When you’re feeling a bit down, or bored, do you ever grab yourself a treat as a little pick-me-up? If you said yes, then you’re engaging in emotional eating. Have you ever wondered how you began this habit? It’s actually something you may have learned before you could even speak...
If you want to help baby develop a positive and healthy relationship with food, it’s best to start as soon as you can. Once you learn a little about food parenting practices and the role you can take in shaping your child’s emotional development, you’ll be able to set your child up for a lifetime of success.
Emotional eating is when people eat food to deal with their feelings instead of eating to satisfy hunger. This can cause issues as eating when you aren’t hungry increases the risk of developing eating disorders and obesity, especially if this habit is formed as a baby.
Emotional eating is often influenced by the home environment and the food parenting practice that parents use to teach baby about food.
Instrumental food parenting, for example, is where parents use food to regulate baby’s emotions. When a temper tantrum flares up, parents might give a treat to make baby happy again. Of course, this lays the groundwork for emotional eating which can lead to childhood obesity.
Non-responsive food parenting is where parents do not respond to hunger cues at all. A baby then develops feelings of desperation around food. When food is finally provided, the baby is more likely to lose control and overeat as they’re unsure when the next meal is coming.
Even responsive food parenting can lead to emotional eating if not done properly. Some parents may respond to what they think is a hunger cue, but is actually a cue for emotional eating.
During the first year of life, your baby is changing and developing in many ways. They grow physically, experience social and emotional growth, and have changing eating patterns.
Babies learn about food through direct experiences, including playing with food and observing the eating habits of those around them. That means parents play a big role in establishing long-term eating behaviors. Parents can model healthy dietary choices for the whole family and can use their feeding practices to reinforce good eating patterns and behaviors.
Without learning positive food behaviors early on, your baby could learn to reach for food when they’re feeling emotions like:
Emotional eating increases the risk of developing eating disorders like binge eating. Binge eating involves regularly consumption of unusually large amounts of food with the feeling you are unable to stop eating. This disorder leads to difficulties with continuous weight gain and challenges with weight loss.
It’s not always easy to tell if baby is eating for the right reasons. Learning the signs of physical hunger and emotional hunger can help you respond appropriately.
When baby has physical hunger:
When your baby has emotional hunger:
Right from birth, you can play a big part in ensuring your baby makes healthy food choices and continues to do so for the rest of their life. One of the main ways you can do this is to develop a diplomatic food parenting style.
This feeding style promotes your baby’s independent thinking and learning about their own appetite regulation. As a parent, you focus on what will be served, when it will happen and where. You set the boundaries for mealtimes but your child still has the freedom to choose if they want to eat what you’ve provided, and how much.
You can also use the following techniques to prevent emotional eating:
Avoid providing food for anything other than hunger, e.g. to alleviate boredom, conflict, calm frazzled nerves etc.
Minimize distractions (television, games, pets, siblings) during mealtimes to allow baby to focus on their own hunger and fullness cue
There are many ways to deal with emotions, but emotional eating doesn’t have to be one! Because emotional eating is a learned behavior, developing a positive and healthy relationship with food through food parenting practices will help you raise a happy and healthy baby.
Disclaimer: The information provided is the opinion of Good Feeding, it has not been evaluated by healthcare professionals, and is for educational purposes only. Before starting any new foods or feeding practices, please consult your baby's healthcare professional.
As parents, we all want to do what's best for our babies, infants, and children. So, it can be more than a little concerning with the news that our family's youngest members could be at risk from the very thing meant to nurture us all – food.
4 months of age signals the start of an exciting window of opportunity, that if taken advantage of has the ability to not only transform your parenting journey (and family mealtimes) going forward, but more importantly, your child’s health and wellness potentials for life. 4 months marks the important opportunity to start ‘Flavour Training’!
In the medical community, there's a clear consensus on when infants should begin complementary feeding: at 6 months old. But despite the AAP, ACOG, AAFP and WHO recommendations being very clear about this timeline, parents often start much earlier.
The primary reason that official guidelines push for this 6 month mark is that very early introduction of complementary foods has been shown to reduce breastfeeding's overall duration. The medical community also holds concerns that introducing solids prior to the age of 6 months could increase the risk of choking and aspiration, lead to diarrhea and poor gut health and contribute to the onset of certain chronic diseases later in life, including diabetes and celiac disease.
So why is there so much confusion over this?
Starting solids poses such a challenge because we’re not only trying to sort through all of the available information and opinions on the topic, but also fit a brand new feeding and food preparation routine into our already busy lives. And, in the hustle to get this done, we often forget the most important element of introducing our children to food: Helping them foster a healthy relationship with food for life.