For many parents meal times are a nightmare as their children refuse to eat. They have a fixed idea in their minds of what they like and do not like and refuse to try anything new. Parents are faced with the option of forcing their child to eat and enduring hours at the table and a screaming match or simply giving up and letting the child win.
How Do These Food Problems Start?
These problems with food often start because the mother is busy and does not have time to cook a wide variety of baby foods. She may rely heavily on processed canned baby foods and allow the child to fill up on milk. She comforts herself that milk is a food and that her child is getting all the nutrients needed from it.
Alernatively, some parents just don't like to see their child distressed.
How To Avoid Problems With Food?
The simplest way to avoid problems with your child and food is to refuse, from the start, to allow your child to refuse food. Make it clear that your child will try everything given to him or her and that if, after, a few tries they don’t like it, they only need to eat a little of it and not often.
Explain to your child, from an early age, how important food is to good health and how it is essential to a eat a wide range of food from each of the five food groups each day. Discuss vitamins and health with your child and make sure that food is never used as a punishment or reward.
Make meal times fun and make sure that there is no television and that the family uses the time as a way of finding out about each other and bonding.
If your child refuses to eat do allow the refusal to become significant as this encourages the child to use food as a way of getting attention. Calmly tell your child what he or she is expected to eat and what the consequence of not eating will be and then follow through. It may be to go to their room and leave the happy family environment, it may be no desert, it may be doing extra chores. Every parent knows what will have the greatest impact on their child.
Consistency
It is essential that you are consistent with how you deal with food issues. It cannot be ok not to eat vegetables one day and then not ok, the next day. You need to send a consistent clear message to your child of what is expected of him or her and expect compliance. There must then be consequences.
