What Preschool Teachers Want YOU to Know

Stop sending in so much food.

A few weeks ago I conducted a workshop at a daycare/preschool center in NJ where parents pack their children's food. What did the teachers there have to say? 

1. Parents send in too much food.
2. Parents send in too much snack food like pretzels and crackers.
3. Parents wonder why their children aren't eating their vegetables. 
4. Parents think teachers should monitor what the children eat better.

Imagine, a small child sitting down to lunch. He pulls out 5, 6, even 7 containers. Most contain preferred foods like crackers, pretzels and cookies. One has a sandwich. One contains carrots.

How, these teachers wonder, are they supposed to make sure this child eats at least a few bites of the sandwich and some of the carrots? Because when the parent comes to pick her child up, that's what she's going to want to know: 

• Did he eat the sandwich and carrots? Or, more likely...
• How come my son ate his crackers but not his sandwich?

Don't think this is a phenomenon limited to this one daycare/preschool center. Everytime I talk to preschool teachers I hear the same complaints.

And so teachers resort to the bribing, bartering and cajoling that parents use: You have to eat at least a bite of your sandwich before you can have your cookies.

(Don't know why that's a failed strategy? Read Wheelin' & Dealin': 10 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Trade Peas for Pie.)

Here's something to consider: Providing too much food actually encourages children to be picky. They never have to consider eating anything they don't want at any given moment. 

In my experience, many parents are guilty of sending their preschoolers off in the morning with too much food. In fact, the pickier the child the more likely parents are to overpack. It's a strategy that backfires.

• Here's the logic: "I never know what Sally will eat so I pack a lot of choices to make sure she has something she wants."  But...
• When parents pack lots of snacks (crackers, sweetened yogurts, juices) there is no reason for your toddler to eat the healthy stuff.

Packing too much food sets your child up to fail.

It sets up a bad dynamic for the preschool teachers. And, it also teaches your child to fear hunger. Read The Upside of Hunger.

Children need time and incentive to considering eating right. Read: Let Your Kids Sit with Their Own Struggles.

Send your child to daycare or preschool with a reasonable amount of food.

And your child will be more likely to eat (at least some of) everything you send--the healthy stuff included.

You'll also be making your child's teacher's life a little easier.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

Preschool and Pop Tarts

You've grown a great eater...until he lands in daycare or preschool.

That's what happened to Michelle's son. He was a shopping cart-riding/broccoli-gnawing tot until he got to preschool where he was exposed to Goldfish crackers, gummy candy, and some sort of birthday treat from a classmate nearly every week.

And to Courtney's son. He was an eating champ until he got to daycare where they served him cafeteria food like macaroni and cheese, corn dogs, and even Pop Tarts for snacks.

What can you do?

You can become an advocate for change. You can also use this as an opportunity to teach your child how to live in a world dominated by this stuff.

There isn’t anything your children need to understand about eating right that can’t be presented in child-sized nuggets.

No child is too young to learn how to handle sweets and treats. But you can't teach this stuff just by limiting the junk. You've got to talk to your kids too.

Talk to your child about proportion.

Proportion is easy to explain: We eat some foods more often than other foods.

And, there's room in the diet for everything. Including Pop Tarts—which I still eat once a year or so when I'm in the mood to taste my childhood!

Here's a sample dialogue.

• Mary: The food you eat at daycare is pretty tasty, isn’t it?
• Bob: Yeah, I love it.
• Mary: I love that kind of food too. But you know what? It’s not the healthiest food.
• Bob: It’s not?
• Mary: No. Remember how I always say that we have to eat things like fruits and vegetables more often than we eat hot dogs, noodles, and cookies?
• Bob: Yeah.
• Mary: Well, because you eat all that Fun and Treat Food during the day, we have to be extra careful to eat Growing Food at home. That’s why I am always going to offer you things like apples and pears for snack when you get home from school. You don’t have to eat the snack, but there won’t be food again until dinner. Okay?
• Bob: Okay, but I don’t like pears. They’re mushy.
• Mary: I didn’t know you don’t like pears. Thanks for telling me. This must be a new thing because you liked pears last week. Let’s make up a list of the fruit you like right now and I’ll make sure to include those items in our Rotation Rule. Okay?
• Bob: Okay.
• Mary: But remember, I’m going to keep serving pears from time-to-time. I like them and you never know when you might want to start eating them again.

