‘Clean your plate’ leads to problems; doctor offers ways to encourage healthy eating in kids
For generations, well-meaning parents have resorted to an arsenal of food rules, including “clean your plate before you leave the table,” to try to get their children to eat a well-balanced diet.
“My parents said the same thing to me,” said Dr. Michele Arthurs, a family medicine physician with Kaiser Permanente in Temple Hills, Maryland. “When we’re looking at the overall relationship with food, we want to rethink that.”
Forcing children to finish their food can teach them to ignore natural hunger and fullness signals that are built-in for humans.
“Over time, this can contribute to overeating, and food anxiety, and sometimes even eating disorders,” said Arthurs. “It’s important for our kids to learn how to stop eating when they feel satisfied, not when they feel too full.”
According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, March is National Nutrition Month.
Making healthy food available at the dinner table is a starting point.
“It’s important for our children to be exposed to all the food groups — different vegetables, different fruits, different whole grains, different sources of protein,” said Arthurs.
“Having a little bit of a trial on the plate can be helpful — invite that,” she suggested. “It doesn’t have to always be accepted by our child. We might have to try 30 times before the new food, no matter what color it is, is indeed sampled.”
What’s the problem with food rules?
When a parent insists a child eat their food, “it can create a relationship with food that feels antagonistic,” Arthurs said. “The child does not have control over that particular situation.”
Instead, she said the goal is to empower young eaters.
“When it comes to their own choices for food, that they have control over that. That they understand the purpose of food — that’s it’s more than just how it tastes, that it’s there to nourish their body,” Arthurs said.
The effects can be long-lasting. A child who is forced to eat vegetables is likely to become an adult who doesn’t want to eat vegetables, and “that’s a hard habit to undo,” said Arthurs.
Empower children at the grocery store
Rather than imposing edicts at the dinner table, Arthurs said there are easy ways to help children develop a healthy relationship with food.
“If they’re coming with us to the grocery store, we can play ‘Where’s Waldo’ with food,” she suggests. As an example: “I’m looking for a food that’s red, that’s sweet, that has tiny little seeds on the side, and is high in all these wonderful vitamins and nutrients that we need — what might that be?”
(The answer, by the way, is “strawberries.”)
Another idea is to look for ways to remind children about the benefits of healthy eating.
“A lot of kids say, ‘I want to grow up to be big and strong.’ And you can answer, ‘What are the foods on your plate that are going to support that?'” said Arthurs.