Parents often place a moral value on children’s eating habits — here’s why they shouldn’t.
By Virginia Sole-Smith
Observed on a play date: A clutch of parents, shaking their heads at the sight of their children inhaling handfuls of veggie straws. “I’ll tell you one thing I was not prepared for with parenting,” one dad pronounced. “All of the snacks.”
Tubes of string cheese. Duplo-sized energy bars that cost more than a coffee. And of course, the ubiquitous spill-proof cup, brimming with cheesy crackers or Cheerios. There are few cars, strollers or tote bags owned by the parents of America that don’t contain at least one of these items on any given day. We bring snacks to the playground; to the grocery store; to restaurants, even though we are, in theory, planning to eat the food we find there. Anyone who has ever been stuck on a delayed plane with a toddler knows the importance of snacks.
And yet, our children’s love and need for a constant snack buffet is also one of our greatest parenting shames. On play dates, we notice who hands out store-bought fruit pouches and who washes fresh blueberries. On social media, we see a rainbow of bell peppers, snap peas and beet hummus packed into bento boxes, and then look askance at the Little Bites muffins and Kraft cheese slices our kindergartener insists on taking to school. We view our toddlers’ snack cups in much the same vein as their pacifiers or their Peppa Pig fixation: something we probably shouldn’t allow but, wow, does it take the edge off.
[For more healthy eating tips for your children, see our pieces on meal planning, instilling healthy eating habits without shame, and dealing with picky eaters.]
Jenny McGlothlin, a feeding therapist at the University of Texas Dallas Callier Center, said she hears two common refrains from parents about snacks: “It’s either ‘I get dirty looks when I pull out the Cheetos’ or it’s ‘I don’t ever let them snack!’ ” she said. Both responses are rooted in a culture that categorizes every food — and often, the sheer act of eating itself — as unequivocally good or bad. “Snacks” are associated with treats, and “snacking” with a kind of mindless, undisciplined style of eating, both of which, we’ve been told, are unhealthy. But it’s a mistake to write off your child’s burning desire for goldfish crackers at 10 a.m.
“Kids have smaller tummies and can’t eat as much as we do per meal, so they have to eat more frequently,” explained Elizabeth Davenport, a dietitian in Alexandria, Va. “A child constantly asking for snacks is likely just growing and hungry.” Which isn’t a failing of theirs or yours. But our guilt around our kids’ snacking — and our fear of their unruly hunger — can encourage eating habits that only further entrench food dysfunction. “We need to help parents to shift from thinking of snacks purely as a stop-gap to capitalizing upon them as a meal,” McGlothlin said.
Getting Past Grazing
Handing over snacks on demand quickly turns into near-constant snacking. “Grazing is a problem, but not for the reasons parents think,” said McGlothlin, who is also the co-author of “Helping Your Child With Extreme Picky Eating.” When a child snacks constantly, his stomach is always at least a little bit full. This may prevent the hunger-inspired meltdown that parents dread, but it also means that when kids sit down to lunch or dinner, they aren’t hungry. “Kids who won’t sit through meals or barely touch dinner but then want a snack 20 minutes later are often the product of stopgap snacking,” said Maryann Jacobsen, a dietitian and co-author of “Fearless Feeding: How to Raise Healthy Eaters From High Chair to High School.”
A better approach is to treat snacks like mini-meals. Schedule them at regular intervals throughout the day based on your child’s age and appetite. Serve two or three foods and have kids sit down at a table (or at least on a park bench) to eat. “And sit with your child while she’s eating and share the snack yourself,” McGlothlin encouraged parents. “This helps her understand that eating is something we enjoy and focus on, so we can listen to our bodies.”
But how to release the snack cup from a toddler’s death grip? Davenport said parents have two options: Put it away and see if she notices. Or, gradually decrease how much you put in the cup, and then, after a few days, move the Goldfish to a bowl on the table. “Offer them alongside some cheese and fruit, and let your child decide what and how much she’s hungry for,” she advised. When your child loses interest in eating, clear the table and explain that she’ll be eating again soon.
