Kid Food Instagram is awash with ‘tips’ and ‘tricks’ and ‘expert advice’ for getting your ‘picky’ eater to eat two goddamn peas. On top of perfectly curated bowls of organic, home-grown veggies and locally produced quinoa or whatever-the-fuck, parents, ok mothers, are expected to deploy a battery of strategies to ‘overcome’ their child’s ‘fussy’ eating and raise Good Citizens who like their broccoli as much as their cake. Allegedly.
Popular strategies include: sticker charts for finishing their fruits and vegetables, playing with food at the table (“can you show me how to chomp these peas like a dinosaur”), cutting shapes out of fruit and sandwiches with teeny tiny cookie cutters, and sticking little flags or forks in food. We’re taught to praise them for clearing their plates, or to hide veggies in their pasta sauce, or just to have a ‘no thank you bite’.
Some, maybe even most, of these ‘tips’ come from professionals - registered nutritionists and dietitians, doctors, psychologists, and feeding therapists. People who are ostensibly qualified, but seem to be missing something key about what kids actually need to eat well.
So, what’s the problem?
Well, maybe there isn’t one, and if these things work for you, then that’s cool.
But if they’re not, and you find yourself in a battle with your toddler, preschooler or school-aged kid almost every mealtime then it could be because these strategies are designed to appease adults, not to help kids. And don’t get me wrong, this isn’t your fault as a parent. It’s because we’ve been given shitty strategies that completely ignore the fundamental building blocks that kids need to learn how to eat. And a lot of them are coming from nutrition professionals. YIKES.
Here’s the deal: these strategies are based on external motivation. They build motivation outside of the child. Rewards, praise, fun shapes, games and so on, don’t help support a kid’s internal drive to eat.
And here’s the kicker - eating is internally motivated. It’s “I WANT TO DO IT” on overdrive.
The reason why lots of kids don’t respond well to all the tactics Instagram throws at you is because they perceive that their autonomy is being undermined. Just in the same way that kids have strong convictions about wearing their sparkly princess skirt and dinosaur onesie to the playground, they have clear and strong boundaries about what and how much they will eat.
Kids can smell an agenda a fucking mile off. And any tricks to ‘get’ kids to eat are pushing an agenda. But remember (and this is a hard lesson for parents to learn, myself included) - it’s not our job to decide what or how much our kid eats. Yes, we have a responsibility as parents and carers to offer regular meals and snacks, and offer a balance of foods to support growth and development. And that’s it. That’s our job. Once we’ve done our bit, it’s up to the kid to decide what they’re going to eat (from the selection you offer), and how much. This sometimes gets distilled down to ‘you provide, they decide’, which is a variation of Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility (which I’m not linking to because of their horrendous response to Lindogate). We’ll talk more about this model in my Dear Laura column soon.
Look, I know this is annoying. I wish I could offer you ‘my 5 top tips blah blah blah’. But the truth is that when it comes to feeding kids, there’s no one size fits all.
Some kids are adventurous eaters - it doesn’t matter what you say to them or put in front of them, they’ll probably give it a go.
Other kids have an enormous drive for autonomy, any perceived pressure or agenda pushing can stress them out and kill their appetite.
And some other kids might be people pleasers, meaning that on the surface, some external motivation ‘works’, but it may backfire longer term because kids learn to eat for praise or a reward, not because they have developed a positive relationship with that food (and what happens when they turn 18 and you’re not there to congratulate them on eating their peas?)
Some kids have sensory sensitivities that mean they need a lot more safe foods at the table, among other accommodations like screens and ear defenders.
So with that in mind - I’m not going to give you ‘tips’ or ‘tricks’ or other overly simplistic solutions. I’m going to share some things that might make mealtimes a little easier. They might not be as easy or shiny as cutting watermelon into stars, but they will probably have a more positive impact on your kid’s relationship with food.
Three of these ideas - autonomy, relatedness, and competence - are taken from a psychological model called Self Determination Theory (SDT). SDT theorises that humans have an innate drive towards psychological growth. This growth can either be nurtured or thwarted by our social environments. This innate drive towards learning and new experiences is what I mentioned earlier - internal (or, if we’re being nerds, intrinsic) motivation. Researchers believe that in order to reach our potential for growth and well-being, 3 conditions need to be met in our social environments: autonomy, competence, and connectedness. Internal motivation drives a lot of human behaviour - it’s what motivates babies to crawl and then eventually walk. It helps explain why we want to learn new skills or information, and even helps explain why some people enjoy movement and others don’t.