Feeding is Parenting: What is Your Parenting Style?
By Anna Lutz, MPH, RD, LDN, CEDRD-S
There is so much information out there about feeding children! A lot of parenting advice, sadly, is influenced by diet culture. This can leave parents feeling confused, shameful, and fearful, at times, when it comes to what and how their children eat.
As a parent, it’s hard to sort out the most accurate and helpful information about how to approach food in your home. Something to consider is your own parenting style and how it aligns with how you parent with food.
Because of diet culture’s influence on how we feed our children, it’s not uncommon for a parent to approach food in a way that is different from their own parenting style.
3 Parenting Styles
You have probably heard or read about different parenting styles. 3 common ones discussed in research are authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive.
Authoritarian:
Parents with an authoritarian parenting style tend to have more rules, and there’s more one-way communication from the parents to the child.
Authoritative:
Parents who parent with an authoritative parenting style tend to be more nurturing and supportive. They set firm limits and boundaries, but are also responsive to the communication from the child.
Permissive:
The permissive parent is thought of as being warm and nurturing, yet they have few rules or boundaries. The children tend to be in charge of the decisions.
Feeding from an authoritative perspective is a way to support your child in developing the skill of feeding themself in a way that is nurturing and honors your child's abilities.
Diet culture is authoritative by definition
When it comes to diet culture, there are wrong and right ways to do things and wrong and right ways to have a body. There is one-way communication between the rules of a diet and the dieter’s body. The information coming from a person’s body about what or how much they need or want to eat is not considered. Your needs and desires aren’t taken into account in diet culture.
Diet culture has influenced all aspects of our culture, including medicine, education, and parenting. So, it’s really common and understandable that how we feed our children is influenced by diet culture and that our feeding at times may be authoritarian.
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. Examples of this are telling a child that they “must clean their plate” or deciding how much they are allowed to eat.
In contrast, a parent using a permissive feeding style may be short-order cooking or allowing a child to eat anytime, anywhere.
Neither of these approaches has been shown to help a child expand their variety or listen to the signals of their body regarding hunger and fullness. It’s common, when a parent is concerned about their child’s eating, to go back and forth between these two approaches.
Although it’s a natural reaction to be 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 boundaries so that the child can expand their eating skills.
Authoritative Parenting Supports Raising Competent and Confident Eaters
We know from research that parents who feed their children in an authoritative way raise children who are “competent eaters” (a term developed by Ellyn Satter) and are better able to feed themselves in ways that support confidence, flexibility, and health.
Feeding a child in an authoritative way takes into account the information you have as a parent. For example, what your schedule is, what food is available, and what a balanced meal looks like. And then allows your child to listen to their own body by deciding what and how much they will eat.
Feeding from an authoritative perspective is a way to support your child in developing the skill of feeding themself in a way that is nurturing and honors your child’s abilities
Examples of Feeding with an Authoritative Parenting Style:
- Establish regular, yet flexible, meal and snack times with the goal of your child arriving at meal and snack times hungry, but not starving.
- Decide what is offered at meals and snacks.
- Allow your child to decide how much and what they eat of the items offered.
- Offer all types of food at different meals and snacks, including desserts.
- Don’t talk about food in terms of “good” or “bad”.
- Provide a child with opportunities to explore foods 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 appropriate meal time behavior, you could experiment at a non-eating time.
- Decrease anxiety at meal time by allowing a child to serve their own plate and by having a safe, familiar food on the table.
- Offer different avenues to try new foods. For example, offer a familiar sauce or dip for the child to have with a less familiar food.
- Serve combination meals, like a taco bowl or salad, “deconstructed” so that your child can try the meal with the ingredients of their choosing.
- Experiment with 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, you may decide your child does best with being exposed to beans or chicken on the side.
- Without pressure, invite your child to help you prepare an unfamiliar food.
- Prepare an unfamiliar food in a familiar way. For example, serve breaded fish sticks as a bridge to eating fish in other ways.
Responsive feeding is a term that is congruent with an authoritative parenting style and is based on the idea that feeding is a conversation between a caregiver and a child.
If we ignore what our child is telling us with their eating (or not eating), we will end up pressuring or forcing them to eat. We know pressure doesn’t help children learn to eat well in the long run. Or, in contrast, we may end up being too permissive and not helping our child develop their eating skills.
Looking for more information and support about feeding children and family nutrition? Check out our parent resources, recipes, podcast, and Anti-Diet Parenting Course (Coming Soon!) at Sunny Side Up Nutrition.
Anna (she/her) specializes in eating disorders and pediatric/family nutrition. Anna received her Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Duke University and Master of Public Health in Nutrition from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a Certified Eating Disorders Specialist (CEDS) and an Approved Supervisor, both through the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals (iaedp). Anna serves on the board of Carolina Resource Center for Eating Disorders and is a Content Expert with NCEED. Previously, she worked at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC and Duke University Student Health, treating individuals with eating disorders. She has completed extensive training through the Embodied Recovery Institute and strives to provide her clients trauma and somatically informed care. Anna delivers workshops and presentations on eating disorders, weight-inclusive healthcare, and childhood feeding. She also writes and talks about nutrition and family feeding, free of diet culture, on her blog, Sunny Side Up Nutrition, and her podcast, Sunny Side Up Nutrition Podcast. Anna sees clients and provides clinical supervision in our Raleigh office and via telehealth.
Spread the word
Medical Disclaimer: All content found on the HER Health Collective Website was created for informational purposes only and are the opinions of the HER Health Collective experts and professional contributors. The Content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health providers with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read on this Website. If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor, go to the emergency department, or call 911 immediately.
