ARE YOU FULL? SHOPPING
In order to learn when to stop, the child has to feel assured that there is more than enough for him. If there is an ample supply, he will have to determine from inside when to stop.
from Kids, Carrots, and Candy by Jane R. Hirschmann and Lela Zaphiropoulos
Once your child learns to identify her hunger and how to match it to a specific food, the final question is, Are You Full? Like hunger, the goal is for her to recognize the feeling of fullness from the inside, rather than from external cues, such as an empty plate, the end of school lunch time, or parent restriction.
Start with the shopping list. Allow your child to choose which foods they would like from the grocery store. Check.
Next, buy an ample supply of the requested food, more than can be consumed in one sitting. For example, buy at least 4 bags of potato chips. Further, when half the supply is gone, replenish immediately. The idea here is to eliminate any eating out of fear that a food will be taken away. I liken it to how I sometimes overeat at the holidays or when on vacation, with the mindset, I only get these cookies once a year!
This step bugs me on several levels.
Financially: To buy four of everything on each girls’ list costs a lot of money.
Time: Getting to the grocery store more than once, or maybe twice a week is not realistic.
Emotionally: Delivering everything that the girls want in that volume overwhelms me. What if it never stops?
For the first two, I have simply explained the issues to the girls, and we have together come up with solutions. As Hirschmann and Zaphiropoulos corroborate, true limits of cost and time are things that children can understand. The problem arises when you as a parent try to use the first two as excuses, when what is really going on is the third. I can tell you from experience, kids can sniff out displaced fear faster than a cat gravitates to a dog person.
My biggest issue with Kids, Carrots, and Candy is that it does no justice to the topic how hard moving to self-demand feeding can be for parents. Even committed parents like me. I believe that the best way for my children to learn how to nourish themselves is by self-demand feeding. That is Honest Truth Number 1. Watching my child eat two full bowls of ice cream with toppings scares the shit out of me and makes me doubt Honest Truth Number 1. That is Honest Truth Number 2.
At least I am being honest.
I waffle about how much of my fear to show to the girls. On the one hand, to mask how I feel is futile. They know me well enough to call me out. On the other hand, my fear is not their problem. It is mine. So I look for other solutions.
What I notice is that the grocery lists have changed. First there was a run on sweet cereal: boxes and boxes of Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. On the list last week were only Apple Jacks and Multigrain Cheerios.
Next came the snacks: PopTarts, chocolate cereal bars and Fruit Roll Ups. This week, there was one request for Fruit Roll Ups, along with turkey and carrots.
We are in another gauntlet now, the one that I am finding the most difficult by far. Pepsi, 7Up, chocolate chips, Hersey bars, Bounty bars, Skittles. It’s like they are turning up the volume a little bit on me every few weeks. Really Mom? Are you going to let us eat this too? They are testing me.
If I were to follow my own advice I would let go, like I did with the cereal and the snacks. I would honor their requests as fast as I can. Experience shows me that the sooner they know they are really are in control, the sooner it will end.
It can’t be my fear that determines when to stop.