Don't know about Growing Food, Fun Food and Treat Food? Read Slackers Rule. Or what the Rotation Rule is? Read End Picky Eating with The Rotation Rule.

Some lessons can’t be learned by structure alone. They need explanation.

Imagine walking into your child’s classroom to find the teacher handing each child a book. Afterwards, you watch the teacher sit down in her chair, open her book, and start reading quietly to herself. 

It wouldn’t take long before the children figured out what they were supposed to do: open their books and start reading. 

So far the teacher’s actions seem reasonable. They also seem perfectly adequate: the children have all the information they need to figure out what they’re supposed to do.

Now imagine that the children don’t know how to read. Do you still think the teacher’s actions seem adequate? Probably not. Some lessons need active instruction.

If you’re worried that having this kind of conversation with a young child would make him feel bad about his daycare center...

As if you’re somehow putting them down or accusing them of serving unhealthy food, you could add something like:

• “Every family eats differently and your teachers have to make sure they serve something that everyone likes.” Or, 
• “Your teachers know that kids like to eat Fun and Treat Foods with their friends. But we can’t eat these foods all the time.”

The key to authoritative parenting is blending a solid structure and firm discipline with warmth and compassion.

That’s why talking to your children is so crucial. It’s where the warmth and compassion come in.

During these conversations you not only get to explain your thinking to your children, but your kids get to explain their thinking to you.

For more on this topic, read When School Nutrition Stinks.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

Kids Reject New School Lunches: Surprise, Surprise.

Kids hate the new school lunch program. Or at least enough kids are being vocal about hating the changes to cause concern.

You've probably seen (or at least heard about) the video made by Kansas kids who claim to be starving.

I hope you've seen Jon Stewart's hilarious response to the situation. The gist of it is this: If you're hungry, eat!

My response to the situation has been somewhat tamer, and a lot less entertaining.

In Eat Like a Linebacker, Get Fat Like a Likebacker on The Huffington Post, I argue that the feeling that kids need more food isn't restricted to the Kansas kids.

Americans are consumed with calories. But when it comes to kids, the relationship is backwards: Instead of worrying that kids are eating too many calories, we worry that kids aren't eating enough.

In fact, I recently conducted an Internet survey in preparation for my new online classes—which start on Monday, by the way—and topping the list of parental concerns was getting kids to eat more food, especially getting them to eat more fruits and vegetables.

Register for the first online class. It's FREE and you'll never have to utter the words, "Just try it, and if you don't like it you don't have to eat it."

We shouldn't be surprised that when we spend the first years of our kids' lives telling them to eat more that they have to spend the rest of their lives figuring out how to eat less.

I've made the argument before that our culture of nutrition is part of the reason parents inadvertently teach their kids to overeat: The pressure to get the right nutrients into kids is enormous, and because there's no way of measuring nutrient consumption, parents feel compelled to push ever more food into their kids'' mouths. Pediatricians even sometimes make the situation worse.

Then, in Teaching Kids to Hate the Healthy Stuff, posted on Psychology Today, I argue:

If we ever needed proof that nutrition isn’t the right paradigm for teaching kids to eat right, here it is. After years of accepting school lunches that are laden with sugar, salt and fat because they contain just enough of the right nutrients—chicken nuggets=protein, chocolate milk=calcium, pizza=vegetables—schools are trying to change the way kids eat. The kids aren’t having it, and I’m not surprised.

We can't feed to our kids' taste preferences, exposing kids to a certain type of eating experience, and then expect them to accept change without at least a bit of a backlash. 

Our goal has to change from "getting" nutrients into kids—a coercive way of thinking about the job at best—to teaching kids how to eat right.

Get the tools you need in my new ONLINE courses, starting Monday October 15th. (Have I plugged them enough?)

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~