Avoid actively restricting your child’s consumption of food you have available in your home.
“No eating those cookies–you can have one if you eat enough dinner.”
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Create a home food environment conducive to making healthy choices:
Make nutritious foods easily accessible within your home (e.g., put fruit and vegetables at eye level in the refrigerator and put healthful snacks in easy to access locations such as on the countertop or table). Make desserts, snack foods, or other favorite foods available on occasion, allowing your child to choose them when they are made available.
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Home food availability is one of the strongest correlates of fruit, vegetable, and low-fat dairy intakes. [29,30] Research shows that complete restriction of desserts and snack foods prompts overconsumption when these foods become available. [32,77,91] Exposure to food restriction has been associated with excess weight gain over time.[55,56]
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Avoid using food restriction and pressure-to-eat to control what your child eats at mealtimes.
“This meal is healthy for you, you have to eat everything on your plate before you can be done.”
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Provide consistent structure to your meals, while encouraging your child’s autonomy over eating choices during mealtime:
Eat three meals daily. Whenever possible, eat these meals as a family. Parents should be responsible for choosing when meals will be served and what foods will be served at meals. (Parents can involve children to teach them about meal planning and how to make healthful choices.) Children and teens should be responsible for choosing how much food they eat for each meal given a range of healthful options without verbal restriction or pressure-to-eat from parents.
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Consumption of regular meals is associated with healthier dietary intake patterns and fewer unhealthy weight control practices.[31–34] Family meals are strongly correlated with better dietary intake and lower risk of engagement in unhealthy weight-control practices.[35] Food restriction is associated with dietary disinhibition, increased eating in the absence of hunger, and increased prevalence of unhealthy weight control practices among adolescent girls and boys.[50,54,67,78,79] Higher levels of food restriction has been associated with higher BMI.[54–56,59] Pressure-to-eat can result in dislike of target food items, emotional disinhibition, reports of dietary restraint, and disruption of innate self-regulation mechanisms. [78,79]
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Avoid using food restriction or pressure-to-eat in an effort to teach your child about healthy eating or healthy weight maintenance.
“No more chips for you today-you’ve been gaining too much weight lately.”
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Provide a supportive environment with in which you model a focus on healthful behaviors, not on weight or shape:
Model healthy and balanced food choices and eating patterns, including consumption of desserts, snack foods, and other favorite foods in moderation. Focus conversations with your child on making food choices for overall health, not weight or shape. Do not allow weight teasing within your home.
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Parental modeling of eating, activity, and diet-related behaviors have been shown to be significantly associated with child and adolescent behaviors [22,29,92]. Parent conversations focused on weight/size are associated with increased risk for adolescent disordered eating behaviors, whereas conversations focused on healthful eating are protective against disordered eating behaviors.[93] Exposure to weight-teasing within the home environment is associated with decreases in self-esteem, increased in depression and an increased risk in unhealthy weight control practices.[36–39]
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