Helping Children Develop a Positive Relationship with Food

A Practical Guide for Early Years Professionals

Jo Cormack

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781785922084
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784504861
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This simple, insightful resource explains how to help children develop a healthy relationship with food. Giving practical guidance on how to support lasting positive eating behaviours in children, it includes valuable information and advice about how to resolve issues including fussy eating, obesity, and special needs related feeding difficulties.

• SECTION 1 •

ALL ABOUT A GOOD
RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD

In the first section of this book, we will think about what constitutes a good relationship with food and why it is important. I will introduce you to some key concepts which are essential to an understanding of how to promote and support a positive relationship with food. The most important of these is self-regulation – an idea that we will be coming back to again and again as we think about how children eat and how to feed them. I will invite you to reflect on what our role is in relation to feeding children and will introduce you to American feeding expert, Ellyn Satter’s ‘division of responsibility’ model, which proposes an answer to this question. Finally, we will explore the importance of exposure and variety in helping children develop a positive relationship with food.

Chapter 1

WHAT IS A POSITIVE
RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD
AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

WHAT EXACTLY IS A POSITIVE RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD?

This is one of those apparently simple questions that is really quite difficult to answer. Like many things, we know it when we see it. If we spot a child eating lots of different, nourishing foods with enjoyment and gusto, we might want to say that they have a positive relationship with food. But can we define it? Can we get closer to describing what a positive relationship with food is all about, in order to help children move closer to attaining this lofty ideal?

NUTRITION

Nutrition is a key aspect of a positive relationship with food. Children need to be adequately nourished in order to fully engage with the curriculum and access all of the opportunities available to them in whatever setting they attend.

Most early years practitioners will be familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.1 Maslow argued that, before higher level needs can be met (like the need for belonging or for self-esteem) more basic needs (like the need to be safe) have to be addressed. He expressed this theory visually, as a pyramid. At the very base of Maslow’s pyramid are our physiological needs. These are the things our bodies require in order to work properly.

Just as a child who has not had enough sleep, or a child who is unwell, cannot function at full capacity, a child who has a very poor diet is at a disadvantage. Of course, there are many reasons why children might not to be able to access a healthy diet (including socio-economic factors) but sometimes it might be their negative relationship with food that is preventing them from reaching their full potential.

VARIETY

A child who ate the same meal every day could be adequately nourished if that meal was balanced, but we would not necessarily want to say that they had a positive relationship with food. Being able to enjoy a varied diet is so important. Each child is at a different stage in terms of their relationship with food and it is normal for young children to be distrustful of the unfamiliar. However, supporting children to be curious about foods they have not seen or tried before, and giving them exposure to foods that are new to them, is an intrinsic part of helping them develop a positive relationship with food. We will be exploring this in Chapter 4.

OUTCOMES FOR CHILDREN

While early years is about so much more than academic outcomes, there is a lot of research evidence showing that children who are better nourished have more success academically.2 In other words, well-nourished children do better at school. Children who lack a positive relationship with food will also struggle with some of the social and emotional aspects of life. Eating is such an important part of our daily lives; problems in this area can have a significant negative impact on children’s wellbeing.

For example, a child who dislikes fruit may attend a setting where fruit is always offered as a mid-morning snack. That child may feel anxious in the build up to snack time. They may feel excluded and different from their peers. Perhaps they will act out and express some of these difficult feelings through negative behaviour, which may have repercussions of its own. There are many social and emotional consequences emerging from something as simple as a child not being able to eat fruit. Problems with eating ripple through multiple areas of a child’s life, from learning, to sleeping, to their social interactions and beyond.

IT’S NOT JUST WHAT CHILDREN EAT, IT’S HOW!

The content of children’s diets – the nutritional qualities and the variety – are of course very important. For a child to eat in a psychologically healthy way though, how they eat, rather than what, comes into play. Are they able to tune into their body’s signals and eat because they are hungry, rather than because of the adults around them? This is something we will be looking at in more depth in the next chapter. Are they able to enjoy the social side of meals? Are they relaxed and happy when they eat? What role does food play in their life? How children feel about eating is so important, and the adults around them have a lot to do with that.

‘A positive relationship with food’ describes eating behaviours whereby children eat a varied diet, enabling them to be well nourished. They eat in response to their bodies’ cues and they are able to enjoy and benefit from the social side of meals.

YOUR UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY

As an early years practitioner, you are uniquely placed to have a positive influence on how the children in your setting relate to food. You and your colleagues may well be providing them with more than one eating opportunity every single day they attend. Your setting could be the only place where many of the children ever get to interact with and experience certain foods. It could also be the only regular chance some children get to eat communally.

