Healthy baby’s bad appetite is often caused by his psychological peculiarities and system of upbringing in a family.Thus, if a mom always forces a baby to eat, and a baby is obstinate, then any meal turns into a struggle between a mom and baby. A stable stereotype of relationships is formed, when table and food cause a baby’s protective response: refusal and obstinacy.
What forced feeding can bring:
- anxious fear, hidden under whims at the table, is formed in a baby with gentle, amenable character.
- Sluggish, phlegmatic children eat slowly and this causes irritation in adults. Mother hurries her baby, pushes another spoon with food in his full mouth and feeding process turns into a torture both for a baby and mom. At some moment a baby’s negative attitude to food overwhelms a baby and becomes a reason of psychic traumas.
- Negative emotions of violence, fear, obstinacy and offence are connected with environment and certain food and kept in subconsciousness of sensitive and impressionable children.
It often happens that a baby, who always ate bad at home, starts eating well in a kindergarten suddenly. Children often compliment food, cooked in a kindergarten. Sometimes babies eat everything they are offered in someone’s place with pleasure. There’re also other situations: a baby east nothing in a kindergarten, but at home his appetite is good. These are typical signs of neurotic reaction on food.
Parents need to show understanding and enormous patience, if a baby eats badly. You know, parents are responsible for their children’s eating disorders.
Drawing, telling fairy-tales, rest-care technique will help to cope with psychological problems:
- offer a baby to draw a dinner in a family of bears (squirrels, foxes) and invent a story about bear-cubs, who eat badly. You need to prompt a baby how else he can behave at the table, receive pleasure from food, about necessity of good eating. Avoid moralizing, just invent a merry story with happy end.
- Play a game “Stubborn (whimsical) baby at the table”, play a role of a baby, and a baby will be your mom. Avoid such open phrases, like “I will play up, like you usually do at the table”. Game should be funny, merry and played many times.
- Try to break a standard stereotype of sitting at the table. Offer a baby taking a dad’s place and eating, like his daddy. No matter how much food a baby eats, praise him and say that “this place is magic and the one who sits here eats well always”. You can invite a baby eating at a coffee table in a drawing-room – as if he’s preparing for a cosmic flight and needs a special schedule of nutrition. Even if a baby ate not all food, next time he will sit at the table earlier, so that to manage “flying” on his spaceship in time. Pin only positive emotions with this place of eating.
Your parental intuition and knowledge of your baby’s peculiarities and hobbies will help to find other playing variants.
Other problem – is a full baby. You can meet full plump babies in any children collective, on the street. Some of them are movable like balls, elastic, playful, with open face. Others, to the contrary, are slow-moving, indifferent to everything and unfriendly.
Quite often reason of corpulence is in absence of elementary culture of nutrition, i.e. overeating. Parents and grandparents, who think a baby will be healthier, if he eats more, contribute to this. Consumption of high-calorie farinaceous foods – buns, patties, pies leads to quick weight gain, hypoderm doughiness.
Psychological aspects of overweight problem:
- full baby can grow happy and successful, if he has light character and loving parents;
- children often start teasing a full baby in a collective. A baby feels unhappy, lonely, not like everybody, he can become a social outcast in a group or class. Such children suffer from their overweight sincerely. Diffidence, children offences, low self-esteem are formed.
- Mother’s position, worried by a baby’s appearance and unable to humble with the fact that he’s not the way she’d like him to be, increase baby’s sufferings. Mother irritates, does not accept a baby the way he is on a subconscious level, reproaches and rails at him constantly.
- Parents can form complex of helplessness and diffidence, if they pity their non-typical baby too much, watch over him, protect from everything that can cause problems and troubles. In such case a baby grows being dependent, unprepared for life.
Parents should remember that in every age children treat their appearance differently:
- in a pre-school age a baby’s self-perception if formed basing on other people’s opinions: phrases “what a little baby” or “what a plump baby” bring either positive, or negative emotional evaluation. Parental evaluation is especially important. Negative evaluations cause touchiness, petulance in one children, and inner protest, displayed in bad behavior and aggression in other children.
- In midchildhood a baby has many chances to compensate his external disadvantage with successes in studying, benevolence and friendship with coevals, display of skills and talents;
- Teen age is a period of soul-searching, change of attitude to other people and oneself. Changes of attitude towards children’s obesity take place right in this age. Happy children suddenly decide they are too fat (especially girls) and start ‘struggling” with their plumpness actively. Others start being proud of their “sizes”, go in for sport (especially boys).
Psychological problems of obesity are solved independently, if a child receives enough family warmth, care, parental support. Parents should teach a child treating offences and mockeries with humor. Hypochondriac moms and dads should get rid of their anxiety and irritation as for their baby’s appearance. Include all possible methods of help with patience and care: diets, exercising. Treat this as a trouble you can overcome.
Timely medical support and treatment, if they are necessary, correct and proper upbringing, considering a baby’s physical and psychological peculiarities, will provide him harmonious relationships with himself and other people, allow being successful and happy in life.
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