In the long term, pressure to control food intake usually has the opposite effect to what’s intended

When parents or carers try to control children’s food intake, the child is likely to push back in the opposite direction. In other words, children tend to eat less when pressured to eat more, but eat more when they feel food is scarce.

The best thing we can do is let children decide how much they eat

It’s often hard to know how much food children need at any given moment, so the best thing we can do as parents and caregivers is to let them decide. The more we allow them work out how much food they need, the better they will be at responding to their body’s cues of hunger and fullness, which gives them a valuable tool for lifelong healthy eating.

One well-researched and widely accepted approach is The Division of Responsibility (DoR), developed by world-renowned child nutritionist, Ellyn Satter. If coercion, convincing and/or control has become the norm, it can be difficult to understand how another way of approaching feeding could help, but teh DoR approach makes feeding children much easier. When parents/carers do their job with feeding, the child can do their job of eating.