Ellyn Satter

Feeding With Love and Good Sense

The Feeding with Love and Good Sense intensive training empowers participants to be feeding specialists, teaching them to evaluate, assess and provide treatment for complicated feeding problems. It also gives situational experiences which increases participants' comfort level in working with parents. The workshop is secondary and potentially tertiary intervention training. It is constructed to prepare health, education and mental health professionals to work with established feeding problems in children from birth to age 5. Depending on the structure of the audience, it can also prepare health and mental health professionals to act as intervention teams with entrenched feeding problems. Trainees gain insight on the use of primary interventions, but this is an outgrowth of the material rather than a focus of the training. The workshop does not cover special needs children. However, the materials considered gives principles and insights that can be applied to help special needs children take responsibility for their own eating. This material includes feeding dynamics and child development as it relates to feeding as well as integrating the trust model in feeding

Trainees from primary care programs like WIC, CACFP, Head Start and primary care medical clinics have said the workshop gave them a greater depth of understanding of feeding and parent-child interpersonal dynamics. This helped them solve uncomplicated feeding problems and set realistic limits on their services. Trainees also gained experience in identifying and referring children with entrenched growth, food selection and feeding problems. (For training in primary intervention, the workshop Feeding Dynamics Education and Intervention in Primary Care or the prepackaged workshop, Montana Feeding Relationship Training Package—video and training materials—is available through Ellyn Satter Associates.)

PARTICIPANTS LEARN TO:

• Apply the basic principles of infant and child development to feeding

• Observe and interpret the interactions—and the distortions—of feeding dynamics

• Systematically evaluate the components of the established feeding problem—medical, developmental, nutritional, feeding dynamics and psychosocial

• Develop a set of recommendations and a treatment plan that will achieve a desirable and realistic outcome

• Diplomatically but straightforwardly approach parents with the assessment and recommendations

• Carry out treatment

TEACHING MODES

Teaching modes include experiential exercises, lecture, live and videotape demonstration, role play, group discussion and problem solving around case studies.

TOPICS

• The feeding relationship, nutritional status and food regulation

• Primary, secondary and tertiary intervention

• Assessing established feeding problems

• Assessing the child who eats poorly

• What is normal growth?

• Childhood eating disorders

• Developmental aspects of feeding

• Establishing a working contract with the parent

• Assessing and treating the finicky child

• Assessing and treating the too-fat child

SCHEDULE: 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. with breaks at 10 and 3:30; 1½ hour lunch break at 12:00