This opportunity comes with responsibilities; you owe it to the children in your care to make sure that you adopt evidence-based good practice. You also need to do your best to help instil in them a joyful and psychologically healthy approach to eating. You can do so much: through what you model, through working with parents and through understanding and adopting best practice.

Research shows that in early childhood, children’s eating behaviours are not yet set in stone.3 There is a window of opportunity for adults to help them develop a positive relationship with food and to learn positive eating habits.4 It is also a critical time when it comes to the development of children’s food preferences5 and there is evidence that eating behaviours learnt at a young age can influence how a person eats later on in life.6 Seize this opportunity with both hands, and help give the children in your care a gift that will last a lifetime.

Chapter 2

SELF-REGULATION

In recent years, it has become the norm for informed practitioners and parents to take a ‘behavioural’ approach to what children do. Put simply, we reward the behaviour we want to see more of and do the opposite with behaviour we wish to reduce. The reward might not be tangible; it could be a reward in terms of positive attention or praise.

This works well when we think of behaviours like tidying away toys. If we want a young child to pick up the bricks when they have finished playing with them, we might praise them when they do this or we might give them a sticker for their reward chart. Maybe we will reinforce that behaviour by smiling at the child and describing what a fantastic job they have done.

It is very easy to see how this behavioural approach gets used with eating. If a child eats ‘well’ or tries something new, they are often praised or even rewarded. Sometimes they are given stickers or ‘clean plate awards’. However, this is based on the mistaken assumption that eating is a behaviour to be modified. In other words, we see eating as a behaviour that we want children to perform for us.

When we lump eating in with other things like tidying away or trying hard during phonics, we are in fact not helping children eat for the right reasons. What these ‘right reasons’ are will be explained in the section which follows. It all comes down to where the motivation to behave in a certain way comes from. Does it come from inside the child (intrinsic) or outside the child (extrinsic)? In fact, the benefit of extrinsic motivation for any kind of behaviour has been questioned,1 but, for eating, it is clear cut. We need children to be eating because their bodies tell them to, rather than in response to the adults around them. Seeing eating as a bodily process, instead of a behaviour to be driven by adults, is the first step towards supporting a positive relationship with food.

Self-regulation is a term which is used in many different contexts.

When we talk about self-regulation in relation to eating, we are describing the process whereby we eat in response to signals from our body and brain (appetite) and we stop eating when our body tells us that we have had enough.

Influential American child feeding expert, Ellyn Satter, describes several things we need to be able to do in order to self-regulate effectively,2 including:

•cope with hunger well enough to be able to eat in line with a socially accepted pattern of snacks and meals

•feel sure that there will be enough food available for us to eat at each meal and snack (and that this will include something we can enjoy)

•be able to eat in a conscious way, where we tune into our bodies’ signals

•be able to stop eating when we have had enough.

Let’s look a little more closely at each of these points.

COPING WITH HUNGER

From a young age, some children may have been raised to eat in a grazing pattern. This means that they have lots of small opportunities to eat and miss out on fully experiencing their natural appetite. It is true that children have small stomachs and need more eating opportunities than adults and older children. However, this has perhaps been taken too far and, based on my clinical experience, I would suggest that many children eat so frequently they have become divorced from their experiencing of hunger cues.

There are many reasons why this may happen. Sometimes children dictate when and what they eat; this is especially true for picky eaters when parents are anxious about their eating, thus giving the child a lot of control over their diet. Sometimes, parents use food as a means of behaviour management or entertainment. It is socially normal, for example, to give a child a packet of crisps as they go around the shops in a pushchair, or to give them some raisins on a car journey. This keeps the child busy but can also prevent them from learning to experience and interpret their physical cues.

Children who are hungry can behave in a way that is more challenging for parents too. It can be easier to avoid letting them get hungry in order to prevent this. Again, this interferes with appetite and self-regulation. One of the challenges when it comes to feeding children is walking the fine line between preventing them from experiencing their appetites and letting them get excessively hungry. We will explore this in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section 1: All About a Good Relationship with Food
• Section 2: Under Pressure
• Section 3: Food and Feelings
• Section 4: Implications for Practice: Fostering a Positive Relationship with Food
• Section 5: Your Food Ethos
• Section 6: Nutrition and Healthy Eating
• Section 7: Working with Parents
• Section 8: What We can Do Away From the Table
• Section 9: A Closer Look at Picky Eating
• Section 10: Special Cases
• Section 11: A Case Study
• Nurture Early Learning, New Zealand
• Final Thoughts
• Resources
• References
• Notes
• Index
• Join Our Mailing List
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• Of Related Interest
• Endorsements