Kids need support learning to eat in moderation, especially during snack time. Snacks are the most challenging to moderate because children often prefer snack foods to dinner. If you want to teach your children to snack and eat sweets in moderation, follow these six steps.
1. Teach them to recognize hunger cues. Children won’t be able to recognize how much they should eat at snack time if they don’t understand how hungry they are. Explain what hunger feels like and how to tell when feeling full, then ask how hungry they feel before every snack. This will help children connect hunger levels to the amount they choose to eat.
2. Allow your child to listen to hunger and satiety cues without any input from you. Have you ever noticed that some days your child can finish an entire bowl of ice cream and other times won’t want more than a bite? How sometimes they are ravenous in the morning and other times too tired to even think about breakfast? Our children must learn to trust their own constantly changing hunger and satiety cues, otherwise they may learn to habitually overeat. As Dina Rose says in her book “It’s Not About the Broccoli,” “even if it turned out, by some stroke of magic, that you do know how much your kids ought to eat, you still shouldn’t interfere. Teaching kids to trust your instincts rather than their own instincts prevents your children from learning how to self-regulate.”
3. Give them practice. Just as children need practice reading before they reach chapter books, and practice driving before they hit the roads alone, they need practice figuring out how much they should eat at any one time. To teach them this, follow author Ellyn Satter’s division of responsibility in which parents are responsible for what food is put on the table, when meals and snacks are served, and where children eat. Children are responsible for how much they eat — and whether they eat at all. By giving kids control over how much they eat at every meal and snack, you are giving them the moderation practice they need.