Eat and feed with joy
The Ellyn Satter Institute blogEat and feed with joy
Explore how to eat, how to feed, how to address picky eating, overweight, underweight and special needs. Get tips on coping with interference from well meaning family, doctors, and teachers. Learn how to reconcile what you want to eat with what you are supposed to eat!
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Starting family meals
How you feed your child differs from one developmental stage to the next. Initially you feed from the breast or from a bottle, holding your infant close to you. Their task is to suck, swallow and breathe whilst you support their body in your arms. Once they start...
Feeding Children with ADHD
Parents whose children who are being treated with medication for ADHD have particular feeding challenges. The medication spoils children’s appetites, children eat poorly, and parents worry that their child’s growth will be stunted. Often, parents and their children...
Enjoy the milk you love
The bad press surrounding saturated fat has mostly harmed the reputation and enjoyment of milk and milk products, since the early 1970s. Not all saturated fat is bad However, the evidence for branding saturated fat in dairy foods as “bad”, was never too strong to...
Making parents anxious
Just when you start to relax, now comes word that you have to be careful not to overfeed your baby! Always ready to pack for a guilt trip, having grownup children doesn’t save us from second-guessing what we did back then! Not to worry! Relaxing and having good times...
Self control vs autonomy
These days, it’s common for researchers to conclude that “deficits” in children are what cause obesity. That is, there is something wrong with the child that leads to obesity. Self-control, generally defined as the ability to delay gratification, is a case in point....
Trust your child’s appetite
Recently, I was doing an assessment in my clinical practice and reviewed a video of a family meal – Mum, Dad and their four-year-old daughter. The meal lasted 58 minutes! How could a four-year-old sit at the table for that long, I hear you ask. Well, she did a pretty...
Not all family meals are perfect; eat together anyway.
Families always eat, but, in the words of a Minneapolis parent addressing the challenges of family dinner, “We don’t always sit down and eat together if it’s fast food, like we would if it was home cooked.” The same research group found that families are more likely...
The child who takes “too long” to eat
Some parents feel that their child(ren) stay at the table forever! Parents say they are following the Division of Responsibility™ and worry that setting a time limit will be restricting or somehow interfering with their child doing his jobs with eating. There are...
How long should kids stay at the table?
This is a common dilemma: What to do when kids finish eating their meal, but others in the family are still eating? Firstly, it's important to note that it can be pretty boring for a young child to stay seated at the table once they have finished eating. Here is what...
Never Diet Again
Diets don't work You probably know that diets don't work. If they did, people wouldn't be coming up with new ones all the time, billions of dollars wouldn't need to be spent on 'dieting' and we would all be competent eaters. Unfortunately, this isn't the case....
Explore
More about feeding
- Follow Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding
- Avoid pressure
- Avoid restriction
- Evitando la Presión
- Children know how much they need to eat
- Family-friendly feeding tips
- How children become competent eaters
- How children learn to eat new food
- Sit-down snacks
- Using “forbidden” food