Reflective Mealtime Practices

How reflective mealtime practices support children’s wellbeing 

Early childhood (ages 2-5 years) is recognised as a window of opportunity to support 

children to develop a positive relationship with food and a trusted relationship with their body [1,2]. Learning to eat a variety of foods is a skill built over time and each child learns at their own pace. 

Positive and developmentally-appropriate food experiences support children to learn to eat and develop a trusted relationship with food [2, 3].

While each person’s relationship with food is unique, a trusted relationship with food generally looks like [2, 4]:

• Having positive attitudes about food and eating (no guilt or negative emotions).
• Food acceptance including feeling comfortable with food, flexible with food choices and able to learn to like new foods overtime.
• Eating by listening and responding to your body’s cues around hunger, satiety and what it needs in that moment.

Our BHN Health Promotion team works alongside educators and families to support food environments at Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services (e.g. kindergartens and long daycare). Senior Health Promotion Officer Amie Bast, and Health Promotion Officer Kayla Di Maio, guide services and families through a whole-of-service approach which recognises the importance of food environments in influencing children’s life-long relationship with food and their bodies. 

Through the Mealtime Expectations project, Amie and Kayla support services to engage in deep reflective practice, culminating in a co-design session where shared values are developed to align professional practice and mealtime environments across the ECEC service and home. The deep reflective practice provides time and space to reflect on the deeply held belief systems and experiences that inform practices.  

“I was made to finish what was on my plate” or “If I didn’t finish my dinner, there was no dessert” are stories that are frequently told and then replicated in parenting or professional practice at the ECEC service. This might look like pressure or prompting children to eat, policing the order in which children can eat, or monitoring food consumption. Evidence highlights that these restrictive feeding practices and higher parental control, pressure and restriction are directly associated with higher rates of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and compensatory behaviors in adolescence and young adulthood [5].  

These are the cycles that Amie and Kayla are actively working to shift.

A positive mealtime environment should be guided by responsive feeding practices [6]. The Division of Responsibility (DoR) in feeding is a recognised approach to support children to be confident and competent eaters. This approach encourages the adult to take leadership with the what, when and where of feeding, while the child is responsible for determining how much and if they will eat at all out of the food that is offered (note, this includes offering a variety of all foods) [1].

To support your child in having a trusted relationship with food and build a supportive food environment at home, it can help to remember the following: 

• Mealtimes don’t always go ‘well’. Sometimes there is a lot of discomfort. It is ok to sit in this discomfort and lower the expectations of yourself or the child/ren when things don’t go well. 
• Mealtimes include breakfast, lunch, or dinner, both weeknights and on the weekend. Practicing new routines or mealtimes does not have to happen after a long day when everyone is tired. Focus on breakfast or lunch on the weekend to start. 
• Children’s food preferences change over time and they require between 30–60 exposures to a new food before it becomes an accepted food (maybe even more, and maybe it will never be accepted).  
• Be patient with change. Keep offering opportunities to eat, free from pressure, prompting or bribery.  

To find an ECEC service that will support your child in having a trusted relationship with food, it is important to be mindful of potential ‘red flags’ that may require a further conversation: 

• The service promoting or advertising ‘sugar-in-food displays’. These are visual tools that illustrate the amount of sugar contained in common foods and drinks, often by presenting the equivalent quantity of sugar alongside the product. These displays can lead to moral value placed on common food items. 
• Outdated health information like the Food Pyramid. 
• Negative or binary framing of foods within policies. This may look like “limit discretionary foods” or “teach children about ‘sometimes’ food”. 
• Rigid lists of what food to bring into the service and what not to bring, except when this is in relation to allergies.  
• Reputation as a ‘strict with food service”. 

When to seek help 

A child’s relationship with food may be influenced by more factors than acknowledged within this piece, and your child may need individualised support. Better Health Network offers a range of allied health care services who can provide help and support to your child and family. Speak with our Service Access team to find out who is best placed to support you and your child.   

Click here to access our services or call us on 132 246 (132 BHN) 

References: 

[1] Ellyn Satter Institute from: https://www.ellynsatterinstitute.org/ 

[2] Satter E. (2007). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneb.2007.01.006 

[3] Mura Paroche et al. (2017). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01046 

[4] Butterfly Foundation. Health not weight. 

[5] Loth, K. A., MacLehose, R. F., Fulkerson, J. A., Crow, S., & Neumark‐Sztainer, D. (2014). Are food restriction and pressure‐to‐eat parenting practices associated with adolescent disordered eating behaviors?. International Journal of Eating Disorders, 47(3), 310-314. 

[6] Byrne, R., Baxter, J., Davidson, Z., Irvine, V., Vidgen, H., & Gallegos, D. (2024). “For me it’s just the conversation: Responsive-feeding influences among early-childhood educators.” Public Health Nutrition. doi:10.1017/S1368980024001885