A child eats poorly - advice from a psychologist

Go to the doctor

The first step is to check the child's health. One of the main reasons for low appetite is poor health. Children often don't want to eat when they have a fever, a tummy ache, or are teething. If refusals to eat are episodic during illness, it’s okay. But when your baby constantly complains of discomfort and eats poorly, be sure to visit a pediatrician. Low appetite may be a symptom of illness.

Children also don't eat well when they're nervous, overly tired, or have recently been under a lot of stress. What can be done in this situation? In a calm atmosphere, talk to your child, find out what is bothering him, most likely, you will be able to help him find a solution to the problem that worries him. Teach him to manage his emotions, increase his self-esteem and self-confidence. If he doesn't learn to do this as a child, he will have a hard time as an adult.

Error three, or “Eat for mom, for dad...”

Most parents believe that in order for a child to grow normally, he must eat the amount of food required for his age every day.

Of course, standards exist, which is why pediatricians write books. But every child is an individual. Remember, do you eat the same amount of food every day or do you eat more today and less tomorrow? It happens that yesterday you wanted to eat an elephant at lunch, but today even a cup of coffee seems too much? So why do we deny children the right to have different appetites?

An accidental, unstable decrease in appetite in a child should be treated calmly. During such periods, give your child his favorite foods more often, reduce portions (just remember that when you don’t feel like eating, the sight of a full plate is unpleasant). Accept as a fact that strong experiences can spoil the appetite for a while, and the child in this sense is even more sensitive: any unpleasant sensations, pain, resentment, grief noticeably affect the child’s psyche and disrupt the appetite. On the other hand, oddly enough, pleasant emotions can also cause loss of appetite. If the baby is overexcited, playing or running around, this can cause a short-term refusal to eat. You should wait a little and not offer your baby any intermediate snacks, and after a while the appetite will return.

How much food does a child really need?

Psychologists and pediatricians advise looking at the current situation in a new way. For example, find out whether your child is eating too little. According to statistics, among children under 7 years of age, only 20% are true little ones.

A small child, until he has formed eating habits, asks to eat only when he is hungry. His appetite is controlled by instinct. If the baby is in good health, then he will eat exactly as much as his body needs, and extra portions will only do harm. As he gets older, he begins to focus not on the body’s need for food, but on the socio-psychological situation, life experience, and emotions.

How to determine how much food a child really needs? Pediatricians and psychologists advise following a simple rule: the baby must eat as many spoons of each dish as he or she is full years old. In other words, a two-year-old toddler must eat at least two spoons of soup and two spoons of the second for lunch. If a child begins to be capricious, agree with him to follow this rule. This will make eating predictable and more comfortable for both baby and mother.

When it comes to baby nutrition, mothers often forget to count calories, but this is very important. If you carefully analyze your baby's diet, it may turn out that he is getting many more calories than he needs.

At the age of 6 - 12 months, the baby needs 800 kcal;
In 1 – 3 years, 1300 – 1500 kcal are required;
At 3–6 years old, the daily norm is up to 2000 kcal;
At 6–10 years old – up to 2400 kcal.

Now check how many calories are in children's cottage cheese, fruits, porridge, cutlets and other foods that a child usually eats. It is quite possible that you force him to eat too much, and he refuses instinctively.

A child refuses to eat: what to do?

When a child begins to eat at the family table, he may at times have problems with his appetite. He is capricious and plays with food instead of eating, or wants one thing from the table, but refuses the rest. There are especially many problems with food that is considered healthy. Then, after about an hour, he may suddenly become hungry.

First you need to understand why the child does not want to eat at the right time. Maybe that's how he develops. At a certain age, a child’s body does not require a lot of food. Maybe he is not hungry at dinner because he is still full after lunch. Or maybe he reached into the cookie jar or grabbed a sandwich from the neighbors. You have to accept that sometimes kids just aren't hungry. Here are tips to help stimulate a good appetite and ensure nutritious nutrition.

Five ways from a psychologist to feed your little one healthy food

What to do in a situation when the pediatrician says that everything is fine, you have checked the diet, the instinct of self-preservation has not disappeared anywhere, but the child still refuses to eat? This means there are some external problems. The advice of our psychologists will help you cope with them.

Don't put pressure on your child

Children are sensitive to adults' emotions, especially negative ones. Treat an uneaten meal calmly: if you haven’t eaten, it means you’re not hungry. If this is not an important problem for the baby, then you should not sound the alarm. Don't try to feed him at any cost.

Never try to force feed a child, don’t threaten (like “If you don’t eat it, I’ll pour it on your head”) - don’t break his will.
Never scold your child when he eats, for poor appetite, a stain on his clothes or behavior - eating will be associated with negative emotions.
Never shove the spoon; if the child stubbornly closes his mouth and moves the plate away, he is full and there is no need to overfeed him.
Never punish your child with food.

