Last month I told you about working on Feeding with Love and Good Sense II. Because I know more now about producing a video than I did 20 years ago, this time we did prescreening. We asked parents about their concerns about feeding, and we used a questionnaire addressing the degree to which parents did their jobs with the what, when, and where of the division of responsibility and the degree to which they let their child do the how much and whether of eating. My plan was to find parents of children at each developmental stage who were doing a good job, then find other parents who were making common errors with feeding.

As I said last month, it was easy to demonstrate parents putting pressure on feeding. However, I was disappointed in my quest for another Andrew. He is the eight-month-old from FWLGS I whose mother is convinced “has no stopping place.” She instructed his child care provider not to let him eat as much as he wants. At the end of the feeding, Andrew is disappointed and crying, looking pleadingly at the provider to give him more food. Viewers get the message: restricting children’s food intake is cruel. We have posted Andrew on a "secret" site on YouTube.

Today’s children appear to be restricted by being forced to eat vegetables. The idea seems to be that vegetables are slimming. I am not sure if this is better or worse than outright food restriction, but it surely is disrespectful and counterproductive.

I saw many feeding patterns, in addition to the almost-universal vegetable pressure, that undermined the child’s being able to tune in on his or her hunger and satiety. That undermining, of course, sets the child up for making errors in food regulation and growth. Examples include:

• Getting a child to eat solids when he doesn’t want to.
• Only letting a child have a prescribed amount of solid food and formula.
• Letting the child eat or not eat to keep the parents’ attention.
• Getting the child to eat a few more bites when he indicates he is done.
• Withholding dessert until the child has eaten “enough.”
• Letting the child eat on his own, i.e., not with parents.
• Letting the child eat in front of the TV rather than at the table with the rest of the family.
• Making stopping comments when the child eats a lot.

The parents we videoed feed in contradictory ways. The same parents who enforce certain amounts and types of food at mealtime allow their child free access to food and caloric beverages between meals. In fact, none of the parents surveyed indicated that they structured snacks.

Of course, all the pressuring behaviors I talked about last month interfere with a child’s ability to regulate food intake. Hassling children upsets them, whether it is about using silverware or about taking “no thank you” bites. That upset generates internal static, which drowns out sensations of hunger and fullness. Think of yourself when demands come at you thick and fast. How capable are you of tuning in on yourself and knowing what you want and need? So children make errors in food regulation. Some make the error of eating too much and growing too fast, some make the error of eating too little and growing too slowly, and some regulate well and grow consistently in spite of all the aggravation.

The take-home message? If you are asked to intervene with a child’s weight acceleration (or weight faltering, finickiness, etc.) there is an almost universal likelihood that errors in feeding are the culprit. Whatever is going on, teach the division of responsibility in feeding, and reduce the static.