Is your child hangry? Here are some tips. | Integrated Learning Therapy

Have you ever felt ‘hangry’? It’s a combination of anger and hungry that may be caused by blood glucose levels dropping, leading to irritability, bad mood, anger or tantrums. It happens to children to and, because they have smaller stomachs than we do, they can feel hungry again before we do. Some may not notice they’ve become very hungry until the moment of crisis.

So, what can parents do when hangriness strikes—and reduce the risk of it happening again? Here are some tips from nutritional experts Alison Spence and Alissa Burnett.

What’s really going on?

First: is your child really hangry, or just angry? Feeding straight away isn’t always the answer. Ask yourself:

how long has it been since they last slept, and how was last night’s sleep? If they’re actually tired, a storybook, toy or cuddle might do. Consider whether their next meal can be earlier today—before they’re too tired to eat.
has anything else upset them? If so, act on this, rather than using food to distract or soothe.
how long has it been since they last ate? Did you miss a meal in the parenting rush? It happens! Maybe it’s time to pause for a healthy snack.

If it’s not long until lunch or dinner, you could:

just wait
let them start on the vegetable component of the meal, or
snack on some easy veggies (of age-appropriate texture) like a carrot, capsicum or cucumber.

Dinner could be trickier if they’ve filled up on yoghurt or biscuits, so try not to serve things they love (other than veggies) at this time.

If your child complains of hunger but only wants a particular food or refuses veggies, consider whether they really are hungry.

Try not to get foods and emotions too entwined

Many adults struggle with overeating to manage their emotions, a behaviour often learned in childhood.

It’s important to find other ways of improving moods so children don’t learn to rely on foods to manage emotions. Explore other activities like listening to music, playing, or having a cuddle. We can also teach children other non food-based ways to manage their emotions, such as mindfulness and deep breathing.

Using food as a reward or to calm can also lead to emotional eating. This may increase children consuming foods irrespective of hunger.

On the other hand, overly restricting food can have unintended effects and lead to emotional eating.

3 ways to reduce hangriness risk

Maintain a regular eating routine

For most young children, three meals and two snacks a day works well. Having these at predictable times helps children learn to eat at meal times and be able to wait until the next meal.

Try to limit grazing. Grazing can set up a cycle where children aren’t hungry at meal times, so eat little, but then become hungry (or hangry) again soon after.

This can frustrate parents who’ve prepared a meal that isn’t eaten, and then feel pressured to prepare extra foods between meals. Grazing, even on nutritious foods, can also contribute to tooth decay.

Include foods that help children feel fuller for longer

Try to serve nutritious, substantial snacks. Including some protein and carbohydrates can help maintain their energy levelsf rom one meal to the next.

Try natural yoghurt, milk, hummus, nuts/nut butter (of age-appropriate texture), eggs, oat muesli or wholegrain bread, to go with fruit or veggie snacks.

Encourage children to pay attention to their hunger and fullness cues

It can be tempting to pressure kids to eat more at mealtimes, or offer different foods if they reject what’s served.

But this is unlikely to help in the long run and can create a rod for your own back. It can turn mealtimes into a battle and parents into short-order chefs.

Pressuring children to eat can override their ability to self-regulate; they can get into a habit of overeating instead of listening to their hunger and fullness cues.

“Parent’s provide, children decide” reminds us a parent’s role is to provide nutritious foods at regular intervals; it’s the child’s role to decide how much to eat.

If you include something at each mealtime you know your child will eat, such as a favourite vegetable, then they’ll likely eat something if they are hungry.

If they really don’t want to eat then maybe they aren’t hungry, and that’s OK.

Other tips include eating together, eating the same foods, modelling enjoyment of those foods, and turning screens off while eating.

This is general advice for healthy children, but some may have more interest or enjoyment in food, or be more fussy, and may be particularly prone to difficult behaviour when hungry. If your child experiences severe fussiness, restricted eating, or you have concerns about their nutrition or health, you need to get help.

A well child’s health and nutrition is unlikely to suffer with occasional short bouts of hunger. Yes, hangriness may occasionally happen (it’s normal for children to test the boundaries!). But it’s OK to stay firm and ride it out. With an eating routine there’s another meal not too far away.

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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.