Learn to distinguish whims from satiety. Keep calm. It is better to place a dish with healthy snacks - fruits and chopped vegetables - in a prominent place. When the child gets hungry, he will come and eat. The instinct of self-preservation cannot be fooled.

Make meals a family ritual

Rituals that are repeated day after day help children feel safe. How to make a tradition out of an ordinary lunch? Very simple. Lay a colorful tablecloth or oilcloth on the table, place beautiful dishes, and lay out napkins. Sit down for dinner or lunch with the whole family. Turn off the TV so that it does not distract your child. Talk at the table: how the day went, what interesting things happened, about plans for tomorrow. Let the child see that eating is something interesting, calm and pleasant; of course, he himself will want to take part in the family meal.

Set a positive example

Do you want your child to eat properly and at the same time? Then do the same yourself:

eat yourself only when you are hungry - after sleep, at lunch, after a walk
try to have breakfast, lunch and dinner at a certain time,
limit food intake by time - 20-30 minutes, portions should be small;
try not to snack between meals, and if you do, choose fruits and vegetables;
give preference to healthy, varied foods; it is not necessary to fall into fashionable food “religions”;
make sure that the child receives enough vegetables, meat, fruits, fish, and grains;
Offer products according to age, prepare new dishes regularly.

Agree, it is dishonest to demand that your baby eat an entire bowl of soup when you yourself are having lunch with a delicious sandwich or curbing your appetite with chocolate. Our eating habits are formed in childhood, and what they will be like for a child depends only on you.

Serve the dish beautifully

Few people like boring porridge, but if you put a cheerful face on it with berries, then eating it is much more fun and interesting, right? It doesn’t take much time to create an unusual design for a familiar dish. Sausages with spaghetti “hair”, a mouse made of cottage cheese with raisin eyes and a cheese tail, bell pepper cars will delight any little one. Give your child his own dishes, let there be a funny picture at the bottom of the plate or cup: to see it, you will have to eat everything.

Mistake two, or “Not all examples are good”

They say that in order for children to eat well, they need to set an example.
Examples are great, but only if they are correct. Try to teach your son or daughter to follow the basic rules of behavior at the table as early as possible: let the child go with you to wash their hands before eating, eat with a spoon, and from 4-5 years old with a fork, use a napkin, clean up after themselves after eating and etc. But remember: children under 5 years of age are very impressionable and willingly try on the behavior of others. And not just the one you would like. For example, if a mother is on a diet, then the baby can also become infected with the desire to limit himself in food. Or, when dad categorically does not eat dairy, the child, following authority, can also abruptly refuse milk, fermented milk products and cottage cheese. If your baby regularly has lunch in the company of peers (for example, in a kindergarten), then the appearance of just one capricious child in it can ruin the appetite of everyone else and, conversely, the only insatiable baby can activate the appetite of a dozen other toddlers. Children no less easily fall under the indirect influence of seriously ill relatives. If one of the adults is sick at home, the child, as if trying on his role, may also refuse to eat or choose foods according to exactly the same criteria as the sick person.

So it is worth making sure that the examples that the child sees in front of him are worthy of imitation.

Traditional methods

At two or three years old, children already have their favorite foods and dishes, and there are also those that they will not eat under any circumstances. And this needs to be understood, because an adult, for sure, has addictions to something and unloved foods.

Therefore, there is no point in insisting on their use. But if a one-year-old baby and a little older refuses even his favorite treats, you can resort to folk methods that will help develop a feeling of hunger in the baby.

How to increase a child’s appetite using folk methods:

Half an hour before meals, children can be given sour berries, fruits and juice from them . It could be raspberries, cherries, apples. If the child loves carrots, you can give them too. All this contributes to the production of gastric juice, and carrots are also good for vision.
Half an hour before meals you can give your child herbal tincture, decoction or tea, but not ordinary, but prepared from medicinal plants (in first place in terms of effectiveness are tinctures or decoctions from dandelion root, wormwood, chicory). Naturally, not every child will agree to drink such a tincture, because both wormwood and dandelion root have a bitter taste, but it is precisely because of this that the secretion of gastric juice increases.
For appetite, infusions are given to children half an hour before meals according to the dosage indicated in the instructions or as prescribed by the doctor.
Infusions (wormwood, chicory and others) are slightly inferior in effectiveness, but children prefer herbal teas made from juniper, black currant leaves, cumin, rose hips or sea buckthorn. This appetite-increasing drink is not only effective, but also pleasant to the taste, aromatic and sweetish. Therefore, this option is optimal for increasing appetite without harming the baby’s body.
Helps increase hunger mint or fennel. They are good because they can be used by children at any age. For example, a one-year-old baby can be given mint tea 20 minutes before meals, a teaspoon, just like fennel tea. And for children over 2 years old, mint tea can be given a quarter glass several times a day before meals.
These teas are prepared very simply: pour half a teaspoon of mint for 10 minutes or a teaspoon of fennel seeds for 2 hours with a glass of boiling water.
If a child loves honey, and, of course, if he is not allergic to this product, then you can use it to increase your appetite. It contains royal jelly and pollen, which improve appetite and strengthen the body's immune defense. The composition also contains substances that also have a positive effect on increasing appetite - these are bee bread and propolis.

