Want Your Child To Eat Healthy As An Adult? Adopt These 5 Strategies

For the last several years I’ve collected studies that examine the relationship between adult eating habits and childhood feeding. Not just how kids eat today, but the type of adult eaters they will become.

Now, this type of research doesn’t prove cause and effect. There are limits to looking back in time (called retrospective studies) and making connections. But when you couple this research with what is already known about feeding children, you get some helpful information.

Based on the research to date, I’ve laid out five simple strategies to help ensure your child eats well even when you are no longer there to cook and encourage him.

1. Create Positive Mealtime Memories

What will your child remember about dinner time in your home? Will it be bickering about food, or will it be about family time and satisfying meals? The negative and positive associations kids make with mealtime can affect their long-term view of food.

In a 2015 study in Appetite, adults who had positive memories of dinnertime were more likely to relate to food in ways that benefited their health and well-being. Negative dinner memories were linked to “food as a chore and bore they would rather ignore.”

Often, meals are thought of as successful if kids eat what is offered, in all the right proportions. But we can’t forget that long-term success is more about how they feel while they are at the table.

2. Treat Food Like Other Domains of Learning (Don’t Force!)

Consider other skills children learn, whether it be reading, cleaning up, or riding a bike. While you can make a child clean his room, you can’t physically force him to do a good job. Likely, you help him until he gets older and better at it. You can’t make a child physically read if she can’t. Yes, you can have her read out loud but if she can’t get some of the words, you help her, right? Maybe give her strategies for sounding it out?

But you can force a child to eat before they are ready. We see eating as simply putting food in our mouth, chewing, and swallowing. But eating is much more complex than that. In one study, 70% of college students who were forced to eat a food as children, refused to eat the “forced food” as adults.

We need to trust children when they say they aren’t ready to eat certain things, and we need to spend more time teaching them about food and how to prepare it. Forcing is not an effective way to teach and its negative effects could last a lifetime.

3. Manage Your Child’s Emotional Health Positively, And Without Using Food

A 2016 study in Appetite asked subjects how they were fed as children and also measured current food preoccupation and emotional eating. While restriction for weight, health and what they call “emotion regulation feeding” (eating to help a child regulate their emotions) were all linked to food preoccupation and emotional eating in adulthood, emotional regulation feeding had the biggest impact.

In another study, 122 adults were asked about their current eating habits along with their memories about food rules as kids. The adults who recall parents using food to control behavior through reward and punishment were more likely to use dietary restraint (restricting food practices such as dieting) and binge eat.

A recent study also showed that rewarding kids with food led to more emotional eating a few years later. In a press release lead researcher Dr. Claire Farrow had this to say: