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Avoid Common Pitfalls In Planning and Providing Family Meals
- Don’t try to anticipate what your child will eat. Remember, it is his job to learn to eat the food you eat.
- Stay away from catering and short-order cooking. Don’t try to please every eater with every food on the table.
- Don’t try to get food into your child.
- Remember Ellyn Satter’s division of responsibility: You do the what, when and where of feeding; he does the how much and whether of eating.
- Don’t expect your child to be consistent. He won’t eat some of everything, but only 1 or 2 or 3 foods. He will eat a lot of something one day, ignore it the next. He will eat a large quantity one day or one meal, not much the next.
- Avoid too much or too little hunger. A famished child will behave poorly and eat poorly. So will a full child. Help your child to be hungry but not famished at mealtime by offering planned snacks between meals, but don’t let him graze constantly for food or drinks.
Copyright © 2005 by Ellyn Satter. For more about family meals, see Your Child's Weight: Helping Without Harming and Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family or see www.KelcyPress.com For permission to reproduce this handout, call (800)808-7976 or write info@EllynSatter.com
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