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Provide, Don't Deprive, in the School Setting
For the complete Satter Feeding Dynamics Approach in the School Setting in pdf form, click here.
Concern about child weight issues has focused energy and interest on the school nutrition program. That’s good. That concern is being translated into food restriction. That’s bad. Making slimming children down the priority of the school nutrition program distorts its true mission. Our first responsibility with respect to feeding children is nurturing them: reassuring them they will be fed. We must provide children with the nutrients and energy they need to be healthy and grow well physically, emotionally, socially and mentally. For children to learn well, they must get enough to eat.
Depriving Doesn’t Work
As ambitious, highly funded school- and home-based programs have illustrated, restricting children’s food intake to get them slim doesn’t work. Instead, restricting makes children eat more and get fatter. Depriving children of treat foods makes them overeat on those foods and get fatter. Restricting children’s portion sizes makes them lose track of their feelings of hunger, appetite and fullness and get fatter. Trying to get children to fill up on vegetables and other nutritious, low-calorie foods turns them off those foods and makes them avoid them when they get the chance. Turning children off to nutritious low-calorie food is a nutritional concern, not a weight-management concern. There is no evidence that getting children to eat low-calorie foods makes them slimmer.
Instead, Provide
To provide for children in school, we must find the middle ground between the current vending-machine, ala carte, graze-and-grab school culture and the nutritional sanitizing that is on the drawing boards of many task forces and even states.
To find that middle ground, we have to broaden out the lens from calories-in, calories-out and focus on a system-wide approach. To find that middle ground, we must emphasize providing, not depriving. We must all work together to optimize feeding, provide opportunities to be active and support children’s natural growth processes.
- Feed and parent in the best way, including providing filling, well-timed meals and safe places for children’s natural activity
- Maintain Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding. Adults do the what, when. and where of feeding, children do the how much and whether of eating.
- Maintain Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Activity. Adults are responsible for structure, safety and opportunities, children are responsible for how much and whether.
- Let children grow up to get bodies that are right for them.
- Love children just the way they are–fat, thin or in between, and raise them to be capable.
- Do what schools do best: Teach children to make the most of what they have.
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Ellyn Satter Associates
4226 Mandan Crescent, Madison, WI 53711
Phone: 608-271-7976 | Toll-free 800-808-7976 | Fax: 866-724-1631
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