A specialist children’s dietician and feeding therapist has called on parents to abandon a common tactic used to get picky eaters to finish their meals.
Lucy Upton provides guidance about positive eating habits and nutrition in children. She also shares wholesome recipes and parenting tips online, including how to incorporate more veggies into kids’ diets.
In her widely-viewed TikTok clips, she focuses on the challenges of dealing with fussy eaters. One video sheds light on verbal encouragement missteps, suggesting that phrases like ‘one more bite’ or ‘just try it for mummy’ should be avoided.
Lucy elaborated: “One: ultimately it is pressure to eat and children tend to respond the opposite way when we over encourage or pressurise them to eat even in a positive way so back off. You will often find when you stop adding layers of expectational pressure children eat better.
“Two: you are telling your child to ignore their internal feelings of hunger and fullness. In reality, we want children to listen to their bodies whether they’ve had one bite or a whole plateful.
“Ultimately, they should be listening to their own appetite, we want them to keep doing that and three tends to be that children who feel pressured around meal times or over encourage tend not to enjoy meal times that much and if we’re all honest as parents, including me, we want our kids to come to the table and enjoy meal times and enjoy their food.”
Lucy’s TikTok video had racked up 122,900 views and 1,308 likes at the time of writing, as well as a flurry of comments. In her post, she expressed understanding for the “temptation to encourage your children to eat at mealtimes,” acknowledging that making sure children are “well-fed with full tummies feels like parental instinct.”
She confessed that it’s easy for many parents, herself included, to “fall into the trap of over encouraging with lots of phrases like ‘just take one bite’, ‘three more bites and we’re done’ etc.”
The paediatric dietitian emphasised that such phrases “are perceived as pressure by our kids and we may be asking them to do something they quite simply don’t want to do or feel like doing.”
Lucy continued: “Pressure around food and meal times is also shown repeatedly both in the literature and across the 15 years of practice I’ve seen to actually increase reluctance to eat foods at meal times and also reduce meal time enjoyment for children. So if you have a picky or selective eater, if you do just one thing this week I’d encourage you to stop any over encouragement, lower expectations and focus on positive ways to create calm connection at meal times without talking about the food!”
She added that for children who have additional mental or developmental diagnosis, personalised advice would be more appropriate due to varying needs. . Following Lucy’s TikTok video on child eating habits, parents flooded her post with comments seeking further insights while others discussed their personal battles with food.
One person commented: “As a 34 year old, I feel so guilty about leaving food on my plate cos I was always made to finish my meal even if not hungry. Now I struggle with my weight and overeating.”
Another queried: “What’s specifically wrong with the ‘one more bite’ please?” To which Lucy responded: “I guess the question is to think about who should decide how much a child eats? Most would agree the child, as you wouldn’t expect to be told how much you had to eat.”
One parent asked: “So should I just ignore mealtimes and give her food when she asks? At mealtimes she has a few bites and then runs off, then asks for food 30 minutes later.”
In response, Lucy advised: “So I wouldn’t ignore mealtimes as such, I would have clear routine of meal and snack times (avoiding grazing as a general rule) and make sure there’s 1-2 accepted foods (she normally eats) at mealtimes.”