Feeding children differently isn't fair. They will notice.

Some of the parents who have struggled the most that I have worked with have one child who is large and one who is small.  ("Overweight" and "underweight.") Parents who feed children in the standard approach, that is, the control model, and try to control a child's weight by how they feed, find themselves stuck. Paraphrasing one client, "I am constantly pushing food on my younger daughter and snatching it out of my older daughter's hands. The skinny one gets ice-cream while the chubby one has to eat sugar-free popsicles. My husband gets mad if he gets home and finds out my older girl had some milk-shake. I can't do this anymore, it all feels so wrong. None of it's 'working' anyway in terms of their weight. We are constantly fighting and in tears around food."Kids know when something is not fair, when one child is treated differently. Kids know that when a parent works so hard, at the price of so much conflict and upset, that being fat must be pretty awful, and that the skinny sibling is, in some way, better. That feels awful to a child, and the parent in the scenario above felt awful about it all too. But, she was doing as she was told by the pediatrician and dietitian, and well, society at large...

Watch this video here...  Wait for it. It's worth it...

This scenario of feeding children differently is what I thought about when I saw this video. Check it out and let me know what you think. Are you trying to feed kids differently? How does it feel... Were you fed differently from a sibling as a child? How did that feel?

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