Why Should We Not Reward Or Punish Our Children With Food?

In consultation I find that Sometimes parents punish or reward their children through food “If you don’t behave well, you’re not going to come to dinner with us,” “until you calm down you’re going to stay in your room without dinner,” “if you behave well, I’ll give you a cookie,” “if you don’t do your homework.” Today you are going to have vegetables for dinner.”

Also on many occasions we fill our children’s boredom with cookies, popcorn or sweets, that is, processed foods and sugars, which are a direct reward for our body.

In these cases What we are doing is teaching our children to manage emotions through food and associate certain foods as negative and others as positive. This type of punishment is a serious mistake that can cause problems in the long term. We will be conditioning behaviors to the privilege of eating a sweet or simply eating.

Why it is not good to punish or reward children with food

Feeding is a basic need and is part of a child’s childhood routine. Food should not be seen as a prize that is part of a negotiation, such as choosing dessert. This can be a privilege that we can give our child, letting him choose on the weekend between three desserts that we offer him.

We need to keep in mind that Food serves primarily to nourish and that as parents this is a duty that we must fulfill. Food is not a regulator of stress, anxiety, or negative emotions that make us feel uncomfortable. If we make this association in the child, it could lead to future problems.

If our child is restless, we cannot give him a cookie to make him last a while longer without “disturbing”, if our child is crying in the middle of a supermarket we cannot give him a cookie to calm him down, if our child is bored, the solution It’s not giving you some worms either…

With this act we are sending our son different implicit messages: “I’m not available to you, your discomfort bothers me and I don’t know how to manage it, mom or dad are only okay with you when you’re okay, when you’re upset the solution is to eat because that’s how you calm down”… We end up promoting emotional hunger in the long term. , increasing the risk of overweight and eating disorders.

The psychological effects of this education strategy

What happens when we offer or eliminate food based on our child’s behavior? We are anesthetizing, suppressing and distracting the negative emotional states of our children

It is necessary for children to be restless, bored and have tantrums and naturally we are the ones who have to calm our children, since we are their regulatory source of emotions. How they learn to regulate their emotions as children is how they will regulate them as adults.

How will a child who has been calmed down through food manage emotions as an adult? Probably in any situation that is overwhelming or for which you do not have the necessary management resources, what you will do is calm the discomfort by going to the refrigerator.

When we start this type of behavior we do not usually go to healthy foods like fruits or vegetables, but as I said before we go to foods rich in fats and sugars. What happens after ingestion? In the short term, eating calms, but in the long term, guilt appears due to the binge eating

If we learn from childhood that eating calms, it will be a very difficult cycle to break. Using sweets or processed foods as prizes is not helping the little ones. They are unhealthy foods.

If we want our children’s behavior to be good, it is best not to make a relationship between behavior and this type of food, since we will be giving special importance to this type of food. If we want their behavior to improve, Our role is to explain and teach them why to behave in one way or another and how The best reward will be verbal and emotional reinforcement.

An inappropriate type of punishment

Punishing children by eating food that they do not like (usually fish, vegetables or fruit) does not solve the original problem and does not favor the child’s nutrition. What will happen is that a bigger tantrum will appear when the child has to eat that dish that he doesn’t like so much. Furthermore, if they eat this type of food as a punishment, they will like it even less, since it will become something aversive.

Not having fish, vegetables or fruit in the child’s diet is not an option, little by little we have to introduce it. Sometimes, to avoid fighting or for comfort for ourselves, we give up and accept that the child does not want to eat it, but this is important to change.

If we associate our child’s bad behavior or behavior with a punishment in which he has to eat some food that he does not like, he will associate that food as something unpleasant and negative, so he will not want to incorporate that food into his diet. The opposite will happen with prizes such as sweets and candy. They will be associated with something pleasant and positive, so they will always want to feel the pleasure of eating foods high in sugar.

It is important that lunch or dinner time becomes a pleasant family moment, in which it is not colored by arguments or is a moment of punishment. In this way, negative associations will not be made with food intake.

Conclusion

I always say that there are two important things that we should not punish our children with: food and affection. The absence of both can generate long-term emotional problems for them.

When setting a consequence, it is important that the chosen consequence is related to the behavior that the child has implemented. For example, imagine that our son has started playing with a bottle of water which he has spilled all over the floor and we punish him by telling him that tonight he will eat green beans. The child gets angry, cries, screams, while we collect all the spilled water.

Also, at dinner time and when he has to eat the beans, the tantrum will return What has the child learned from the situation? Has the initial problem been solved? Have we taught the child what to do in this situation? In a situation of this type, the child will find no relationship between the behavior carried out and the consequence.

It is important that the consequence be established immediately to the behavior and are related In this case, if the child has spilled all the water we will have to teach him how to collect it and how to do it. That something that has been fun for him becomes something a little more tedious like picking up. In this case we will be teaching the child to repair those negative behaviors implemented.