Theory on How Children Eat Offers Food for Thought
It is a radical approach to feeding children--letting them have whatever they want whenever they want it, with a few simple guidelines. And at first glance, it might appear to be a wholesale prescription for cavities, hyperactivity, depression and kids accused of impersonating the Pillsbury Dough Boy.
But according to New York therapist Jane R. Hirschmann, the idea of self-demand feeding is hardly new. Most of today’s children and many adults were initially reared on it, thanks to Dr. Benjamin Spock’s recommendation of feeding infants however much they wanted whenever they asked for it.
Considering Actual Needs
The problem, Hirschmann said during a recent visit to Los Angeles, arises when children are weaned and placed on arbitrary feeding schedules that have more to do with the convenience of their parents than with their actual needs.
She cited the common dictums of “Don’t spoil your appetite” and “Take a bite for grandma” as just two offending pieces of perverted logic that adults often use in training children when to eat.
Such commands “are more about the mother’s labor than the child’s internal needs,” she warned.
On top of this, added Hirschmann, co-author of “Are You Hungry? A Completely New Approach to Raising Children Free of Food and Weight Problems” (Random House: $15.95), many parents are so phobic and afraid of gaining weight that they unwittingly pass their craziness about food on to their children. As the parents are determined that their children will not grow up with weight problems, early taboos are frequently established on sweets and other foods thought to be detrimental to health.
Which only makes the forbidden foods all the more desirable, said Hirschmann, who earned a master’s of social work degree from UCLA and teaches her nutritional theories in New York. Such restrictions amount to a diet. “Diets lead to deprivation, which leads to binging,” she said. “When you deprive or prohibit or restrict certain foods, you create an intense interest in those very foods.”
Hirschmann’s book has been met with less than enthusiasm by some nutritionists, who contend that the theory is nice but doesn’t work in actual practice. Given the other forces at work in society, children given complete freedom may opt for junk food as readily as a healthful regimen, they argue.
Hirschmann does not recommend food that is harmful or raising people on a steady diet of Twinkies, hot dogs and rum raisin ice cream. Instead, she argued that if such foods are permitted--when the child is really hungry--the foods will eventually lose their special appeal and take a back seat to more healthful choices.
Approach Effective
From observation of her own life (she lost weight equivalent to two dress sizes) and the lives of her clients, she maintained the approach is both effective and sound.
“Sugar is not the culprit,” said Hirschmann, who has been hired to teach these ideas to residents at New York’s Montefiore Medical Center and to the general public at the New School for Social Research in New York City. “The culprit is not sugar but excess--eating any food to excess. There are people who have died on high-protein diets.”
Hirschmann, who specializes in food problems in her private therapeutic practice, decided to develop this approach to feeding children when she had twin daughters six years ago. “I decided to take the curative approach and make it preventive,” she explained, “so that parents could raise children free of weight problems.”
In her home, every day is Halloween (if the children want it that way, she said) and as a result her children have little or no interest in sweets. That’s her approach even when they are seduced by television advertising and ask their mother to buy cereal (“the colorful garbage with the superheroes on it”).
Hirschmann remembered warning her children, “It’s really not good for your body,” when the cereal was requested. But she bought it anyway and let them eat it. As she recalled, “They said, ‘This is too sweet’ and went back to their healthier foods.”
What’s more, Hirschmann maintained that such enlightened attitudes about food are not restricted to children raised by a psychotherapist specializing in weight problems. In her book, she provides three basic steps to train any child (or adult) on how to eat according to the needs of the body.
The three steps center on three questions: (1) “Are you hungry?” (2) “What do you want to eat?” and (3) “Are you full?” Their corresponding answers are: 1) Eat only when you feel actual physical sensations of hunger, 2) Eat what you really enjoy and the wisdom of the body will eventually prevail and create healthful choices and 3) Stop eating when you are full (determine this from internal cues rather than external signs such as how much food remains on a plate or in a cupboard).
To facilitate this process, Hirschmann recommends that each child be given his or her own well-supplied food shelf so there is no sense of deprivation. She also advises that children make shopping lists of the foods they prefer to guide the parents. “Every 4-year-old can tell you what they want right down to the bran,” Hirschmann pointed out. “They are so in touch with their bodies.”
