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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. 

Slowly Decrease Structure

Think about the Division of Responsibility as a baseline. As our children grow up we need to start to take away some of that structure and give them more of the responsibility in eating. We may continue to decide the “when” and “what” at certain meals, but give them some of this responsibility at times. It’s a very gradual shift over time.

As parents, we want to avoid falling into a pattern of flip flopping between being permissive and then, as a reaction, authoritarian. With a teen, this may look like allowing them to be in charge of their breakfast and lunch meals, but when we get worried their meals aren’t balanced then we react with telling them they must eat all of their vegetables at dinner or they won’t get any dessert. There are some strategies we can use to facilitate this decrease in structure without falling in to an all or nothing way of parenting. 

Tips for Feeding Preteens and Teens: 

• Focus on what you are going to provide, rather than what you want to prevent. Parents often talk to me about the amount of processed snack food their teenager eats.  Rather than restricting them from eating certain foods in the afternoon, prepare a balanced afternoon snack for them. “I’ve made a plate of apples and peanut butter for snack.” or “Do you want to add yogurt or nuts to have with your snack?”
• Engage them in meal prep. You may ask them to make their breakfast, but then assist them in putting together a balanced meal. “What would you like to have with your eggs and toast, apples or grapes?”
• If they reach for an afternoon snack – suggest an item to balance it out. “How about you have a glass of milk with your cookies?”
• Continue with house rules that provide structure – sit down while eating; turn off screens while eating; don’t take food to their rooms. “Looks like you are having a snack, let’s sit down at the table.”
• Talk with them about their eating plans when they are not with you. When your child is not with you, you don’t have a say in what they eat and don’t eat. You can support them by talking through their plans for the day. “What do you think you’ll have for afternoon snack while you’re out?” or “What will you do for dinner before dance class?” or “Let’s pack a snack since you’re not coming jome before practice.”

More than anything, remember that modeling is much more effective than teaching or telling your child how or what to eat. They may not accept the above ideas or suggestions, but you are modeling for them what it looks like to feed yourself well. You also model for them every time you put together a balanced meal or take time to sit down for a snack for yourself. It’s hard to take away the scaffolding, but when you do, you model trust in your child and their wise body.

Last July, I sat down to write a blog post late at night after I picked up my daughter from two weeks away at summer camp.  I had planned to write a post about easy summer no-cook meals. But I was having trouble getting my words on to paper. I opened a new document and started writing what I really wanted to write. I wrote a letter to my daughter’s camp counselor. After I picked her up earlier that day, Miriam had told me her counselor was on a diet and “counting her steps” in preparation for a post-camp trip to the Caribbean. Miriam’s camp is in the mountains and the days are filled with swimming, kayaking, rock climbing, sports and running up an down the hills of camp.

I hated to think that a diet interfered with anyone’s mind and body experiencing the joys of camp. Although I was certainly not surprised, it made me sad that diet culture had affected my 12-year-old’s camp experience. I also know that this is the norm in our culture and certainly the camp or the counselor hadn’t done anything intentionally wrong. 

My post An Open Letter to My Daughter’s Camp Counselor was shared online over the summer. It seemed to hit home for a lot of parents.

Camp Culture

I was a camp person. I went to summer camp for 8 summers as a child. And then I was a camp counselor for several years in high school and college. Summer camp is such a special place. It’s a place removed from the “real world,” without technology. It’s free of many of the social rules children experience all year. And camp is a place where acceptance and kindness are expected. Summer camp focuses on character development, facing fears, gaining independence and trying new things. When you are at camp, you are immersed in a new culture – Camp Culture. Camp Culture includes singing silly songs, giving lots of hugs, encouraging others, care packages, wearing bathing suits half the day, writing letters with pen and paper and looking up to the counselors.

Older teenagers and young adults, the counselors, are put in charge of the daily life of younger children. There are no parents there to make a child wear matching clothes. No one double checks that they brush their teeth well. The children, while cared for and safe, have a special kind of freedom with their young counselors in charge of daily life. The children look up to their counselors and want to be just like them. They hear them if they are talking about losing weight or dieting. Diet culture needs to not be a part of Camp Culture. 

Camp Staff Training

As summer approaches and college semesters come to a close, camp staff members around the country will soon gather to get ready for summer camp and the hundreds of thousands of children who will be in their care. The counselors will have extensive staff training to learn about the values of camp and the importance of being a good role model for the campers. The staff training will consist of safety procedures, leadership development, team building, songs, dining hall rules, and schedules. It’s my hope that camp directors will consider including information about the harm of diets and diet talk in their staff training. Because diets are so commonplace, information about dieting is not included as an important part of training those who spend time with our children. However, keeping diet culture out of the activities our children are involved in absolutely fits with the values of many of these activities.

Free Staff Training Lesson

We wanted to offer a short staff resource that can be included in summer staff training in the coming weeks. Camp Directors! Download our staff training lesson, Diet Free Camp Culture, for your staff training.  Download our free staff training lesson here.

Parents and Camp Directors

Parents, would you share this with your child’s camp? I think the best way to make a change is through the voice of parents.  Camp Directors, if you use this as part of your training or maybe decide not to, I’d love to receive your feedback on how this message can reach camps better and more clearly. 