One and a half to three years

The “magic” age, the crisis of three years, the phase of negativism... We are all literate here, we understand what we are talking about. In practice, this means that you are trying to accustom your child to your family's culture, but the child is trying to do everything his own way. In addition, after one and a half years, children stop growing so rapidly (then there will be a second round in adolescence, our personal record looks like “gaining size in a week”), and, accordingly, do not need such a volume of nutrients. But you remember how he dived into a plate of porridge with a running start, you still have that cheerful 6 am “Porridge!” in your ears. Meat! Mo'oko! Sachet! give it QUICK!!” And then he sits down and thoughtfully picks at the plate, fishes out something there with his small fingers for half an hour, leaves, then bites off half an apple right in the drawer, dirty, then you find him intently chewing dog food. The mother feels completely sick when the child joyfully perches on a chair, takes a spoon, sniffs the food - and suddenly turns around and retreats into the room with a stately “well, I don’t eat that!” Panic! A!! He is ill? Is he looking for a cure? Why doesn’t he eat anything at home, but when visiting or in a cafe he rushes about as if he’s not himself?

He is studying. This world, it’s completely new, never seen before, and I, in my brand new body, is also new, incomprehensible, I don’t know what I like and what I don’t, what food makes me happy and what makes me sleepy . Sometimes I wake up so hungry that I could swallow my mom and dad too. And sometimes I want to cry and suck my thumb right in the morning. But I don’t really want to sit at the table and eat porridge, which for some reason smells tasteless today (although I usually love it very much).

Parents mistake this normal exploratory behavior for protest and subversion. They threaten, demand, manipulate. Although all that is needed in this situation is to leave a bowl with some scraps available and go about your business. Perhaps in the evening he will get hungry and ask for something specific. Perhaps it will be the evening of the next day.

Normal eating behavior at this age is pecking and pinching, and constant snacking. We, pupils of Soviet kindergartens, out of habit think that at two years old it is normal to eat “first, second, third” for lunch and with bread. Yes, there are children who can gobble up this almost liter of complex and varied food. But not all. Most people can finish a cheese sandwich and half a cucumber in one fist. But often, once every hour and a half. And this is inconvenient for nannies and teachers, so - a full lunch and bed.

I was very shocked when I discovered that in English kindergartens, children either are not fed centrally at all, or are given some kind of nonsense, such as cookies, tiny cheese and an apple. But the children came home hungry, having had a good time, had dinner at seven o’clock, and at eight o’clock they already fell asleep of their own free will. At eight o'clock in the evening! Do you hear, mothers who are still trying to negotiate with customs at 23.00?

Possible causes of poor appetite

► Lack of a constant feeding schedule. If the child is not used to eating at a certain time.

► Sweet snacks. The more sweets your baby eats between meals, the harder it will be to get him to eat a bowl of soup or a vegetable dish.

► Illnesses of the child. When an illness occurs, a child’s appetite decreases significantly, as all the body’s strength is spent fighting the disease. In this case, you should not force food on your baby.

► Emotional experiences. During these periods, parents' attention should be focused on the child's condition, and not on the amount of soup he has eaten.

Why does this problem occur?

Many parents have a hard time dealing with the lack of appetite in their children. But before moving on to ways to increase it, you should figure out why the baby refuses to eat. There may be several of them:

Misconception about lack of appetite. Parents, without noticing it themselves, overfeed the baby. In addition to the main meals, they give them either a cookie or a bun, and when it comes to a full meal, children, as a rule, do not have the desire to eat.
In order to feed a baby, all methods are good, and therefore very often children aged 2–3 years eat while watching cartoons. Or rather, while the children are watching them, mom or dad stuffs the prepared delicacy into them.
But! Such forceful feeding can harm the child, because in its process the production of digestive juices is not carried out, as it should be. Therefore, hysterics, refusal to eat, abdominal pain and even vomiting can become common occurrences whenever you try to feed your baby.
A lack of appetite may also be due to the fact that the child begins to get sick.
This can be caused by viral or infectious diseases, as well as certain gastrointestinal problems.

If the baby refuses to eat, but still feels well, then there is no reason to worry. Perhaps he hasn’t had time to get hungry yet, and nothing terrible will happen if he misses one meal. During the second, he will certainly make up for lost time. If there have been changes in the baby’s behavior - he has become sleepy, weak, capricious, symptoms of a cold or dysbacteriosis have appeared, you should consult a doctor.

Important! It also happens that a child begins to eat poorly and refuse food due to a deficiency of iron in his body. In order to determine this, you need to undergo the appropriate tests and visit a doctor, who will prescribe the necessary vitamin complex.