Our responsive feeding manifesto

At Easy Bites, we are all about the long-term goal of raising a child who has a psychologically healthy relationship with food.

We also believe in making things practical and efficient for parents to reduce the practical and mental load of feeding.

It’s Time for a Paradigm Shift

The research behind responsive feeding started as long ago as the eighties and nineties, Now, responsive feeding is recommended by many organizations, including the American Head Start program, the American Heart Association, and the American Dietetic Association. But why don’t more people know about it? 

50-ies: be grateful for it, and keep quiet.

We could say the child-feeding paradigm of the 1950s was that children should eat all the food on their plate.

Parents are told they need to get their kids eating a varied, healthy diet, persuade them to try new foods, to eat more of what’s good for them and less of what isn’t, and this at every meal. This leads to a ‘get food down child’ mindset.

Current: control of health, body, nutrition

The ‘get food down child’ mindset often creates pressure and can become a barrier to healthy eating. Did you know that many issues around picky eating are rooted in a need for autonomy and self determination we have as kids already at a very young age?

Why change: the effects of too much control

The new paradigm: responsive feeding

Responsive feeding, the alternative to the ‘get food down child’ mindset, respects and builds on the need for autonomy in early childhood. It is based on Self-Determination theory.

Help parents feel great about feeding their children in a way that fits with the realities of daily life.

The Easy Bites Mission:

We know that a relaxed and confident parent is a happy parent. We also know that when you have worries about feeding your child, this can be super stressful and will likely really affect you; we feed our children several times a day, every day, and anxiety about how this is going can be a big deal. Whether you just want to learn more about best practice, or have a problem to solve (like ‘picky’ or ‘fussy’ eating) feeling confident and empowered is EVERYTHING.

We LOVE LOVE LOVE research evidence ❤️

We are a team of pediatric dietitians, feeding scientists, occupational therapists, and recipe authors, working based on years of working with families in our practices and using the latest research by the American Society of Pediatrics and the World Health Organization.

(evidence based) pillars to raise a confident eater.

4

Understanding your child’s eating

Understanding
typical development

Forewarned is forewarned, right? Did you know that many of the things parents fret about in relation to young children’s eating are actually typical? But if you don’t know what to expect, when things change or problems present themselves, it can really throw you.

  • As scientists have learned more about how children eat, they have highlighted different innate (inborn) characteristics that are relevant. Understanding that your child may eat in certain ways just because… they were born that way… can be very liberating. There is still lots you can do to support their eating, but some of it is simply outside your control and it really helps to recognize that. Here are just a few examples of these characteristics:

    • Your child’s sensory profile4 (how we process smell, sound, etc., makes a big difference to how we eat)

    • Your child’s temperament, particularly how emotional they are5 (how quickly and intensely they get upset compared to their peers is related to their eating)

    • Your child’s sense of taste7 (especially how they react to bitterness, which is largely down to genes)

    4 Blissett, J., & Fogel, A. (2013). Intrinsic and extrinsic influences on children’s acceptance of new foods. Physiology & Behavior, 121, 89–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2013.02.013

    5 Hafstad, G. S., Abebe, D. S., Torgersen, L., & von Soest, T. (2013). Picky eating in preschool children: The predictive role of the child’s temperament and mother’s negative affectivity. Eating Behaviors, 14(3), 274–277. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2013.04.001

Understand your child’s
food personality

You know that friend who you can 100% rely on to jump in and try the weirdest and wonderfulest novel food item at a restaurant? And the other friend who always likes to play it safe when you eat out together? Well, kids have their own food personalities too, depending on their sensory profile, temperament, sense of taste to name a few.

  • Research1 has found that many parents don’t know about how children’ eating changes as they reach the beginning of their second year of life. This is when many children hit a ‘food-neophobic’ patch (wariness of unfamiliar foods) and may gravitate towards a narrow selection of familiar foods, possibly dropping things they used to like. Other researchers2 suggested that parents may have unrealistic expectations about how children eat. Another study3 highlighted how shifts in eating due to changes in appetite as a child grows (along with how their increasing need to be independent) were poorly understood by the parents in their study.

    1 Norton, J., & Raciti, M. M. (2016). Primary caregivers of young children are unaware of food neophobia and food preference development. Health Promotion Journal of Australia, 27(2), 155–158. https://doi.org/10.1071/HE15021

    2 Fraser, K., Markides, B. R., Barrett, N., & Laws, R. (2021). Fussy eating in toddlers: A content analysis of parents’ online support seeking. Maternal & Child Nutrition, n/a(n/a), e13171. https://doi.org/10.1111/mcn.13171

    3 Tartaglia, J., McIntosh, M., Jancey, J., Scott, J., & Begley, A. (2021). Exploring Feeding Practices and Food Literacy in Parents with Young Children from Disadvantaged Areas. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(4), 1496. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18041496

Sharing Meals with your child

There are lots of reasons why it might be tricky to share meals with your child. Perhaps you want to eat very different foods? Maybe you find it too stressful, and prefer to have a ‘grown up meal’ later? Perhaps your schedule doesn’t allow it.

We get it!

Know that eating together supports kids accepting variety and reduces stressful mealtime behavior in the long run. We’ll help you make the transition.

