Are we making our fussy eaters even fussier? | Integrated Learning Therapy

The frustrating problem of fussy eating continues to plague some parents. Very naturally, families with reluctant eaters often try pressure and persuasion to cajole a child to eat. But are these strategies effective?

A research team from Deakin University’ Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition IPAN found that such strategies largely fail and may turn children into even fussier eaters, interrupting their ability to regulate their own appetite and form healthy eating patterns.

Lead researcher, Dr Alissa Burnett said parents with less fussy children were more likely to encourage healthier eating habits by involving their children in meal preparation and not forcing them to eat.

“The findings tell us that we need to be doing more to help parents of fussy eaters because the strategies they are instinctively using, while well intentioned, are not helping their children develop lifelong healthy eating behaviors,” Dr Burnett said.

“It can be very frustrating when children refuse to eat or refuse to eat certain foods and we start to worry the child will be hungry or is not getting adequate nutrition, so providing well-targeted advice is important.”

The qualitative comparison of mothers’ feeding strategies involved a survey of more than 1,500 mothers of children aged between 2 and 5 and assessed child fussiness levels using the Children’s Eating Behavior Questionnaire. The mothers were also asked the open-ended question “What are the strategies you use when your child is being fussy or refusing to eat?”

Dr Burnett said the responses described strategies that may inadvertently reinforce fussiness, promote poor appetite self-regulation or poor dietary intake including:

I tell them they only have to eat, for example, five mouthfuls of their meal.
I tell them that is what’s for dinner; if they don’t eat it, they will go to bed hungry.
I tell him, if he eats his dinner he can have dessert, or do an activity he likes.

Parents whose children were less fussy tended to involve their children in meal preparation, let their child to decide when they were full, and serve certain foods repeatedly to encourage their children to try foods they thought they wouldn’t like. Responses from these parents included:

I involve him in the shopping for food and in the preparation of meals.
I don’t force her to eat if she doesn’t want to. I let her decide how much and how often she would like to eat.
I always provide some options that I know they will like, combined with some other things that I want to expose them to.

Dr Burnett said parents of very fussy children were more likely to deconstruct meals, serving pasta and sauce separately, or hide vegetables in meals to get their children to eat more healthy foods.

“Presenting foods in unusual forms or hiding certain ingredients, such as vegetables, might improve dietary intake in the short-term but doesn’t teach children to accept a variety of foods in the longer term,” Dr Burnett said.

More information: Alissa J. Burnett et al, Mothers’ descriptions of their feeding strategies in response to fussy eating with children of different levels of trait fussiness, Appetite (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2023.106581

Journal information: Appetite

Provided by Deakin University

Image supplied by Freepik

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.