No Thought for Food

(This piece was written in 2022)

Before children are old enough to be recruited for school, feeding is generally the largest source of coercion in their lives.

I don’t know the precise reason why parents feel that it is necessary that children be forced to eat – even parents who are otherwise largely non-coercive – and there are probably many reasons. The argument I hear most often and the one that convinced us for a brief period before we abandoned it was: ‘But he has to eat something!’

There are so many errors and false assumptions in this argument and before I go into them let me tell you how our child became a happy eater.

It started at 6 months: the age that the ‘experts’ have decided that all children have start to eating solids.
Obviously baby didn’t like what he ate (who likes tasteless food? – but a child is not a who - more on this later).

Thus started the struggle of getting baby to eat, worrying desperately whether something was wrong with him, arguing over what to feed him. Feeding time was stressful and unpleasant for us but much worse for baby who was confined to a chair, and tricked into putting things in his mouth that he didn’t like. We would try all kinds of things – dancing, singing, YouTube (which was the only thing that sort of worked but YouTube is supposedly worse than not feeding). Baby would cry and cry. ‘But he has to eat something!’

Taking this argument literally wouldn’t have been this bad – if a baby has to eat something even a few mouthfuls should be ok and the baby can be released. But parents are never satisfied with ‘something’.
The baby has to eat everything that the parents decide the baby should eat. And how do the parents decide how much the baby should eat? They fill a bowl with mush or they make two pieces of something. And the parents have decided that THIS is the amount the baby should eat. ‘One more bite baby, just one more bite. Finish the bowl.’

Why? How decided that the precise amount contained in that bowl is the right amount for the baby to eat? And you’re so sure of this that you will persist despite a crying, screaming baby? And if the bowl is not finished, is it the beginning of the end for the child? Will he starve to death? Or - as bad - will he see that the parents aren’t enforcing a rule and never again do anything good?

So if a bowl of food is not the correct amount what is the correct amount? Google wasn’t our friend here. All the usual suspects of coercive parenting say: try some other food, let the baby play with the food, don’t give in.

The most obvious answer is never provided. Who decided how much the baby should eat? The baby! Why is this so hard to accept? More on this later.

Anyway, this continued for 3 or 4 months. Foods that baby liked were avoided because these were not ‘healthy’ and he must eat this and this and this.

With some exposure to Taking Children Seriously (takingchildrenseriously.com) I tried to convince my wife to let him eat what he wants, when he wants but I was a poor proponent of the philosophy of freedom. Feeding time became a nightmare.

Finally, on a trip somewhere my wife gave up. She had had enough of seeing a crying baby reject food. She resisted her instincts to get him to finish a paratha or a bowl of sathu-maavu. Then something magical happened.

For two weeks we didnt force him at all.
Then slowly he began to point and grunt/hum at different foods. We would then offer it to him. If he didn’t like he would spit it out or shake his head.

One night we ordered in some wonderful Nagamese food in a hill-station town. Baby was crawling around babbling. It was meal time but in our new found freedom we weren’t trying to make him eat. While we ate he explored. Suddenly he saw us eating and began to ask for what we were eating. We have him bits of noodles and pork and beef. It was spicy (and we were warned off spice by the internet) but we took out chances. He kept eating.

That was a transformative moment in our life’s. My wife was finally convinced that he should eat what and when and how much he wants.

Now for the most part he eats a wide variety of foods, tried everything we offer him, rejects what he doesn’t like, eats as much as he wants. It’s been 6 months and he’s healthy – he hasn’t starved to death or become obese or ‘spoilt’. Meal times are happy, playful fun times – he makes funny faces, throws some food down because he knows the dogs eat it, he laughs. Then when he wants something else he points and asks.

But for some this is not enough: a baby should be plump. They should eat a lot of food. They should eat to satisfy the parent. Imagine being told, as an adult, that you have to eat to satisfy someone else. Imagine being forced to eat even after you don’t want to eat. I have heard of torture techniques less painful than this.

So what makes parents force-feed their children? By force I don’t mean stuffing food in their mouths – I mean feeding till the parents are satisfied.

First is the idea that children are not whole human beings. They’re kind of like pets that need to be fed and bathed and put in designated areas. Their brains aren’t developed so they don’t know what they want. They don’t know what’s good for them. So they must be forced to do things that are good for them.

Yes, they don’t know what’s good or bad for them. Neither do we fully know what’s good or bad for us. Do I know if writing his article is good or bad for me? No, I don’t. Maybe it’ll awaken the demons of my fraught relationship with writing and throw me into conflict and misery for a week. Maybe the time I spend writing it will eat away from the time I have to work on a project. Or maybe I’ll finally begin to enjoy writing again and understand why I have this urge to write. The point is I’m doing it because I think it’s worth doing – with my limited knowledge of the world. I can’t predict the future. If my wife walks in and says, ‘Don’t do it. It’s not good for you,’ I’m going to be upset. I won’t scream and cry because I have words to express my feelings.
We have to let a children do what they want even with their limited knowledge of the world just like we do.

How do you get a child to do something they don’t like but they need (for example, changing a poopy diaper or getting a vaccine)? Before they can understand sentences or reasoning, we must do our best to make the experiences as fun and painless as possible. Our baby is in a phase in which he hates getting his diapers changed. But he is also uncomfortable in his dirty diaper. So what do we do?
There are two ways and each way is a demonstration of whether you take your child seriously or not.
The first is let him or her scream and cry while you forcefully take them to the bed, pin them down, shout at them to shut up and change the diaper - this may sound like an exaggeration but it is the same as doing it gently.
The second way is to take the baby seriously. Convince your baby to let you pick them up and take them for their diaper change. Say, ‘Let’s sing ‘Baby Shark’ or ‘Old McDonald’.’ If that doesn’t work wait and try after a while. Once you put them down for the diaper change sing or talk or give them something that they like (in our baby’s case it’s currently the baby wipes box or my smart watch). Make the experience as enjoyable and fun as possible.
As he started to stand, our go-to technique became to change his diaper as he stood and watched something on his screen.

In the end, feeding is just another part of the relationship we build with our children. If we can trust them to tell us when they’re tired, excited, or in need of a hug, we can trust them to tell us when they’re hungry—and when they’ve had enough. By giving up the battle over the last bite, we make room for laughter at the table, for curiosity about new tastes, and for genuine respect to flow both ways. That, to me, feels like a far healthier nourishment than any perfectly measured bowl could ever offer.

Note: Our son is 4 now. He is healthy and very active.