and parents. Penny Tassoni looks at the key issues and suggests some
ways of addressing them.
The desire to eat and drink is instinctive. After all, food and hydration are needed for survival. In view of this, it is interesting that mealtimes can prove tricky for parents and indeed for some early years settings. In order to support parents with mealtimes, it is worth exploring some of the issues involved.
AN EMOTIONAL SITUATION
One of the reasons that mealtimes can be tricky is because they can quickly become packed full of emotion. Most parents are primed to ensure the survival of their children and as part of this package to nourish them.
This means that emotions can easily run high when a child refuses to try food or appears not to have eaten enough. This, in turn, can lead to situations when parents offer alternative foods that they know the child will eat, or to force the child to eat up.
Of course, neither of these situations is helpful in the longer term. The former means that some children eat only a restricted range of foods, while the latter means that chil- dren associate food and mealtimes with stress.
Quantity
A spin-off from the high emotion linked to food is the amount that some parents feel compelled to give their children. Many early years settings report that where children bring in packed lunches, there is a tendency for some parents to provide enough food for an expedition to the Himalayas. This leads to parents querying why their children have not finished everything and can put pressure on staff to coax children who aren't hungry to eat.
As quantity of food is closely linked to calorie intake and therefore excessive weight gain, this is something that we might need to help parents with. One strategy worth considering is to put out sample packed lunch boxes or sample plates of food for different age ranges. Seeing just how little young children actually need can come as a surprise for some parents - half a banana, for example, rather than a whole one, or a single sandwich made of one round of bread rather than six sandwiches.
As we currently live in an age where child obesity is a huge concern, there are plenty of resources around to help you guide parents. Of particular note are the pictorial resources available from the Children's Food Trust and also the Caroline Walker Trust that 'show' how much food children need (see www.childrensfoodtrust.org.uk and www.cwt.org.uk).
Fussy eaters
While some 'fussy' eating can be cured by simply putting less on a plate, it can make mealtimes a battle ground for some parents. There are some tricks of the trade that we might share with parents who are becoming frustrated with their offspring. These include encouraging children in the preparation of foods, allowing children to self-serve and, crucially, staying calm when a child is not interested.
We can also make sure that we are providing a wide range of different tastes and textures in our settings, as quite often children will be bolder when they are in a different environment, especially when they are part of a group.
We also know that some flavours are acquired over time, and so by encouraging children when they are with us to repeatedly taste tiny amounts of whatever is proving problematic at home, we may be able to help parents out.
Time and place
One of the recent cultural changes for some families is the move away from mealtimes at a table to eating in front of a screen. This has many knock-on effects.
The opportunities for children to experience a social, sharing occasion have become sparser and some children are losing out on opportunities for social interaction. It also means that some children are not developing 'cutlery' skills.
While we can advise parents of the many benefits of a sit-down mealtime, we can help children by really focusing on mealtimes and snacktimes. For some settings, this might mean revisiting the trend towards 'rolling snacktimes', where children can eat by themselves. A return to the wholesale group snack is to be avoided, but there is a case for small family-sized groups of children sharing food together, with an adult.
Skills and spills
Finally, it is worth carrying out an a 'mealtime' audit that looks at how well your setting supports healthy eating, as well as to what extent learning opportunities emanating from mealtimes are being taken up and - of course - shared with parents.
Helping parents to understand the benefits of mealtimes is important because parents tend to focus on the food element rather than on the many skills, including interaction, that are on offer. Photographs with captions about what children are learning can be effective, but also film clips that show parents their children managing to pour their own drinks or using cutlery work well. By engaging with parents in this way, we show not only how we value their children, but also how we value mealtimes.