QUESTION ANSWER

As a mother of preteens and young teens, I was wondering from what age I can introduce my kids to the Intuitive Eating principles. What would you recommend as the age range from which they could start to understand and follow this approach?

It’s interesting that you ask this question, and you’re not the first to wonder about it, because the entire premise for Intuitive Eating is really to bring ourselves back to the kind of eating we intuitively did as children. In other words, it’s about reclaiming the way most of us innately operated around food at one point in our youth. In an ideal world, all children would naturally continue to make their eating choices from an intuitive place, well into adulthood. They would be able to listen to their hunger and fullness cues, just like that newborn baby who stops nursing when he feels full. When that hasn’t happened, the Intuitive Eating principles can help toward encouraging the healthy habits and cues with which we were naturally gifted.

So, to answer your question, my youngest client was nine years old when we were working together, and she was able to grasp and implement the concepts in a way that worked for her—which is at the core of this approach. There’s no age that’s too young for learning (i.e., reclaiming) these important principles. Most teenagers really understand them, and I’ve seen positive outcomes, assuming that the child is on board. Of course—and this is very aligned with the idea of tapping in to what feels right to us—there has to be some level of willingness on the child’s part.

Speaking of children, now is a good time to highlight some pointers regarding raising intuitive eaters. The best way to encourage kids to maintain habits from their wise intuitive place is to use the “division of responsibility” approach. (The gold standard of feeding is actually “responsive feeding,” which is an offshoot of division of responsibility.)

In a nutshell, division of responsibility proposes that the parent should be the one to decide the what, where, and when of eating and the child decides how much and if any. Safe foods—foods you know your child likes and tolerates—must be served at all meals and at snack times. Also, food should be offered at regular intervals. For some children, that means even every 1 to 1.5 hours, especially when the method is being introduced. Clients have told me that they started offering their child food every hour until their eating regulated, which really helped the child to build trust that the caregiver would be offering food often enough.

One of the many goals of this feeding model is to expose our children to all different types of foods. Many of us have inadvertently created the type of feeding dynamic where, for example, a child really enjoys a food, such as salmon. Then, from one day to the next, the child refuses the food, and Mommy gets annoyed and stops cooking and serving it. Since the child is never exposed to salmon again, three years later, when they’re at a bar mitzvah, they will refuse to have salmon on their plate.

Thus, even if a kid turns their nose up a certain food, continue to have the food around. Put it on their plates if they tolerate it. Every level of tolerance is something I count as a win—whether the child licks the food, smells the food, tastes the food, or even holds the food.

Most important is to have a calm, happy mother raising calm, happy children. Thus, if a mother finds the feeding dynamic too stressful, this alone is worse for the child than any actual food. I recommend starting with small goals and building from there until a sense of calm is achieved around mealtimes.

Have questions about the Intuitive Eating approach? Send them to info@wellspringmagazine.com and Gila will be glad to answer them in this space.

Gila Glassberg is a Master's level registered dietitian and a certified Intuitive Eating Counselor. As a teenager, she was faced with constant diet talk, body shaming, and obsessive guilt around food, but now that she has found food freedom through the process of Intuitive Eating, she's eager to share its wisdom with others. Gila works privately with clients and she also presents workshops. The name of her podcast is Get INTUIT with Gila, and she writes blog entries on her website, www.gilaglassberg.com. She can be reached at 570-878-3642.