Kids are more prone to grazing at certain times of day than others. In my house, it’s around 4:00 p.m., when my 22-month-old begs for her snack cup. For weeks, I agonized about how an hour of whiny grazing was undermining her ability to eat dinner with us at 5 p.m. Then one day, instead of refilling the Goldfish, I put out a small plate of leftover pasta and bell pepper strips. She happily sat and inhaled it all, and I realized: She didn’t need a snack — she was ready for a full meal. Now we’re experimenting with giving her a bigger snack around 3:30 p.m. — a yogurt smoothie and some popcorn, or an apple and some cheese slices — and then pushing our family dinner until 5:30 p.m., so she has time to re-work up an appetite. But we’re also good with the fact that some days, that afternoon snack will be her dinner. “Sometimes a child’s schedule is just a little bit different from the rest of the family, and that’s O.K.,” Davenport said. See also: a kindergartener who needs to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at 3 p.m., because he’s not eating much lunch in a busy school cafeteria; or an early rising preschooler who might need two breakfasts, but then sails past lunch. “You never need to push a child to eat when he’s not hungry,” Jacobsen said. “Get to know your child’s appetite and work with it.”
Ending Food Fixations
Here’s the thing about sticking to a snack schedule: For it to work, you may need to become far less strict about what and how much your child eats during those designated snack times. That’s because often, a children’s manic snack demands aren’t about hunger — they’re picking up on our anxieties about how we wish our kids would eat. You may want to ban cheesy crackers and other beloved kid foods because you’re worried about the evils of carbohydrates. But this is worth reconsidering: “People say, ‘I don’t want my kids eating empty calories,’ ” Davenport said. “But crackers or cookies and milk are a great snack.” Goldfish, she added, are portable, not too messy and have “all kinds of good nutrients in them.” And the oft-frowned-upon pureed fruit and vegetable pouches are a convenient way to serve produce that kids might not be ready to eat whole. “Any guilt parents have about these foods is coming from diet culture,” Davenport noted.
Plus, banning food that tastes good backfires. A landmark study published in a 2006 issue of the journal “Appetite” found that when kids were told to eat their soup in order to earn dessert, they ate less soup overall and liked it less than kids who were allowed to decide for themselves how much of each food to eat. With very young children, the sugar-phobic parent might be able to pass off homemade flax muffins as cupcakes, but know that the jig will soon be up. Trying to control what and how much children can eat only ensures that when you do allow a forbidden treat, they will eat much more of it, further reinforcing your fear that they are sugar-obsessed. “It’s not the sugar, it’s the restriction,” Davenport said.
Instead, McGlothlin advised parents to offer treats on a regular basis and if your kids have gotten particularly fixated, lean in and have that food even more regularly until you ease what feeding therapists call their “scarcity mindset” about the food. (You’ll know it’s working when they lose interest, or even vehemently proclaim that they don’t like peanut butter cups after all.) This might mean having M&Ms daily, served alongside a glass of milk or sprinkled on a piece of peanut butter toast. Or you can plan on a weekly ice cream outing, so you can remind your child exactly when and where he’ll get to enjoy his favorite dessert.
For a child who regularly rejects dinner but then begs for a bedtime snack, consider blurring the lines between “snacks” and “dinner foods,” offering her favorite crackers as a side dish at dinner. “But parents have to be really good at this,” McGlothlin warned. “If you say she can only have five crackers, she’ll still fixate. But if you back off completely, she’ll eat a lot of crackers for a few nights and then start to eat other things.” I can attest that this neutral approach works, though often only when you’ve reached your personal limit of being able to sit silently by as your preschooler subsists on applesauce pouches and brownie-flavored Larabars. But stay strong. And when other parents raise an eyebrow, tell them that this strategy is research-based and feeding therapist-endorsed. “Kids are really good at regulating their intake,” McGlothlin said. “We just have to be good providers of opportunities.”
Virginia Sole-Smith is a journalist, the author of “The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America,” and co-host of Comfort Food Podcast.