Shaping Children's Eating Habits with Loving Nutritional Education

The stubborn eating behavior of children is a well-known phenomenon in nutrition education. It often drives parents to the brink of despair. Stubborn children who refuse to eat. Overwhelmed parents who want to provide their children with variety and healthy food at all costs. Bad moods at the dinner table are thus already preprogrammed. Why does this phenomenon keep repeating itself? And how can we make the shared mealtime a pleasant experience? With the right background knowledge, nutrition education becomes much easier.

Developmental Stages in Eating Behavior

To understand children’s behavior and to integrate loving nutrition education into everyday life, it helps to take a look at the development of eating behavior. The following table provides a good overview of six developmental stages:

1.	takes place in the womb and is a passive, continuous form of nutrition.
2. and 3.	include milk and complementary foods and are characterized by hunger, thirst, sucking needs, physical contact, and increasing curiosity.
4.	occurs between the 11th and 18th month of life. In addition to basic needs, imitation, fun, and play are added.
5.	is from 1.5 years up to the 8th–10th year of life. Eating behavior here is also shaped by self-determination, social experience, food envy, and defiance.
6.	focuses on distancing from parentally prescribed behavior, which leads to peer groups, image, athletic performance, ecology, politics, and social issues becoming more important.

Taste Preference: Sweet and Fatty

Genetically innate taste preferences have repeatedly ensured survival throughout human development. Leading the way is the desire for sweet and fatty foods—the first imprint through breast milk. From an early age, children internalize the certainty that sweet and fatty milk is good for them. Later at the table, children therefore repeatedly seek out these qualities. Conversely, bitter foods are genetically linked to signals of unripe, spoiled, or potentially poisonous foods. The famous childhood aversion to Brussels sprouts appears in a different light with this knowledge.

Defiance vs. Survival Strategy

Apart from taste imprinting, sweet, fatty foods offer little energy bundles the chance to meet their high energy needs despite their small stomachs. Vegetables could never achieve this. The fundamental refusal of the little ones is therefore not defiance or rebellion against parental nutrition education but an instinctive survival strategy. Vegetables have very low energy content and are not sweet or even bitter! They fill the stomach but do not satisfy hunger. From the child’s perspective, it therefore makes no sense to eat vegetables as a main meal. Raw vegetables, on the other hand, are gladly accepted, but more out of playful motivation than for satiety.

Don’t Play with Food—Or Maybe You Should?

As soon as the little one sits at the table, a classic learning process within nutrition education begins. Emotional support from adults is therefore essential. They should encourage tasting positively but accept rejection by the child. Forcing a child to try something would have the opposite effect and associate the food with a very negative feeling before it is even tasted. Curiosity and courage to try again are lost. Besides actually putting food in the mouth, all other senses are involved in getting to know food. The more a child can use these senses with a food, the more likely they are to dare to actually eat it. A positive taste experience is thus much more likely. On average, a child needs about 10 to 15 contacts with a food to decide for or against it. This also includes sometimes crushing something between their fingers or spreading it beside the plate. What looks like playing to adults is an important learning process for the child.

Rules Help with Nutrition Education

As the child grows, in addition to playful learning, the associated rules become increasingly important. What generally applies can also be transferred to nutrition education. Clear rules make interaction easier. Strengthening the eating community is the focus here. Regular mealtimes are important so that a regular feeling of hunger can develop and everyone knows that food generally tastes better when hungry. Also, the same food should always be offered to everyone because the one with different food does not belong to the community. It applies that everyone may wish for a meal, but everyone also has the right to politely but firmly refuse foods. It is important that children do not feel pressured as a result. Just as with the “what,” it also helps to teach children to listen to their feeling of fullness regarding “how much.” They only have to eat as much as they want, not until the plate is empty.

Getting to Know Foods Playfully

Besides openness at the table and preparing food together, it especially helps with small children to support their imitation. Through lovingly and authentically designed wooden toy foods, like those from howa, even small children can be introduced to vegetables and thus support nutrition education. The different shapes and colors can be objectively examined in a play kitchen or in the grocery store, and a playful, easy approach to them can be learned. This awakens curiosity and lowers the inhibition threshold for little ones to happily engage with foods at the table.