Baby Led Weaning - trusting your child

No one likes to be forced.
Even for the fun part of life, forcing won't work. Imagine forcing to bungee jump or sky dive when you have a fear of heights.

What about forcing Education, marriage or a career. Forcing leads nowhere.

❓Then why is forcing a child to eat, normalized? Most of us have gone through force feeding as a child or have seen it happen. Why do you think some adults force children to eat?

👉 Adults assume they know more about the child's stomach & appetite than the child themselves.

👉Adults assume the child doesn't have boundaries. Everyone, including a baby has the ability to say No when there is a breach in boundary. Understanding body boundaries is very important to understand consent & to prevent sex abuse.

👉 Adults associate food with love. Food is for hunger. Forcing a child to eat is not a way to love your child. In fact long back, force feeding was a very common punishment in prisons (check image above).

👉 Adults have unrealistic expectations about the quantity a child can take at a certain age & it can lead to force feeding.

👉 If sensory processing issues, chewing issues & other underlying problems affect the child's ability to eat & they go unnoticed or underdiagnosed, adults might force feed. These issues can be identified by a feeding therapist.

🍎There are many more reasons, but in long term a child that's force fed can end up with a very negative relationship with food & can have eating disorders, issues in regulating intake, inability to understand satiety, inability to chew, to control appetite, to understand hunger cues, emotional eating, food aversions, inability to try new food & can even create hatred towards food.

🔥If someone doesn't like sex or any particular element in sex, for example oral sex, forcing them can't be a solution. Just like misconceptions about sexuality can lead to long term issues in adulthood, parents' ideologies & beliefs about food habits can cause problems in adulthood too.

Let's be more mindful with our kids' eating habits. Remember we're not just raising children, but tomorrow's adults too.
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