How Should You Feed Your Child?

Most specialists hold that feeding problems in children go back, for the most part, to the parents' conduct toward them. Here are some counsels that should be followed in feeding the child:

1 — Do not force the child to take food he has no desire for. A child's appetite for food varies according to the weather and the stages of growth. It is established that a child's growth may slow down or quicken at certain stages of his age, so that his appetite for food falls below, or rises above, what it was.

2 — Do not punish the child for not eating, and do not tempt him to eat by way of rewards and promises. Do not offer him what he refused at an earlier meal, and do not threaten him that he will fall ill and grow up weak and feeble if he does not eat. Such threats only make him more stubborn and sow anxiety and alarm in his soul.

3 — Fix set times for his meals, letting no less than two hours and no more than three pass between any two meals — while seeing to it that he gets his fill of sleep, and of play, which is among the most important aids to his digestion and to his profiting from his food.

4 — Do not allow him food between the eating hours set apart for him.. and remove the food from the table after twenty minutes, letting him feel that this is done according to rule, not as a punishment for him.

5 — Offer him the kinds of food he likes. After the third year of his age a child can digest everything grown people can digest, if he eats of it in moderation.

6 — Help the child learn how to feed himself.. for in that there is something that makes him feel he is eating as he pleases, without imposition or compulsion..