going by division of responsibility in feeding we have stress-free meals—and snacks, of course. Kevin is so much happier, and so are we.

Grady grew slowly

Grady had always been long and lean, but at his three-year-old checkup his weight had dropped below his usual third percentile and my pediatrician recommended appetite-stimulating medication. That didn’t sound right to me. I asked him to give me 3 months and a referral to a dietitian. She helped me realize I had been putting pressure on Grady to eat and generally not making eating enjoyable for him, and recommended I read Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family. What a relief to realize I only had to be responsible for providing healthy, balanced meals and snacks, and then I let Grady be responsible for eating. Grady gained weight, I shed my stress over food, and now we all eat better.

I had to let Henry get hungry

I thought I was following the division of responsibility in feeding, but between meals I let my two-year-old, Henry, eat whenever he wanted to. The food was healthy—I hauled little bags of crackers and juice boxes along so he could eat whenever he felt a hunger pang. Then I learned about the sit-down snack! Henry was no longer a baby who had to be fed on demand. He could last 2 or 3 hours before he had to eat again. At first, he put up a fuss when I stopped giving him food handouts, but before long he got used to having his snacks at certain times. Getting a little hungry before meals makes him eat better. And I no longer have cracker crumbs and juice smears all over the house and car!

My son has autism

My seven-year-old son, Gabe, was diagnosed with high-functioning autism when he was three. He has always been a super-cautious eater, first with breastfeeding, then semi-solid foods, and now table food. We are told that he has Sensory Processing Disorder, meaning that he is really sensitive to tastes and textures, and we were told, “stop coddling him and make him eat.” I am not proud of all our begging, pleading, pressuring, forcing, cajoling, and rewarding! But Ellyn Satter reassured me that we could follow the division of responsibility, even with Gabe. So we did. I always put something on the table he usually ate—applesauce, bread and butter—something that went along with the meal and didn’t involve making him his own meal. At first he had tantrums when we wouldn’t make what he wanted, but compared with before, this was easy! Gabe is still a “picky” eater, but he does his part to make mealtime pleasant by settling happily for what I put on the table, even if he isn’t enthusiastic about it.

Structure is essential

Your child will eat and grow well if you maintain structure. To provide structure for your child, you have to provide structure for yourself. Have a schedule for sit-down meals and sit-down snacks. Stick to it.

Structure supports both you and your child

Structure lets both you and your child know you will be fed. Structure helps you each to eat what and how much your body needs. Don’t wait until hunger drives you to figure out what to eat. You will grab for the first food at hand, and whether you know it or not, you will scare yourself into overeating—and you will scare your child, as well.

Meals do not have to be a chore or a bore

Have family-friendly meals. Provide food you enjoy.

Have sit-down snacks between meals. A planned snack between meals lets you and your child arrive at mealtime hungry and ready to eat. Drinking (except for water) and munching between times spoils meals.

Avoid feeding struggles. They will spoil your meals. Follow the division of responsibility.

Make family meals pleasant. Your child wants to be at family meals because you are there.

Expect your child to contribute. Joining in with family meals is a privilege that your child earns by behaving nicely.

Be considerate without catering

Remember whose meal it is. You know more about food than your child does. Your child is growing up to learn to eat the food you eat and to join in with your meals.

Make only one meal, but include easy-to-eat foods. Include one or two foods that your child—and other eaters—generally eat and can fill up on, such as bread or fruit. Don’t worry if your child eats it and only it meal after meal, day after day. Eventually she will eat something different.

Include fat. Include fat when you cook, and make it available at mealtime to make food taste good. Fat with food also keeps everyone from getting hungry right away. Your toddler may eat butter as if it were cheese. That’s okay. She needs the calories.

Trust your child to eat. She wants to eat, she wants to learn to eat the food you eat, and she will tire of even her favorite food and eat something different. Sooner or later (maybe later rather than sooner) she will eat a variety.

Don’t take it personally. Food is love. But your family’s not eating the food you prepare isn’t the same as not accepting your love. Other family members love you back and eat what they enjoy.

Drinking and eating on the go

Keep your feeding goal in mind: Helping your child to be a competent eater, not getting-food-into-your-child right now. It doesn’t matter if the food or drink is nutritious, created especially for children, or even organic. Letting your child slurp and munch on the go will keep him from being a competent eater, and his nutrition will suffer. Just like other children, your child is likely to love eating and drinking wherever, whenever. But if you let him, expect this: He will have trouble knowing how much he needs to eat and may eat too little and grow too slowly or eat too much and grow too fast. He will behave poorly at family meals because he isn’t hungry and can’t be bothered. He won’t learn to eat the food you eat because his special food, delivered in his special way, is more to his liking.

Family meals are about family

If considering family meals puts you on a guilt trip and makes you feel overwhelmed, skip ahead to Have family-friendly meals. Especially read the section, “prepare food you enjoy.” Here is the bottom line: Family meals are first and foremost about family. They are not about food virtue: about providing only fresh-cooked food that earns a gold star from the food police.

Meals give a time and place to provide your child with food and reassure her she will be fed. You can pay attention and enjoy food when it is time to eat, then forget about it between times.

Meals let you conduct the business of the family, keep up with what is going on with everybody, help each other out, and tell family stories.

Meals teach your child how to behave at mealtime. That lets you enjoy her, and lets her be comfortable when she eats with other people.

Both you and your child eat better when you have family meals. You learn to enjoy a variety of food. Going to the meal hungry and eating until you get enough supports eating the amount you need and weighing what is right for you.

Children and teens who have regular family meals feel better about themselves, get along better with other people, and do better in school. Teens who have family meals are less likely to abuse drugs and have sex.

Meals are about family

You are a family when you take care of yourself. Whether your family numbers one or ten, whether you are related or a group of people living together, have family meals.

Sit-down snacks solve feeding problems

Planned, sit-down snacks are the ace in the hole of the beleaguered parent. When you know a sit-down snack is coming up in a couple of hours, you can say, “that’s it for now, snack time is coming soon.” You can say to your school-aged child, “snack time is now. Sit down and eat now, or you have to wait for dinner.” The planned snack solves these feeding problems:

Your child leaves the meal having eaten little or nothing. He is back 5 minutes later begging for food.

Your child has eaten well at the meal, but happens to think, “cookie,” and starts begging.

Your child did not eat much and seems okay with that, but you worry that he will not make it until the next meal.

Your child comes home famished, is too busy to take time to eat, and wants to munch along with other activities.

Your child eats constantly until dinner, in front of the TV or while doing homework.