Sunny Side Up Nutrition

A cooking, nutrition and family feeding blog to simplify your life

Anna Lutz

The Berry’s Journey: Learning Where Food Comes From

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In July, my family and I visited River Ridge Farm for their “Berry Fest – U Pick Day.” It was a hot July day filled with berry picking, hayrides, face painting and yummy food. The children enjoyed filling the pint containers with blueberries and black raspberries. They also loved the hand made snow cones with syrup made from the berries. I was excited for my children to see where some of their food comes from, but we left having a better understanding of all the work and logistics it takes to get food to us in our city grocery store.

River Ridge Farm is in Independence, VA. It is owned by my aunt, Charlotte Hanes, which allowed us to ask lots of questions during our day on the farm. They primarily raise grass-fed beef and added berries to their farm a few years ago. They raise berries in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, free of pesticides and using sustainable farming methods.

When we arrived at the farm, we purchased 6 pint containers for $30, $5 per pint. This is about what you would pay for a pint of organically grown berries in a grocery store. At first, this sounded high to me, but as I learned more about the many steps that go into getting berries into our hands, it now sounds like a bargain.

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Feeding Teens: Slowly Taking Down The Scaffolding

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I’m often asked about how to approach food with preteens and teens. Teenagers developmentally need more freedom and independence and being too rigid in feeding can lead to a teen feeling restricted. Restrictive feeding has been shown to interfere with a child being able to use hunger and fullness cues to guide their eating.  

On the other hand, our current food culture doesn’t always support teens listening to hunger and fullness. As a parent, sometimes it can feel like people and businesses are always offering food to our children and not in a way that promotes balanced eating. A teen doesn’t yet have the abstract thinking it takes to be totally in charge of their own food, nor the experience.  It doesn’t make sense to give teens full reigns of their eating. While we don’t want to feed a teen the same as we would a 3-year-old, we also don’t want to totally hand over the responsibilty of food to a teenager.

Kids Learn from Structure

If you follow our writing, you know we use Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding (DOR) as a foundation of the work we do.  This gives parents the jobs of “What, When and Where,” when it comes to food, and the child’s jobs of “If and How much.” You can read more about DOR in my previous post. However, as children become older, the goal is for them to gain more skills and independence around eating. Just like any self-care task, we start with more structure and, over time, give them more of the responsibility. 

Bedtime Routines

I like to compare how we parent with feeding to how we parent with bedtime. Just like we can’t make our child eat certain food, we can’t make a child fall asleep.  What we can do is provide them with routine or structure that helps them fall asleep. The parents are involved more with bedtime when children are young and then as the child grows up, the child may have more and more of the responsibility of going to bed. The long term goal is for a child to feel comfortable with their own bedtime routine as an older teen to adult.

This is similar to feeding. When a child is young, you decide when meals and snacks are served and what is offered and, over time, this structure gradually changes. It’s important to start to give a teen more responsibility in feeding to help them develop independence long term. Preteens and teens spend more time away from family and may start having their own money and access to food.  Also, we want to help our children develop the skills to feed themselves so that they are self–sufficient in their eating as an older teen or adult. Children learn by adults assisting them with scaffolding (read more in my previous post) and then slowly decreasing that support or structure.  Young children need a lot of scaffolding and then, as they get older, they need less and less scaffolding until they are old enough to be totally in charge of their food. 

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