  • Eating together as a family helps children eat more fruit and vegetables6 (please note: a family meal can just be a single parent eating with their child - it’s about connection and presence, not recreating a scene from ‘The Waltons’). Other research7 found that families who eat together more frequently experience less difficult mealtime behavior; eating together isn’t just beneficial because of what children eat, it helps with how they eat too!

    The Easy Bites app will help you find ways to make eating together as a family work for you, even when you have different food preferences or your child is a picky eater.

    6 Christian, M. S., Evans, C. E., Hancock, N., Nykjaer, C., & Cade, J. E. (2013). Family meals can help children reach their 5 A Day: a cross-sectional survey of children's dietary intake from London primary schools. J Epidemiol Community Health, 67(4), 332-338.

    7 Berge, J. M., Draxten, M., Trofholz, A., Hanson-Bradley, C., Justesen, K., & Slattengren, A. (2018). Similarities and differences between families who have frequent and infrequent family meals: A qualitative investigation of low-income and minority households. Eating behaviors, 29, 99-106.

Using responsive feeding

Research associates responsive feeding with lower levels of picky eating and greater enjoyment of food. So what is it? Responsive feeding is centered on attunement to (and respect for) children’s sense of their own appetite. And there is more to it than just the control element: Responsive feeding is also characterised by parents creating a clear structure around meals in terms of when and where they happen, as well as a focus on making meals about connection and togetherness.

  • Wow - where to even start with this! There are just so many benefits of responsive feeding. It’s associated with lower levels of picky eating and greater enjoyment of food8 and it supports weight regulation in young children9 . Similarly, non-responsive feeding has been linked to young children’s emotional eating10 . Where picky eating is an issue, research11 suggests that battles may ensue, parents may become upset and feed non-responsively (trying to control what the child eats), which potentially makes the child’s diet worse. For us, there is no question about it; responsive feeding is the route to giving children a positive relationship with food that will last a lifetime.

    8 Finnane, J. M., Jansen, E., Mallan, K. M., & Daniels, L. A. (2017). Mealtime structure and responsive feeding practices are associated with less food fussiness and more food enjoyment in children. Journal of nutrition education and behavior, 49(1), 11-18.

    9 Hurley, K. M., Cross, M. B., & Hughes, S. O. (2011). A systematic review of responsive feeding and child obesity in high-income countries. The Journal of nutrition, 141(3), 495-501.

    10 Mallan, K., & Miller, N. (2019). Effect of parental feeding practices (ie, responsive feeding) on children's eating behavior. Nurturing a Healthy Generation of Children: Research Gaps and Opportunities, 91, 21-30.

    11 Harris, H. A., Ria-Searle, B., Jansen, E., & Thorpe, K. (2018). What’s the fuss about? Parent presentations of fussy eating to a parenting support helpline. Public Health Nutrition, 21(8), 1520-1528.

Feeling good about your food parenting

It really is essential that, as a parent, you can be confident and positive about your parenting. Research shows how this parenting confidence translates into the rest of your life too; you need to feel that you have all the tools in your toolbox that you need. That isn’t to say you won’t have days where it all gets a bit much - all parents are ultimately just doing their best and feeling their way through.

  • Parenting researchers talk about ‘self-efficacy’ - this is a concept that came from education research back in the 1970s12 and it refers to a sense of being able to ‘succeed’ in the parenting role13 . There is evidence that parents who feel that their feeding strategies are effective are more likely to experience positive emotions, whereas parents with children who are seen as difficult to feed are more likely to experience negative emotions14 . We also know that parents’ emotional reactions to how their children eat may impact their wider sense of self-efficacy15 , so this stuff really matters! Still more research has shown that parental self-efficacy has been linked to children eating more vegetables and less maternal distress in relation to feeding16 ; if you feel confident about feeding your child this will benefit them AND you.

    12 Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191

    13 Wittkowski, A., Garrett, C., Calam, R., & Weisberg, D. (2017). Self-Report Measures of Parental Self-Efficacy: A Systematic Review of the Current Literature. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 26(11), 2960–2978. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-017-0830-5

    14 Hughes, S., & Shewchuk, R. M. (2012). Child temperament, parent emotions, and perceptions of the child’s feeding experience. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity,

    15 Wolstenholme, H., Kelly, C., Hennessy, M., & Heary, C. (2020). Childhood fussy/picky eating behaviours: A systematic review and synthesis of qualitative studies. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 17(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-019-0899-x

    16 Koh, G. A., Scott, J. A., Woodman, R. J., Kim, S. W., Daniels, L. A., & Magarey, A. M. (2014). Maternal feeding self-efficacy and fruit and vegetable intakes in infants. Results from the SAIDI study. Appetite, 81, 44–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2014.06.008

Last but not least: parents are not to blame!

One thing we will fight to the death for, is our belief that parents shouldn’t be blamed for any problems they may have with feeding their child. Yes, we have lots of advice on what parents can do to make things better and how you can help your child by introducing responsive feeding to your home. Does this mean if things have gone off-track, you have done something wrong? No! Parents are doing the best they can with the information they have. Sadly, that information isn’t always great quality and there is a huge issue with parents not being able to get hold of good quality advice. Which is where we come in.

Feeding children is so many things. Joyful (occasionally) messy (mostly) frustrating (sometimes). Whatever mealtimes feel like in your house, we have your back -  with our four pillars, the EasyBites App is along for the ride, from the moment you introduce solids through first grade.