Nothing is as frustrating as a child who doesn’t want to eat. Even if you go to the extent of feeding them, they still refuse to chow. It is common for pre-schoolers to seem extremely disinterested in food but eating is important for your child’s growth and forging a healthy relationship with food should start early on in life. A well-nourished child has a greater drive to eat than a malnourished child. Most children who have access to food will eat enough to meet their energy requirements. Your responsibility as a parent is to provide the time for eating, pleasant feeding environment and healthy food choices. Their responsibility is to eat what they need.
Importance of food
Food plays an important role in making sure that in the first six months of life, your baby grows exponentially and even double their birth weight. They continue to grow at a rapid rate until 12 months. After 12 months of age, their rate of physical growth decreases dramatically. Between 3-7 years of age, the body of a pre-schooler is cleverly able to channel the majority of nutrients to brain growth and development. The metabolism slows down to conserve energy and even though physical growth continues, it is dramatically less than the baby and future teen years.The drive of a pre-schooler to eat is metabolically less.
What’s causing your child not eat
A growth spurt: Children go through growth spurts and during a growth spurt, there will be a bigger drive to eat. Outside of growth spurts, the drive to eat is considerably less. Studies have shown growth spurts continue to occur throughout childhood, although between toddler and puberty they occur less frequently and for a shorter duration.
Illness: Another reason that make a child to have no appetite is illness. When we as adults are ill, we often go off our food. Yet when our kids are ill and go off food for a while we panic. As long as your child is staying hydrated, give them some space to eat how they feel during an illness. Their appetite usually returns after being sick, so take advantage of post illness hunger.
Reflux: A burning sensation post meal makes a child very nervous to eat foods. Resolved reflux doesn’t always guarantee good eating as the memory and trust in the food experience needs to be experienced first. So be patient with your child.
Constipation: Kids experience constipation and may not be able to articulate exactly what is going on in their tummy. A full colon doesn’t leave much space for the tummy to fill up with food. The feeling of fullness could come prematurely and thus decrease amount of food eaten. This unfortunately can become a vicious cycle and therefore seek help to sort this out.
Feeding environment: Try feed your child in a relaxed environment as sometimes the feeding environment that is stressful may drive your child to refuse food. Try not to fight with your child to eat, force feed or bribe your child during meal times. Using the mealtimes to resolve conflict between you and your partner or discipline your children creates a negative feeding experience.Joy can be created by making mealtimes full of family traditions. Use it as an opportunity to speak about family dreams, fun future events and reminiscing about fun family past experiences. If your children look forward to mealtimes for the social interaction, they will be more likely to eat some of the food.
They are full: Respecting your child’s fullness cues and trusting them to eat what they need of the healthy foods provided will set a foundation of trust and respect.
