Why would a person keep encouraging their babies or kids to eat after the kids indicated they were no longer hungry?

I hope you weren’t at McDonalds and it was their salty fries he was trying to stuff down a 9 month old.
I think babies sometimes play a little game where they turn their head away and giggle and the parent keeps trying to feed the child in case they are still hungry. This patent sounds like he went a little overboard. Maybe he’s a first time dad.

No. It was a sit down restaurant,but it was just like a truck stop kind of place. Burgers, fries, breakfast foods.

Or maybe the baby was going through a fussy eating phase, and because of scheduling constraints, Dad had to get as full a meal as he could into the baby now because there really wouldn’t be time later.

They were taught not to waste food.

If a kid is being given more food than they can eat, whose fault is that?

The kid can eat it. By force, if necessary.

Maybe they were tormented in the same way by their parents, and are projecting their and perpetuating the cycle of abuse, as most people do without realizing it.

Because some parents obsess about their children eating enough. It creates fat children and fat adults and power struggles with food. Or, in the case of my SIL, who was a petite child, it caused her to throw up almost every day for a few months, because she was basically being force fed. She still resents her mother for it. She was in grade school at the time and her mom had instructed her teacher to make sure she ate all of her food, and the nun basically did just that. She wasn’t bulimic, she was a child, she couldn’t keep it down.

I can see if a child is being stubborn and truly depriving himself that a parent might try to do something to get them to eat, but it creates a vicious cycle.

I think most of the time they just do what their parents did without thinking about it. No one in my family was force fed. Thank goodness. My grandparents didn’t do it, and neither did my parents. My great grandmother kind of pushed food on my grandmother, because back then higher social classes were expected to carry more weight, but my grandmother in her early 40’s she’d the extra weight permanently. Her fat weight would be an average weight now.

When I was little and people would comment on how little I ate or how thin I was the women in my family would immediate jump in and say I was perfect and to leave me alone. I always ate, I never battled over food as a kid. I just stopped when I was full.

I assume you know this family’s entire history given that you feel like you are in such a position to judge them. Since you are so well informed, can you tell me when the last time their child had eaten was? How much had the child eaten? Does the child have any sort of medical condition that might make the timing of their food intake important? Or a condition that might make them resistant to eating even when they are hungry? Please enlighten us all.

I am not sure that babies will do a good job to indicate that they’re not hungry, perhaps they might be good at it but the parents themselves are the ones unable to trust or decipher such (generally) unspoken cue. It is also possible that the baby is being picky or the parents believe that the baby is being picky.

I am personally not from the faction that believe babies know what’s good for themselves and act accordingly. It should be the parents that know how to manage their kids based on their obviously superior knowledge.

I didn’t claim to know the family’s history, @Irukandji. I DO know the signals when a baby is not hungry though: Turning his head away, lips clamped, pushing the hand with the food away, and that’s what the baby was doing. In fact, when Dad kept pushing, the child started to get upset. That was about the time we left. I just wondered why some people do that. I was at a birthday party once, and this woman just cut loose on her little daughter because her daughter didn’t want a piece of cake….the lady just screamed and lost it. Scared everyone to death.

@Unofficial_Member, well, a baby knows when it’s hungry and when it’s not. As for food choices, yes. That’s up to the parents. In the beginning, anyway.

There were SO many things my daughter didn’t want to eat! If she ever tried a new thing it was world news. I used to take them to a buffet after church. To my shock my daughter actually ate the dab of cottage cheese I’d put on her plate. She had steadfastly refused it in the past. Then I realized she was really hungry, and that was the first food she came upon so she ate it. She has eaten it ever since.

One time I complained to the pediatrician that all my daughter ever wanted to eat were bean and cheese burritos.
My daughter, who was 3, chimed in and said, “Nuh uh! Remember when I ate that corn?!”
Yeah. About 6 months earlier she’d eaten corn on the cob. It was stunning!
Anyway, Doc told me not to worry about it. Bean and cheese burritos cover the basic food groups pretty well. Said she’d known kids who would only eat butter!

^^ I hope I am wrong but I always have a feeling that you tend to, or should I say, wanting to spoil children. Parents provide food and children are free to eat the food, they are supposed to eat the food but they’re also free to not eat and get hungry in the end. So long as the food is edible and nutritious and the kids aren’t allergic to the food the parents are never wrong not to cater to the kids’ specific taste buds. This is called discipline.

How can you complain to your pediatrician that your kids don’t want to eat XXX when you’re the one who allow that to happen. You said it yourself that your daughter previously refused to eat cheese and one day she eat cheese since she’s hungry, can’t you see that she can actually eat cheese and being picky about her food? Why do you want to nurture children’s pickiness? That I don’t understand nor do I find it a good life lesson.

Me and my siblings were raised by very disciplined grandparents and we were taught from the beginning that food is precious, no matter what, and you shouldn’t waste it just because you don’t find it to your personal liking, because they’re still many hungry and unfortunate kids out there that will really need and appreciate the food you’re having right now, you’ll also disrespect your parents who have worked so hard so that they can bring food to the table. This reasons alone, along with dedicated grandparents have allowed us to always appreciate food served in the house and to never even let a single grain of rice on the plate when we finish eating.

