my approach to teaching my 3 year old to have a healthy relationship with food
preface: i experienced a lot of food restriction, food moralism and food insecurity as a child, and i believe that these factors led to my development of an eating disorder (orthorexia), which i am still recovering from. i am saying all of these things as a parent who wants to innoculate my child against the food moralism that i suffered.
i donât ever force her to eat anything. i will try to persuade her to try something, or to eat more of a thing she knows she likes, but if she still wonât eat the thing, i donât push it. parenting involves a lot of choosing your battles, and itâs more important to me that she feels respected by me than that she has another bite of a carrot at that particular moment.
we donât tell her âeat your veggies firstâ because we donât want to present eating vegetables as a chore. she likes a lot of vegetables already, and thereâs no need to set them apart from other food. we give her a multivitamin to make sure she gets enough vitamins and minerals
weâve never treated candy or chips or any food as a special reward that she has to earn. if she can have it whenever she wants, then it doesnât take on any kind of enticing sense of âthis is forbidden.â and if she wants to eat an amount of candy that might make her sick, we tell her âi donât think itâs a good idea to have any more right now because you might get a tummy ache.â and she trusts our judgment.
we will sometimes make small snack trays that have crackers, cheese, raw vegetables and sliced deli meat, and sheâll munch on them. we teach her that she needs to consume carbohydrates, protein and fat to take care of her body, and if sheâs been eating exclusively carbs, we remind her that she should eat something with protein and fat, like cheese or peanut butter.
if she doesnât like a food, we donât make her eat it. we might ask âdo you want to try it againâ but we respect her âno.â if she doesnât like the dinner we made, weâll let her eat cereal or a sandwich (or something else quick to prepare). because we donât want her to associate dinner time with conflict. sheâs much more willing to try new foods if we donât pressure her or make it a big deal.
we donât describe any foods as good or bad for her, because we donât ever want her to feel guilty for eating. we teach her about the comparative nutritional value of foods without judgment. since weâre not disallowing her from eating any particular foods, she wonât have a drive to eat tons of forbidden â"badââ food when sheâs older and weâre not present.
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