I recently read Karen LeBillon‘s book: French Kids Eat Everything and while many of her food rules were interesting to me – the one topic that really stood out was snacking. I didn’t remember snacking very much as a child – we had three squares a day and I was happy with that. Apparently snacking more is a national trend according to this npr story. This 3 squares attitude has carried over for me into adulthood and I haven’t ever been able to figure out how to pack in snacks on top of meals – for me – snacking destroys my appetite and meals aren’t enjoyable when I am not hungry – and people who know me know I love to enjoy my meals! I remember when I was seeing a nutritionist a couple of years ago who actually planned out my meals. The meals plans included a morning and afternoon snack and they weren’t just fruit – they were big – about a week in I finally complained to her. I said – I can’t eat all of this food! – I am literally stuffed – can I skip the snacks and just enjoy the meals?
Should Food Be Used to Comfort and Calm?
In the book, however, Karen touches on a topic which I had not thought about before. How many times have you been in a situation with your toddler when they start to get fussy and you are out running errands and your first instinct is to shove some food at them and then magically the whining stops?! The book suggests we are using food to calm our children. Wow. It is one thing to read a food rule that says don’t bribe, reward or punish with food but it is entirely another to discuss the topic of using food to comfort. That is exactly what Karen did and it blew my mind. I clearly was guilty as charged. It really made me think twice about what I was doing with my daughter.
Learning to Wait
So I started to experiment with this. Another one of Karen’s good insights is that it is good to make your kid wait – for many things not just food. This was something we were already working heavily on – patience in my book is a virtue. Granted – I have an older toddler – 3.5 years old. I am not sure how this would work with a 18 month old or a 2 year old so take my experience with a grain of salt and try your own experiments. Basically I have no control on weekdays with snacking schedules – preschool provides a morning and an afternoon snack. But I can choose what to give her and I started giving her less for those snacks – just fruit or a small amount of something else. I can, however, change our eating schedules on the weekends.
So here is what I found out – it is possible for my daughter to wait for mealtimes and skip snacks altogether. We have blown right past morning and afternoon snack with other distractions – to the point where I no longer carry food around – at all. Key strategies – working on eating a bigger breakfast with foods that will ‘fill her up’ like raw cheese, eggs and bacon and sausage vs. just fruit and yogurt which is her go to breakfast. I have noticed that she was using breakfast as a means to get us out of bed in the morning – not because she was hungry. She would eat her yogurt and fruit and then an hour later share a much larger breakfast with her daddy (eggs, etc.). So now we try to combine those during the week and on weekends we just consider breakfast to be an hour long event with multiple ‘sittings’! Then she is usually able to wait until lunch at around 1pm.
On Saturdays I give her a light breakfast and she gets to eat the rest of her breakfast at the Farmer’s Market. As for afternoon snack on weekends? We don’t even do it anymore unless lunch was very light and then we might share some fruit together. We tend to eat an early dinner and they are the most fun dinners we have all week. We go out and try new restaurants and foods and the child is so happy to eat! We get to enjoy a lovely, lengthy dinner and she is usually dancing in her chair – win win. So it took a few weeks to get past the mid-afternoon whining but now she is used to waiting – I really think with her it was just mid-afternoon boredom vs. true hunger. So now I try to talk about the feelings beneath the whining vs. just shoving food in her face. And I ask her to wait until our special dinner together.
What Works for Us
I am describing my experience with my child and all children are different – this is what works for us right now (they always change don’t they?) and I hope that I am teaching her that we eat for many reasons but that food isn’t our go to means of comfort. What do you think? When do you provide snacks? Have you read the book?
I can’t remember not ever snacking, as I was never a three-square-meals-a-day type. I eat one big meal and smaller “snacks” throughout the day. At least, nowadays, the snacks are healther. But I’m trying to get my kids to eat better and eat as much real food I can afford/provide. I love the above post and will give it a try, but it seems pretty daunting. I send snacks to school because they have snack time (usually a serving of fresh fruit and a small ziploc of veggie chips/pretzels/etc.) but have started to tell them that when they get home, they have to eat real food for dinner. And if they don’t want it, they don’t get anything until they tell me they want to eat, at which point they eat the real food. Question is, they usually ask for a snack before bedtime. Does that mean they’re still hungry? I’ve just been making it a point to give them only fruit, nothing else, but is this a case of the comfort thing?
I share a similar challenge with you with respect to snacks at school. I do send a light snack with my daughter to school during the week. I usually just send fruit. On the weekends we tend to skip most snacks but we do have a late afternoon one if we aren’t eating dinner early. I think that if you are giving a bedtime snack, it might be they are still hungry. I have noticed my daughter will hold out on eating a real dinner for the promise of something more enticing (such as a dessert). I have to be careful of that!