I am saying this to you as I remember our argument regarding similar issue in the past. I am not saying this to force you to change the way you raise your family the way you like it.

I really had a difficult time trying to understand what you are saying. Did you say that I want to spoil children by not making them eat if they don’t want to eat? Sure. I could have fixed that by acting like an asshole and refusing to feed them anything until they ate what I wanted to them to eat. I just saw absolutely nothing of value in such behavior. I believe it breeds power struggles and causes eating issues and is damaging to relationships. All over FOOD. It’ stupid. If a kid is hungry, they’ll eat. If they aren’t, they won’t. End of story. My job was to make sure there were healthy foods in the house, and that I cooked healthy meals, and only rarely, rarely offered junk food (cake on birthdays for example) and that’s what I did.

And I was just touching base with the doc about it to make sure it was OK, if mostly all she wanted to eat were bean and cheese burritos. It was.

^^That is not what I meant. I agree with what you just said now. What I was referring is the choices of food served to your kids, not about the amount they must eat. Like the previous example I have given you in the past, if today’s menu is cheese sandwich then the kids will have that as their meal, whether they like or not. You’ll be spoiling the kids if you cater to their specific taste buds.

OK @Dutchess_III So once again, a question has been asked by you when you feel that you know the answer and dispute any responses that go against your opinion.

@Irukandji answered the question. You don’t know the history of the situation.

In the defense of Dutchess_III I dint think she is only talking about this specific parent, but “all” parents who see fit to force their children to eat.

There certainly are parents who practically shove food down their children’s throat. They don’t let their children leave the table until their plate is completely cleared of food, or they insist a child eat something the child hates. Or, in my case adults would get annoyed if I just left a few bites of food over. They would say, “just finish it.” I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I was afraid to eat one more bite if I was already full. I didn’t want to feel nauseas. I didn’t have stomach problems as a kid, I wasn’t easily nauseated, but if I overate I was.

Many adults seem to not understand that the taste buds of a child are different than adults. They have more buds functioning, things taste stronger and more extreme to most children as compared to most adults.

I think it can be abusive to force kids to eat when they are not hungry. It’s a form of physical abuse in my opinion, and I’m not so sure children feel a choice when their parent or another adult tells them they have to finish their food to leave the table. If my mom had piled too much food on my plate and told me that I would have been sobbing at the dining room table there for hours, or maybe eventually I would have overcome my fears and eaten and puked all the time, and eventually my stomach would have stretched to accommodate the food I guess.

Most of America is fat, their judgment about food and normal weight is completely screwed up. The average person is not a good judge of normal portions or normal weight anymore in my opinion. 40 years ago we were thinner as a country, portion size was different. Other countries are more realistic about portion size for adults and children. Some are even worse than America.

@Unofficial_Member I think there is a difference between feeding the kids the kind of food they prefer vs making them eat something they don’t like. When I had the daycare I had a pretty strict menu, and the rules for eating in the daycare were a little different than the rules of my regular household. In order to get seconds they had to eat everything on their plate first, then could have as much as they wanted of whatever else. The rule simply had to be the same across the board. However, I still made allowances for individual kids. For example, when we had burritos we also had green beans. My daughter did not like green beans, so I would put 2 or 3 green beans on her plate, and gave the kids who actually liked green beans extra. She could get through 2 or 3 green beans and then she could have as much burrito as she wanted for seconds!
If it was a regular dinner, no daycare though, I didn’t expect her to eat any green beans if she didn’t want to. Really. Who cares? The rest of us will eat them all up so they aren’t going to waste.

@Pied_Pfeffer I didn’t say much either way when people answered the question I asked. @Unofficial_Member, however, turned it on me personally, so I responded to that with my views and my philosophy surrounding food.

@Dutchess_III Yeah, I know the signals too. I also know that certain conditions will cause children to display all of those signals even if they haven’t eaten in three days. You don’t know the situation, so you shouldn’t act like you do. There’s nothing wrong with asking why someone might encourage their children to keep eating when it seems like they don’t want to. There is something wrong with using people you know nothing about as an example. For all you know, your suggested course of behavior could lead to a dead kid. But maybe that’s not as important to you as having everyone in the world do exactly what you want them to do.

Three days??!! I have never experienced a child who hasn’t eaten in 3 days. 24hours is the max I’ve dealt with, because she had sores in her mouth and couldn’t eat. Doc said she’d be fine if she didn’t eat for a day. Boy, when she could eat I just about didn’t have enough food in the house!

Watch the documentary about The Girl Who Never Ate. It is available on YouTube.

I will.

A little over half way through. I am SO GLAD they’re making absolutely 100% certain that there is no physical reason she isn’t eating, or that she can’t. This is tough! For her and Mom. Tough tough tough.

Wow! Amazing child. Amazing mom. I hope there is a follow up in, say, 10 years or something.