Why shouldn’t we reward or punish our children with food?

Several reasons why food is not the currency in children's education.

In consultation I find that parents sometimes punish or reward their children through food.. "If you don't behave well you will not come to dinner with us", "until you calm down you will stay in your room without dinner", "if you behave well I will give you a cookie", "if you don't do your homework today you will have to have vegetables for dinner".

Also in many occasions we fill the boredom of our children with cookies, popcorn or candy, that is to say, processed foods and sugars, which are a direct reward for our organism.

In these cases what we are doing is teaching our children to manage emotions through food and associate certain foods as negative and and associating certain foods as negative and others as positive. This type of punishment is a serious mistake that in the long term can generate problems. 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 through food.

Feeding is a basic need and is part of the child's childhood routine. Food should not be seen as a reward that is part of a negotiation, such as choosing dessert. This can be a privilege that we can give to our child, who chooses the weekend among three desserts that we offer.

We have 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 unwell. If we make this association in the child, it may lead to future problems.

If our child is restless, we cannot give him/her a cookie so that he/she will be able to stand a while longer without "bothering", if our child is crying in the middle of a supermarket, we cannot give him/her a cookie to calm down, if our child is bored, the solution is not to give him/her some small worms either...

With this act we are sending different implicit messages to our childI am not available for you, your discomfort bothers me and I don't know how to manage it, mom or dad are only good with you when you are well, when you feel bad the solution is to eat because it calms you down"... In the long term we end up encouraging emotional hunger, 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 our children's negative emotional states..

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

A child who has been soothed through food, how will he or she manage emotions as an adult? Probably in any situation that is overwhelming or for which they do not have the necessary management resources, what they will do is to calm the discomfort by going to the refrigerator.

When we start this type of behavior we do not usually turn to healthy foods such as fruits or vegetables, but as I said before we turn to foods rich in fats and sugars. What happens after the binge? In the short term the ingestion calms down, but in the long term there is guilt for the binge..

If we learn from childhood that ingestion calms down, it will be a very difficult circle to break. By using sweets or processed foods as prizes, we are 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 function is to explain to them and teach them why to behave in one way or another and how to behave in this way.. The best reward will be verbal and affective reinforcement.

An unsuitable type of punishment

Punishing children by eating food that is not to their liking (usually fish, vegetables or fruit) does not solve the original problem and does not help the child's nutrition. What will happen is that a bigger tantrum will appear when the child has to eat that dish that he/she does not like so much. In addition, if they eat this type of food as a punishment we will achieve even less that they like them, since they will become something aversive.

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

If we associate our child's misconduct or behavior to a punishment in which he/she has to eat a food he/she does not like, he/she will associate that food as something unpleasant and negative, so he/she will not want to incorporate that food to his/her diet. The opposite will happen with treats such as sweets and candies. 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 time with the family.It is important that mealtime is not tinged with arguments or is a time of punishment. In this way, negative associations to food intake will not be made.

Conclusion

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

When setting a consequence, it is important that the consequence chosen is related to the behavior that the child has set in motion. For example, imagine that our child 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 pick up all the spilled water.

In addition, 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 not find a relationship between the behavior and the consequence.

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