Feeding kids can feel like a never-ending balancing act. With cultural expectations and conflicting tips from both social media and health professionals, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and unsure of how to help our kids develop healthy eating habits.
Ellyn Satter, an internationally-recognized dietitian and family therapist, recognized the pressure some parents feel to make sure their children learn to eat “perfectly.” As a result of that pressure, many parents try to control their kids’ food intake, pushing healthy foods as a way to earn dessert, setting vegetable quotas and condemning sweets. Unfortunately, this can lead to pickiness, food obsessions, guilt and other negative feelings around food. Other parents, perhaps because of their own upbringing, take a hands-off approach without much structure, which can lead to chaotic eating habits, poor nutritional intake and difficulty understanding hunger and fullness cues.
Satter’s Division of Responsibility (DOR) is an evidence-based framework that provides a healthy medium by allowing both parents and children to take an active role over mealtime decisions. If applied correctly and consistently, the DOR framework optimizes a healthy relationship with food and eating while reducing mealtime frustrations and parental stress.
Here’s how it works:
Parents Decide:
- What: Parents are in charge of the menu. They provide a variety of nutritious, satisfying options.
- When: Parents set consistent mealtimes and snack times, so kids know when to expect food.
- Where: Parents create a positive mealtime environment—think sitting at the table, not in front of the TV.
Kids Decide:
- Whether: Kids can also choose whether to eat at all.
- How Much: Kids get to decide how much they eat based on their own hunger and fullness cues.
Why does DOR work? In short, parents continue to provide food structure and variety, which kids are not developmentally ready to provide for themselves. And, believe it or not, most children will know when they’re full and should stop eating. Just think back to their infant days when they finished nursing and turned their head away or clearly refused their milk by throwing the bottle!
Parents are sometimes shocked when I suggest letting their kids decide how much to eat. “He won’t eat enough. She will eat way too much. They’ll only eat the bread.” Most of these issues will resolve with consistent application of DOR, once they’ve learned how they feel after “not enough” or “too much” food, or after four straight days of bread-as-dinner.
Kids may be confused about why you’re trusting them with a full plate of cookies if they haven’t been allowed to trust their bodies until now. Parents who have lost touch with their own ability to recognize fullness may feel unsettled by the idea of relying on their child’s ability to self-regulate. DOR challenges parents to suspend their discomfort with a few weeks of too many cookies in exchange for long-term regulation around cookies for life.
Eventually, you’re back to enjoying your kids during mealtimes instead of monitoring their plates, and you may not even notice until the end of the meal how little tension – and broccoli – is left over after the meal.
Tamar Sullivan, LSW, is a therapist at Hilltop Behavioral Health, specializing in the treatment of children, adolescents and adults struggling with eating disorders, body image concerns, anxiety, depression and OCD. She is passionate about helping individuals heal their relationships with food, their bodies and themselves. In addition to her clinical work, Tamar is dedicated to advocacy and education surrounding mental health and eating disorder awareness. To learn more or to get in touch, you can reach her at [email protected].
