Essentia Nutrition: Kids Meal Battles, Part 2

I’m here with Essentia Health Registered Dietician Vanessa Berg avoiding meal time battles at home.

Well, the whole meal time we can look at it as a lesson on many things. We have sharing, we have portion control. Manners. There’s a lot of things we teach our kids at a meal. Some families follow the clean plate club rule, and that’s something that we don’t necessarily recommend. Because we might encourage a child to eat past that full state. So you’re a person that has to have a clean plate, you ignore your own internal cues of being full and having enough nutrition and overeat. So if we teach our children to do that, then they will continue to do that, and they can eat until they’re uncomfortable or learn to overeat. It’s really important for us to trust our own children to trust their own bodies and hunger cues. This really starts when kids are on a bottle. They will stop when they’re full when feeding at the breast or feeding from a bottle. We need to trust that they are trusting their own body cues. So those stay with us. Self-induced starvation is nearly unheard of and so we don’t need to worry about our kids starving to death. They will eat when they’re hungry enough.

And you’ve seen this due to experience I’m assuming?

Yes, and it’s hard. It’s hard to sit back and then the important thing is if they refuse to eat at the meal, it’s not right after the meal that we’re having a snack. Now we’re waiting until snack time because we’ve set a routine of meal times and snack time.

You keep saying that this is going to be a challenging just avoiding mealtime battles, but it’s a battle. How long do you think parents should incorporate this until they need to figure out a different strategy?

I think it’s an important strategy forever. To allow someone to trust their own wants and desires and when they’re full. The other thing to now is that it can take 13 times or a child to really accept a new food. So just cause they didn’t eat it tonight, you can introduce the vegetable tomorrow, or the new fruit or recipe that you’re trying out. Introduce it again, if they see it often, they are more likely to eat it. Even if they don’t eat it, they’ll recognize it when they’re older and it won’t be unfamiliar. So they’ll have those habits that you create at a young age.

Thank you very much Vanessa and all the great tips I’m Diane Thao with KVRR news.