Overfeeding children can lead to obesity, bulimia and even anorexia, experts are alarming. According to them, forcing children to eat is still a big problem in Poland.
The dangers of overfeeding a child are not immediately apparent. They usually appear after a few years, when, for example, our child begins to gain excess weight. This is currently a very big problem among children and adolescents. The next ones are bulimia or anorexia; these eating disorders may also be caused by overfeeding earlier, said Karolina Mazurczak from the Nobody’s Children Foundation in an interview with PAP.
As she added, people who were forced to eat in their childhood, when they grow up, treat food as a duty, do not enjoy it, and often eat unhealthy.
The child should be given food when it feels hungry, and we, as parents, should recognize the signals showing that it is hungry – the expert added. In her opinion, you should not feed your baby when you think it should eat something.
According to her, such an approach to the nutrition of children results, among others, from from the myth that a good mother should feed her baby well. It is also not without significance that today’s parents are children of people brought up by a generation that experienced poverty and hunger.
Meanwhile, the child is unable to starve himself. Rather, the problem is that our children eat too much, way too much. These are + excesses, and not + fussy eaters, + she judged.
I work with teenagers who were forced to eat in their childhood. They are often obese people. They say that they were not hungry, but had to eat for their mother’s, father’s, grandmother’s, grandfather’s health, or they were scared that if they didn’t eat, they would be sick, they would go to the hospital. So they denied their inner need and ate, for example, out of fear – she added.
Mazurczak suggested that parents whose children do not want to eat should look at the whole family situation, consider what is happening at the table and in what atmosphere the meals are eaten.
According to the expert, important are, among others snacks stuffed with children. See what the prams of children look like in playgrounds. 70 percent toddlers up to 12 months old have some snacks in the stroller – crisps, sticks, apples, cookies. When a child cries, he falls over, we stick his food under his nose, and the child cries not because he is hungry, but because he fell over – noted the expert. (PAP)