Healthy eating tops every New Year's Resolution List I have ever seen. And if parents made resolutions for their kids, I'm sure that eating more fruits and vegetables would top those lists too. And I get it: Getting kids to eat right can be quite a struggle.
As a sociologist who helps parents teach their children to eat right, it is clear to me that most people wait too long before really considering their children's eating habits.
Actually, that's not quite true. What really happens is that most parents start out extremely focused on feeding their infants the ideal diet. (Fruits and vegetable purees abound.) But then, healthy eating takes a hiatus during the toddler years.
I'm not blaming parents. Getting toddlers to eat right is tricky business. It's well established that most toddlers go through a picky eating phase as a part of their normal development. Add that to the constant pressure parents feel to get enough of the right nutrients into their kids, and you've got, well, a situation where 25% of 2-3 year olds don't eat a single serving of fruit on any given day and 30% don't eat a single serving of vegetables.1
It's counterintuitive. You would think that pressuring parents to get nutrients into their kids would have the opposite effect.
But instead of producing a nation of apple eaters, we've created a situation where, on any given day, more preschoolers consume sweetened beverages, desserts, and snack foods than fruits and vegetables.2
The problem is not that parents lack sufficient knowledge about nutrition (nor are they simply disregarding what they know). Rather, I've come to realize that the problem stems from an over-emphasis on nutrition. Here's why.
When it comes to feeding kids, most parents think of themselves as Nutrient-Providers and Detectives, and this is how most parents get into trouble. Nutrient-Providers and Detectives look for foods that meet two criteria:
- They deliver the nutritional goods (at least minimally).
- Their kids will like them.
This approach puts parents in the clutches of food manufacturers who sell them "Child-friendly" foods that are decidedly unfriendly. Not because they're nutritionally inferior foods masquerading as healthy heroes, which they are-one study of "child-friendly" foods found that only 11% provide good nutritional value3- but because foods marketed to kids push their eating expectations in the wrong direction. They're all too sweet, too salty, too crunchy, or too creamy.
In short, Nutrient-Providers and Detectives unintentionally end up restricting, rather than expanding, their toddler's palates, all in the name of nutrition: "At least this chocolate milk has calcium." One such compromise isn't so bad, but the cumulative effect can be devastating.
The solution is to give up being a Nutrient-Provider and Detective and to start seeing yourself as a Taste Bud Shaper instead.
Taste-bud shapers recognize that every bite of food influences their children's taste preferences. It's just not the number of times your kids eat peas that determines whether or not they like peas. What matters is the range of flavors your kids are exposed to throughout the day, and how those flavors compare to peas.
Of course there are lots of other factors that influence what your kids are willing to consume and other habits to foster (I'll get to those in future posts) but we now know that if you don't consciously shape your kids' taste buds to like vegetables you'll end up teaching them to dislike vegetables instead. That's something to consider.
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Sources:
1 Fox, M. K., E. Condon, R. R. Briefel, K. C. Reidy, and D. M. Deming. 2010. "Food Consumption Patterns of Young Preschoolers: Are They Starting Off on the Right Path?" Journal of the American Dietetic Association 110: S52-S59.
2 Ibid.
3 Wiley-Blackwell (2008, July 15). 89 Percent of Children's Food Products Provide Poor Nutritional Quality, Study Finds. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 30, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080714102439.htm
© 2012 Dina Rose, PhD author of the blog It's Not About Nutrition. Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.
