Note to nutrition enthusiasts entering motherhood: It doesn’t matter what you know – your toddlers will rule the roost if you don’t have a plan.
This was my first mistake when venturing into the food battlefield with my then twin toddlers; I had assumed that because I was a registered dietitian (and a pediatric dietitian at that!) that I “had this” – piece of cake, right? Well as it turned out, there was no pixie dust to be found. In fact, heading into these tricky feeding years with assumptions and no strategy worked to the quick demise of my equally unrealistic plan of raising healthy and self-moderated children simply based on knowing what to feed them. What I wasn’t prepared for was the unrelenting battle for snacks, mealtime meltdowns and just how limited my mommy bandwidth really was. Add exhaustion from juggling a full-time job with daycare pick-ups and drop-offs into the mix and before long, I was doling out snacks around the clock, serving up ‘toddler cuisine’ and hitting the drive-thru at least once a week. No, this was not my plan nor intention, yet here I was, humbled and defeated – and slightly panicked. But it wasn’t defeat that was keeping me up at night. As an obesity researcher, I knew that while these parenting hacks (and they are hacks!) may have been making my life easier in the short-term, they were setting my boys up for habits and behaviors that would be far more difficult to change in the long-term. Knowledge in and of itself meant very little without actionable steps, and until I figured out what those steps were – I was now part of the problem.
Stopping the cycle of incessant snacking and regaining some semblance of control with my preschoolers required a little ingenuity and patience, but within a week or two, I had managed to get my boys on a daily snacking schedule and routine that involved their engagement and active participation. Dinnertime battles, while far from resolved, were better managed through strategies that fostered their autonomous and control-seeking natures that are typical in this toddler stage of development. Was it a perfect system? Absolutely not! There were good days and not-so-good days but learning to manage my own expectations was a turning point. Did I really think that my boys would graduate toddlerhood choosing broccoli over cookies? Maybe! My mindset heading into these tricky feeding years assumed a similar outcome based on nurture. But the fact is, it’s nature that is behind the wheel and governing our toddlers’ preferences, and they are biologically “hard-wired” with a preference for sugar (and colors, characters, and many other savvy food marketing lures!). Our challenge as parents and caregivers is how to navigate their biology (which – spoiler alert – is our biology, too!) in our modern, sugar-laden food environment without being overly restrictive or punitive.
The toddler years are an incredibly important period in cultivating our children’s future “adult” food preferences and eating behaviors – as crazy as this sounds! In fact, it’s not much different than learning how to read. We don’t expect our toddlers to read Huckleberry Finn at 24 months, so we set them up for future success by early exposure to books and to sounds, words, images, and stories that are delivered through an emotional engagement with their parents and caregivers. This momentum is carried throughout a lengthy period of development during which practice, patience and perseverance is required to become proficient readers.
The continuum of healthy habit building (“nutrition literacy”) is much like the continuum of reading literacy – each phase of development serves as an important step in a lengthy period of development as well, and during which practice, patience and perseverance ultimately determines the level of proficiency. Can you imagine if we dropped the ball on learning to read and just stayed with picture books because they were easier? It would eventually catch up to us because being an illiterate adult limits opportunities and quality of life. But having obesity in adulthood also limits opportunities and quality of life, and that’s because we often drop the ball on nutrition literacy early on in childhood because incessant snacking, toddler cuisine and fast-food is easier.
This realization, coupled by the insidious pitfalls that derail so many well-intended parents early into this journey, is what motivated me to bring awareness and change to the current paradigm. Let’s start a new generation of nutritionally literate kids and have some fun in the process! To learn more about our strategies and overcoming early pitfalls, check out our Children & Youth Family Action Plans on the home page!