How to stop children sneaking food
To understand why kids sneak food, you need to know why they eat anything in the first place.
Three reasons…
1. Physical satisfaction
They are hungry, tired, or have the desire to eat because their body needs nutrition and they want, probably unconsciously, to satisfy that need.
2. Emotional satisfaction.
Children eat because it makes them feel happy, or calms them down.
Isabel Foxen Duke argues that emotional eating is often feared, but emotional eating for its primary reason of facilitating emotional connection between people is an important and healthy aspect of eating. Think about food being shared and enjoyed at a party. We don’t need party food for physical satisfaction, but eating it as part of a social celebration is a healthy, emotionally satisfying activity.
Emotional eating is often feared because it’s confused with binge eating (the two are often discussed as if they are interchangeable). But where emotional eating is pleasant and satisfying for a child, binge eating is unpleasant, unsatisfying and out of control.
It begs the question, why does binge eating happen? It’s a nuanced question, but for the most part…
…Binge eating, is preceded by deprivation and or restriction. A child will binge, in other words, after they’ve felt restriction, not the other way around. If our children have limited access to a food group (perhaps we’ve placed limits on it, or food scarcity exists) our kids may find themselves sneaking, hiding, and bingeing on that food (or any food) when it becomes available to them.
Food scarcity is one of the reasons binge eating often presents in kids in lower socio-economic situations. Binge eating is also correlated to homes where food is highly controlled and some foods are banned altogether.
3. Agency satisfaction.
What does agency satisfaction even mean? It means sometimes children eat purely to exert control or agency over their lives. Eating or not eating is one of the few things parents cannot *make* their children do (barring the use of force, manipulation or coercion).
If our child is not getting enough agency over the foods they eat (choose what and how much goes in their mouth without judgement or perceived control) or over their day to day lives, they will use eating as a means of gaining control over their world.
So what does this mean for us as parents who have noticed sneaky eating in our kids?
If you think of the above three reasons children eat like a pyramid, with physical needs at the top, emotional needs in the middle and agency needs on the bottom, we need to approach feeding our kids from the bottom up. Once we know our kids have strong perceived agency over what goes in their mouth, we can help them find healthy emotional satisfaction from eating. We can create situations where the eating experience is enjoyable, calm and boosts their sense of emotional wellbeing. Once we’ve established a positive emotional environment, we can gently steer them toward making nutritional choices.
One of the reasons I am strongly against teaching nutrition in schools is that the approach often goes straight to the top of the pyramid. Teaching a child about nutrition if their agency is unsatisfied, or their emotional needs are unsatisfied, is likely to make their relationship with food worse, not better.
How can we move forward, starting at the bottom of the pyramid?
One of the most powerful places to start, is to challenge our own reasons for wanting to control what our kids eat, instead of allowing them to figure out what works well for their own unique body.
Plus, we need to stop seeing nutrition as boxed into what kids *should* and *shouldn’t* be eating. Shucking off the judgement given to parents who *allow* their kids to stray from these tight ideals is also helpful (and feels incredibly liberating – I’m excited for any parent to experience this freedom).
Emma x