Download our staff training lesson for your staff training.  

A few weeks ago, I had the honor of meeting Marsha Dunn Klein. Marsha is an Occupational Therapist, with Mealtime Notions, with over 40 years experience working with children with severe feeding issues and their families.  I have read about Marsha’s work for most of my career. So, for me, meeting her was like meeting a celebrity.

Marsha Dunn Klein shared with me this video about eating grasshoppers. Yes! You read that right, grasshoppers! The video is a story about Marsha’s experience in eating something new. It gives a great example of how someone can take small steps towards trying something new. There’s a lot of gray area between not eating something and taking a big bite of a new food.

Responsive Feeding

Marsha’s work as an OT is aligned with Responsive Feeding, an approach to feeding that focuses on the hunger and fullness cues of a child. It’s also a philosophy of some professionals, including myself, in treating children and adolescents with feeding and eating issues.  Responsive Feeding is in contrast to the methods of Behavioral Feeding Programs, that involve defined protocols for “training” or “retraining” children how to eat. Responsive feeding is based on the idea that feeding is a conversation between a caregiver and a child. If we ignore what the child is telling us with their eating (or not eating), we will end up pressuring or forcing the child to eat. We know pressure doesn’t help a child learn to eat well in the long run. Or, in constrast, we may end up being too permissive and not helping out child develop their eating skills.

Child Development and Feeding

I’ve been thinking about Marsha’s grasshopper story in the last few weeks. I’m in the midst of writing a developmentally appropriate nutrition curriculum for preschool and elementary schools with my colleague, Katherine Zavodni, RD. Through this work, I’ve been learning more about child development. I’ve learned about Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. Vygotzky, a Soviet psychologist, defined The Zone of Proximal Development to be the “distance between the most difficult task a child can do alone and the most difficult task the child can do with help.”  Children can learn on the outer edge of their Zone of Proximal Development with “scaffolding” or assistance from teachers, peers or parents.

Authoritarian vs. Permissive Feeding: Finding the Middle Ground

We know being authoritarian with feeding, putting pressure on children to eat a certain amount or certain foods, doesn’t help children expand their variety, and often backfires. An example of this is telling a child that they “must clean their plate.” The opposite of an authoritarian feeding style, as described by Ellyn Satter, is a permissive one. A permissive feeding style may be short order cooking or allowing a child to eat anytime, anywhere. It’s common, when a parent is concerned about their child’s eating, that they go back and forth between these two approaches. Although it’s a natural reaction to being worried about a child’s eating, engaging in these two feeding styles doesn’t support the child in progressing in their eating. As parents, it’s important to provide the structure, or “scaffolding,” so that the child can expand their eating skills.

Structure or “Scaffolding” to Support Your Child

Here are some examples of how a parent provides structure or as Vygotsky would call it “scaffolding” with food:

• Establishing timing of meals and snacks so that the child arrives at meal and snack times hungry, but not starving.  
• Deciding what is offered at meals and snacks, and not short order cooking.
• Offering avenues to try new foods – a familiar sauce or dip for the child to have with a less familiar food.
• Providing a child an opportunity to explore a food in different ways. This may include smelling it, licking it, kissing it, rubbing it on their lips and allowing them to spit it out, if they choose. If this isn’t accepted meal time behavior, you could experiment at a non-eating time.
• Decreasing anxiety at meal time by allowing a child to serve their own plate and having a familiar food on the table.
• Serving combination meals, like a taco bowl or salad, “deconstructed” so that the child can try the meal with he ingredients of their choosing.

• Not always serving the item “made to order.” For example, a child may prefer cheese quesadillas, but one night you may decide to put black beans or some chicken in everyone’s quesadilla. Or making a pizza for the whole family and having the child “pick off” what they choose not to eat.
• When out to eat, asking a child to pick something unique to the restaurant, rather than defaulting to the kids menu of acceptable foods. For example, picking a Chinese dish at a Chinese restaurant, rather than mac ‘n cheese.
• Asking a child to help you prepare an unfamiliar food.
• Preparing an unfamiliar food in a familiar way. For example, serving breaded fish sticks, as a bridge to eating fish in other ways.

“The Ask”- What Can Your Child Handle?

When I talked with Marsha a few weeks ago, I heard her say several times that “the ask” needed to not be too big.  “The ask” would be really big for me if someone asked me to have a grasshopper taco, but I could have a taco with a small piece of grasshopper inside. That’s a smaller “ask.” There is a way to support and “ask” our children to try new things and this must look different for each child so it doesn’t feel like pressure.  Permissive feeding may be not ever asking and authoritarian feeding may be having a “big ask” with lots of pressure.

“The ask” may not be saying “Will you please eat the hamburger?” The ask may be having the child tolerate the hamburger on the table or plate. Or, “the ask” may be suggesting without pressure, they have a very small piece of burger in their bun and see what that’s like. Or, suggesting or modeling for the child to take the hamburger out of the bun and dipping it in ketchup (if ketchup is familiar and accepted).  When we say not to pressure a child, it doesn’t mean not to support the child in their eating. The structure and “scaffolding” is very important for the child to be able to learn on the outer edge of their Proximal Zone of Development.

Look for Marsha Dunn Klein’s book that she is currently working on titled Anxious Eaters.