What is mindful eating?
The foundation of mindful eating for kids and adults alike is awareness. The practice is built around the idea of paying attention to whatever food is being eaten, on purpose, in every moment, without judgement.7
This often looks like eating slowly, using all your senses, and really savoring your food. And the intention behind this technique is to help kids build healthy eating habits and thoughts around food, such as:1
- The idea that they should feel physically better after a meal
- Recognizing when they're full, and eating accordingly
- Understanding the differences between eating out of boredom, habit, or because they feel physically hungry
Promoting mindful eating by practicing it yourself and modeling the concept for your children can help reinforce these positive eating habits.1 And when people eat intuitively, they've generally been found to have better mental and physical health.5 This can help children avoid developing dangerous disordered eating behaviors, which sadly have started showing up in children at younger ages over the years.2
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Tips to encourage mindful eating for kids
How to teach your child about food relationships, healthy habits around food, and the difference between distracted eating and mindful eating may feel overwhelming at first.
But whether you’re new to this type of mindfulness practice or you've been following it for years, there are some tips that may help you teach your child how to eat mindfully.1,4,7
1. Teach them to recognize hunger cues
Help your child learn to understand their hunger cues by asking them how their body feels when they get hungry. Encourage them to pay close attention to what sensations they feel in their body when they get hungry and ask them specific questions. For example:
- Does your stomach “growl?”
- What does it sound like?
- What does it feel like?
- Do you get a headache?
- Do you feel dizzy?
- Do your hands start to shake?
- Do your legs feel weak, like you’re going to fall down?
- Is it hard to concentrate on what you’re doing?
Make sure to also do this after they’ve eaten, so they can learn to gauge when they’re full.
You can ask them to visualize what their empty or full stomach might look like and use these visualizations to teach them how to gauge their hunger. You can try whatever strategies make sense to you, but the important thing is that you are talking to them about how they feel and what they’re noticing about their body.
2. Encourage them to slow down and tune into their senses
Mindful eating focuses on awareness, and this means tuning in to every aspect of eating, including the way food looks, tastes, smells, and feels, as well as the feelings going on within the child's mind and body during the meal.
Encouraging your child to take their time and tune into all their senses can help them develop a stronger and more mindful relationship with their bodies and food.
Eating slowly can also teach your child to understand their satiety cues, which is when their hunger is satisfied, so they can learn to listen to them.
Here’s a helpful activity you can do to teach mindfulness. Offer your child several different types of fruit to choose from. Once they choose a piece of fruit to have for a snack, ask them these questions:
1
- What does your food look like? What color and shape is it?
- Does your food make a sound? If so, what type of sound?
- How does your food feel to the touch? Is it smooth or rough?
- What does your food smell like? Do you enjoy its smell?
- How does the food feel in your mouth? What does it taste like when it’s on your tongue? Once you chew, does the flavor change? How many different flavors do you taste?
3. Create a distraction-free environment
When eating mindfully, it's not only important to eat slowly, but to try to limit distractions while eating. It’s difficult for anyone to practice mindfulness around bright, noisy devices like TVs, phones, or computers. This is especially so when it comes to mindful eating for kids.
Turn off the TV and put away all devices during family meals. Remember, eating isn’t just about the food we consume—it’s also about the connections we make with those we are sharing the meal with.
You can also encourage you child to set their fork or spoon down in between bites so they can focus on what’s in their mouth, as opposed to mindlessly shoveling in the next bite.
4. Allow them to serve themself
Not only will allowing your child to serve themselves encourage independence and self-sufficiency, but it will also teach them to become familiar with appropriate serving sizes and how much food they want to eat based on how hungry they feel.
Combined with other aspects of mindful eating, this can also help your child get in touch with their natural hunger cues and gauge their level of fullness or how they're physically feeling during a meal.
5. Have them wait after eating to decide on seconds
When practiced regularly, mindful eating can also positively influence food choices, including how much food a person eats in a given meal or snack.
It can take a long time for the brain to register how full the body actually is, with estimates ranging from anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes for full recognition.
1,8 By encouraging your child to wait before getting seconds, you are teaching them to honor their body's internal hunger cues and to eat when they are physically hungry, as opposed to boredom or habit. This can also help them learn the difference between
wanting versus liking food.