Shopping Nightmare
But won’t this be a shopping and cooking nightmare for the parents?
Hirschmann has an answer for that too, and advised turning dinner foods into snack foods and having them constantly available.
“We don’t want mothers to be slaves to the kitchen or to their child’s needs,” she said. “Children actually have very simplistic needs. We tend to gauge what they should have based on what we like.”
To accomplish all this means giving a child complete freedom and complete trust in the area of food, Hirschmann noted. Eventually, she has found it will also mean more freedom for the parents--freed of forever having to police a child’s eating habits.
“If parents find this scary, they can start with one food, say gumdrops, and see what happens,” Hirschmann counseled, warning, however, to get at least four bags of gumdrops so the child will not feel there is a taboo on quantity.
This approach obviously has its critics, some of whom Hirschmann and her co-author, Lela Zaphiropoulos, have anticipated.
Healthy Growth
To those who maintain an individual is unlikely to consume a full day’s nutritional requirements with such an approach, the authors reply that studies have shown that most healthy people do not get the so-called nutritional requirements in one day, but rather over a period of time. “Nutritional science and new research have made it clear that one to two weeks, not one meal or even one day, is the time frame within which the body needs to receive and absorb the range of nutrients necessary for healthy growth and development,” the authors write.
But many nutritionists remain unconvinced of the virtues of the self-demand system.
Hermien Lee, for instance, a Beverly Hills-based registered dietitian who has worked on the staff at Johns Hopkins, contended that the self-demand solution “looks beautiful on paper but it doesn’t work.
“There are too many people who use food for other reasons than keeping their bodies well,” Lee said. “People push down feelings with food. And I’m not sure if you could provide an adequate diet with this approach. People eat what’s easiest, not what’s most nutritious.”
Francine Synder, a Beverly Hills licensed marriage, family and child counselor specializing in eating disorders and weight control, said there are “some sound components to Ms. Hirschmann’s theory.
“Basically, what she’s saying is not new. Babies have a tendency to go for what their bodies need. And deprivation does, in fact, increase the desire for those foods which are withheld. However, due to our food-conscious and food-faddish society, I think there needs to be assistance and restrictions placed on children for their best interests,” said Snyder, who holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from International College here and is also a registered nurse.
“It is true that when people are psychologically and physically sound there is a tendency to eat healthfully. However, due to cultural pressures, which include media hype, our eating mechanisms are generally thrown off balance. I don’t feel that her concept takes into account the child’s reaction to peer pressure. That is, ‘Let’s go out and get hamburgers, some french fries or Twinkies after school’ or ‘Come on over to my house and we’ll have some cupcakes and M&Ms.;’ The media has a great impact in glorifying food. If adults can’t resist this kind of hype, than I don’t see how children who have not reached a mature reasoning capacity can really define what’s good for them.”
Among children who have hypoglycemia or who are physiologically addicted to sweets, Snyder said, “there is a physical craving for foods that are not healthy or needed by the body in order to maintain itself. So there are times when the parent definitely needs to step in and assess the situation and maintain control over the child’s eating behavior.”
Hirschmann is well aware that people use food for reasons other than keeping their bodies well--and that they learned this at very early ages because of the conditions put on food and eating in their homes.
“Until you try self-demand feeding, it is hard to trust the outcome,” she acknowledged. “But try to think of what can happen. Parents and children can enjoy having all kinds of food available when they’re physically hungry. There can be fresh fruits and vegetables, meats, whole grains and dairy products--as well as candy sitting on the shelf and pints of ice cream in the freezer. No one needs to compete for any foods. Nothing is a forbidden goodie. And weight gain is not the punishment for enjoyable eating.”
Perhaps most important, Hirschmann contended that allowing a child to control internal bodily needs is not neglect or anarchy, but rather a means of teaching self-control early on. “You can’t make decisions for someone else’s stomach,” she claimed. “Self-control comes from the inside. It doesn’t come from an outside sledge-hammered approach.”
