Apart from the negative feelings, the children ate a markedly larger quantity of soup—whichever flavor they were assigned to—when they were not pressured to do so. Over time, the children became less willing to eat the flavor of soup that they associated with being pressured to finish.
In other words, as so often with parenting, the effect of pressure is exactly the opposite of what we hope for. Our desire to see a child eat well, which comes from love, is often so blinding that we cannot see that we are the ones standing in the way of them doing it. The Beijing grandparents thought they would make their grandchildren healthy by feeding them as much as possible. The force-feeders think they can teach a child to be less fussy. In both cases, the strategies backfire.
So what does actually work, when it comes to feeding a child?
The question of how a parent’s feeding style influences a
child’s eating habits is so complex that you might think it would be beyond the ability of science to measure. Outside a family, no one really knows what goes on at the dinner table. Each household has its own distinctive rules and bizarre unspoken codes. As a child, you come to
learn what distinguishes a “snack” from a “meal,” and whether a request for a second helping will cause your parent pleasure or displeasure. These questions are not easily explained to outsiders, much less quantifiable.
Yet a surprising amount of work has been done on the link between feeding styles and child health, and the findings are relatively clear. Some studies have asked children to describe the feeding style of their parents; others have asked the parents themselves to describe how they feed their children, using a range of inventories and questionnaires. Still others have observed the parents and children at mealtimes. Researchers then tally these data with various health outcomes in the children, such as whether they are overweight and how many vegetables they eat. From all these studies, there are strong indications that some methods of feeding have better outcomes than others.
To make things simpler, researchers tend to divide up parenting styles into four main models, based on how responsive or sensitive a parent is to a child’s needs (sometimes this is referred to as “warmth”) and how demanding the parent is when it comes to the child’s behavior. From these two ideas, we get four basic styles of parenting:
1. Uninvolved: low warmth and low demands
2. Authoritarian: low warmth and high demands
3. Indulgent: high warmth and low demands
4. Authoritative: high warmth and high demands
Obviously, there are far more types of parents than just four. It’s also the case that parenting styles do not necessarily translate into feeding styles. Some parents have mood swings from meal to meal, being authoritarian at breakfast, before the first coffee of the day has kicked in, and indulgent at dinner, mellowed by the first glass of wine. But this model is a start.
Of these, the uninvolved style is clearly the worst. A parent who is an uninvolved feeder fails to provide the food a child needs and also fails to place any demands on the child to eat well. We are not talking about the odd dinner of tins foraged from the back of the cupboard. With uninvolved feeding, almost every meal is chaotic, and you come home to
an erratically stocked refrigerator and parents who do not appear to care one way or another about what you eat. Several longitudinal studies have found that children fed in such a way tend to weigh more as adults. If no one cares much about feeding you, it’s hard to learn healthy ways to feed yourself.
The remaining three styles are less straightforward. The authoritarian style of feeding belongs with the force-feeders. Such parents make high demands on their children to eat well (Finish your soup! Try these carrots! Don’t eat sweets!), but fail to recognize who the person is in front of them and what the child really likes or needs. By contrast, indulgent caregivers—like the Chinese grandparents—are hyper-aware of a child’s wants and food preferences and good at responding to hunger. Whereas authoritarian feeders have the arrogant sense that they know best, indulgent feeders are warm and responsive. Yet indulgent feeders place few demands on children at mealtimes—whether to try new vegetables, or to stop eating when they are full. Indulgent feeders will not tell their children to wait until suppertime, or that they must not add mayonnaise
and
butter to a sandwich. They will bake every cake—or, more likely, buy them—until they find the one that puts the biggest smile on a child’s face.
Some might say that indulgent feeding is a two-way street. In some families, children become skilled at running rings around the grown-ups over food from a very young age. They discover that eating can be a bargaining chip or a way of getting attention. Or they learn that if they ask for something often enough, in a whiny enough voice, they will get the treat they desire. And the treats are everywhere. It is far easier today for parents to slip into indulgent feeding than it was in the past, given the sheer prevalence of foods expressly designed for indulging little ones.
Whatever the cause, a growing body of evidence suggests that indulgent feeding puts children at higher risk for obesity. Nutrition scientists Rachel Vollmer and Amy Mobley, who conducted a large review of the existing literature up until 2013 on how feeding styles affect child health, found that the indulgent feeding style—however kindly meant—was a strong predictor of obesity. One study of nearly four hundred immigrant Hispanic families found that the indulgent feeding style accounted for 26
percent of the variation in children’s weight, even after controlling for differences in parental BMI. Moreover, this indulgent style of parenting was the most popular one among the mothers studied, used by more than a third of the families. Seven separate studies have found that an indulgent parenting style (sometimes called “permissive”) went along with higher weight in children. Indulgent feeding is also associated with children consuming more foods low in important nutrients and high in sugar and fat. This is as you would expect: indulgent parents indulge their children.
What’s perhaps more surprising is that the authoritarian style of feeding—characterized by placing high demands on the child to eat well combined with low sensitivity to the child’s own feelings—has also been linked to higher child weight. One study following nearly a thousand American children from birth to fifty-four months (four and a half years old) found that having authoritarian parents created the highest risk that children would be overweight out of any of the parenting styles. Children with authoritarian parents were five times more likely to be overweight by the time they started school than those whose parents had a warmer approach. At least five studies have found a connection between authoritarian parenting and weight gain, though the evidence is more mixed than it is with indulgent feeding.