6. Collaborate on a garden
If you have the space where you live, consider growing a garden and inviting your child to help you. A garden can promote a sense of accomplishment and autonomy, as well as allow your child to explore your food’s journey, from seed to sprout to dinner ingredient. It can also help impart the concept of patience and appreciation, seeing what it takes to get food on the table and honoring the food that much more when it's on the plate.
Let them help choose what you’re going to plant and help tend to the plants as they grow. Then, when you sit down together for a meal, you can both express gratitude for where your food came from and the work you put in together.
7. Express gratitude
A little gratitude can go a long way.
Practicing and recognizing gratefulness has been tied to greater happiness and health overall, as well as stronger interpersonal relationships and more positive experiences.3 Practicing gratefulness for food can help create a positive relationship with food and eating for a child.
Before your meal, express appreciation for the opportunity to enjoy appetizing food and to share that food with people you love.
What to avoid when teaching kids about healthy relationships with food
While encouraging mindful eating practices can help proactively teach your child about food relationships, staying away from other habits can also help discourage negative thoughts and behaviors around food.
Here are a few things you should avoid when trying to encourage mindful eating for kids.5
Don’t: Teach them to finish everything on their plate
Forcing your child to finish everything on their plate, even healthy foods, teaches them to ignore their internal hunger and satiety cues in favor of a household rule. This can cause a disconnect between mind and body and lead to disordered eating behaviors.
It’s also very important not to tell your child to stop eating when you think they’ve had “enough” of something, especially something you perceive as “bad” or “unhealthy.” This also teaches them to ignore their body’s built-in hunger and satiety cues and can cultivate a disordered relationship with food and their bodies.
Don’t: Force them to eat because it’s dinner time
It's important for a child to eat regular meals, but not everyone has the same internal clock when it comes to hunger.
In fact, many people will eat dinner, typically the largest meal of the day, not necessarily because they're hungry for it, but because it's the "right time" to eat dinner. This isn’t a useful practice and is counterintuitive to mindful eating, which involves acknowledging your hunger cues, eating food to satiate and nourish your body, and being present while you eat.
Don’t force your child to eat at a certain time if they aren’t hungry during that time. Wait and allow them to tell you when they are hungry. Much like the tip above, forcing a certain dinner time teaches them to eat when they aren’t hungry, which can lead to a dysfunctional relationship with food.
Don’t: Expose them to diets
It’s important to model healthy eating behaviors for your children, including savoring food and eating nutritious snacks when hungry between mealtimes. Many people also rely on the rules of a diet to help them through the day, but these programs are considered by many experts to actually be forms of disordered eating.6
Exposing a child to the concept of caloric restriction or cutting out entire food groups can leave a dangerous impression and work to reinforce the unhelpful idea that foods are either "good" or "bad." Not only are diets unhealthy, but they also communicate an unhealthy goal-oriented attitude towards food.
Meanwhile, mindful eating does not have a goal; it is simply about enjoying the process and doing what feels good and right for your body in the present moment.
Don’t: Engage in negative talk about your body
Similar to modeling disordered behaviors to a child in the form of excessive diets is modeling disordered thoughts around food, eating, or body image. And one of the most common ways these ideas get passed down is from parents making derogatory remarks about their own body or appearance.
Your child hears and internalizes everything you say. If you talk about needing to lose weight, how you hate your body, or how you “feel” fat, your child will mimic this attitude, and it may do long-term damage their relationship with food and their body.
Don’t: Label foods as “good” or “bad,” “healthy” or “unhealthy”
When considering how to teach your child about food relationships, try to avoid referring to certain foods as “good," “bad,” “healthy," “unhealthy,” “allowed,” “not allowed,” or any other type of generalization.
This goes for assigning value to certain foods (tree nuts are “healthier” than peanuts), types of food (“junk” food is “bad” for you), or aspects or ingredients in food (white flour and sugar are “bad” for you), as well as assigning limits to how much or little you “should” eat of something (you “shouldn’t” eat a lot of carbs).
This can be very hard to do. The prevailing diet culture does much to emphasize this kind of black and white thinking, where certain foods or body types are inherently "good" or "bad." In reality, no food is inherently bad, but eating something that's considered "forbidden" can lead to feelings of shame and encourage disordered eating patterns.
Food is fuel, a source of energy for our bodies. It can be a source of pleasure and source of community. Mindful eating is one way we can help keep it that way for our kids.