In certain contexts, authoritarian feeding may have some merit. There are signs that with very young children—particularly in low-income households—placing very high demands to eat fruits and vegetables and not to eat too much junk can have positive effects, setting children up with healthy habits for life. A dictatorial style of feeding will also have different impacts depending on the family values surrounding it. One study in New York City found that authoritarian feeding had less negative connotations among a group of Chinese American families than among a group of white families. In the Chinese American families, this parenting style had no impact on the children’s weight, whereas in the white families, feeding children in restrictive, controlling ways was associated with higher bodyweight in the children. There is always the danger that attempts to control a child’s feeding too rigidly will backfire.
The great drawback with authoritarian feeding—apart from the unpleasant atmosphere it creates at the dinner table—is that it prevents
children from learning to recognize their own cues for hunger and fullness. Leann Birch conducted another revealing experiment, this time involving 192 girls. Researchers met the girls when they were five and again at seven. They asked the girls’ mothers to fill in a questionnaire determining the extent to which they attempted to control their daughters’ eating, responding to statements such as, “If I did not guide or regulate my child’s eating, she would eat too many junk foods,” with options from 1 (disagree) to 5 (agree). The girls themselves were, after a lunch, given free access to a range of snack foods, including pretzels, potato chips, popcorn, and chocolate chip cookies. Those girls who had the most controlling mothers also tended to be the ones who ate the most food in the absence of hunger. By the age of seven, they were also the most likely to be overweight. Birch concluded that too much restriction promotes behaviors in children that are likely to make them gain weight. We want what we are told we can’t have.
Reading these studies as a parent can be a good way to depress yourself. Indulgence makes a child fat. Restriction makes a child fat
and
unhappy. It’s tempting to throw your hands in the air and complain, as my mother sometimes used to at moments of stress, “I know! I do everything wrong!”
There is good news, however, if you have children who are not yet fully grown. It is possible to learn how to feed children in ways that are beneficial rather than the reverse. The tricky part is that doing so involves giving up many of the payoffs that we get from feeding. You have to relinquish, or at least cut down on, the joy of indulgence—the bliss of seeing a small creature gobble up treats like Pac-Man. You also have to give up the illusion of power or the feeling that the child’s stomach is just an extension of your own—the belief that you can make a child stop or start eating because you know best.
The style of feeding that has been shown to offer the best outcomes for children’s health in numerous studies is called “authoritative.” Such parents are highly “demanding” that a child should eat well. Yet they are also highly “responsive” to cues from the child (so no force-feeding or coercion). Another way of putting it is “high warmth, high control.” The ideal scenario for a child is to grow up in a house where there isn’t too much junk food, but also not too much fuss made about the evils of
sugar and fat. Four large studies of American families have found that where children are fed in an “authoritative” style, they eat more fruit and vegetables, even during the teenage years. They consume more dairy products, but fewer sweets and sugary sodas. They eat more family meals, and fewer snacks scavenged from fast-food places. They are less likely to be overweight. Perhaps most significant of all, these lucky children have a lower chance of growing up to be emotional eaters. In 2009, researchers in one study interviewed 450 mothers and their children (with an average age of seven). Children whose mothers were authoritative—warm but in control—were less likely to say that they turned to food when angry.
The end-goal of feeding children is very different from what it appears to be in the crazy mess and rush of a mealtime, when parents are desperate just to get them fed and cleaned up and on to the next stage. The true objective is independence: for a child to reach the point where he can regulate his own intake of food and choose the things that will do him good while giving him pleasure. Weaning children off milk is one thing; the real task for parents is to wean children off needing them. The dietician and family therapist Ellyn Satter talks of the “division of responsibility” in feeding. From toddlerhood to adolescence, a parent should be responsible for “what, when, where.” The child is responsible for “how much and whether.” Satter’s idea is that over time, a child offered good family meals with the freedom to eat as much or as little as he or she needs will grow up to become a “competent eater.”
The “authoritative” model also points to ways that adults could learn to feed themselves better. So many of us feed ourselves in ways that are alternately neglectful and overly strict. Next time you sit down to eat, imagine you are an ideal parent feeding a beloved child. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could offer yourself food in a warm, structured, no-fuss kind of way? You wouldn’t punish yourself with crash diets, nor would you allow yourself too much junk. Your priority when choosing food would be to see that you were well nourished, and you’d choose meals to keep your mood on an even keel. You’d want yourself to enjoy eating. The pantry would be stocked with good food, and you would trust yourself to choose wisely from its contents.
The art of feeding, it turns out, is not about pushing “one
more bite” into someone’s mouth, however healthy the food. Nor is it about authoritarian demands to abstain from all treats. It’s about creating a mealtime environment where—as in Clara Davis’s feeding experiment—those who are eating are free to develop their own tastes, because all of the choices on the table are real, whole food.
A new movement in child feeding has emerged suggesting that children can be taught to “self-regulate” from a much earlier age than previously assumed. Gill Rapley was a British midwife and health visitor who felt dissatisfied with the conventional wisdom that babies should be introduced to food via purees, given from a spoon. Rapley pioneered a new system called Baby Led Weaning (BLW), designed to be introduced at six months. Instead of feeding babies with all those elaborate organic purees frozen in ice-cube trays, you simply place chunks of food in front of the baby: steamed vegetables, soft pear; later, pieces of toast or even lamb chops. All food becomes “finger food,” even messy things like risotto. The baby will either grab it and attempt to eat—or not. Should the baby decide not to eat it, the parent is not to step in with a spoon. The idea is to mimic the conditions of breastfeeding, where babies take as much or as little as they need.
Doubtless, there have always been some parents who have fed babies this way. But as an official movement, Baby Led Weaning was launched only a decade ago, as a consequence of the new advice from the World Health Organization to wait until six months before offering a baby solid food. At four months, a baby is not ready to grab food for themselves, but by six months, many of them are. This being so, Rapley argues that it is “logical” to skip spoon-feeding altogether and allow babies to learn eating by “doing things for themselves.”