TBRI Tip: Empowering Through Food

Food - it can be one of the biggest and most frustrating battles of parenthood. Whether your child doesn't want to eat, they want to eat too much, or they want to eat all the wrong things, it can be incredibly stressful for parents. This is exponentially more stressful for foster or adoptive parents, who may be also fighting against a history of food insecurity, inconsistent access to food, food being withheld as a punishment, children being left to fend for themselves to eat, or children being accustomed to being fed different kinds of food than what is typically served in their new home.

TBRI Empowering Principles suggests making sure kids are offered a healthy snack every two hours. While this certainly feels natural for very little ones, I've found as a parent that once my kids left the toddler stage behind, it was easy to slip out of this habit. This is because I incorrectly assumed that my kids would be fine to make it until the next meal, and that if they were hungry they could just grab their own snack. Neither of these were actually true.

Our kids from hard places have lots of things working against them:

• They may have a history of food insecurity or hunger - which causes them to have anxiety surrounding when they will be able to eat again.
• They may have a history of having food withheld as a punishment.
• They may be functioning developmentally at a much younger level than their chronological age - so while they look like a healthy 8 year old on the outside, inside they are a vulnerable little 4 year old who needs help and nurturing when it comes to feeding.
• They might be living in a foster or adoptive home that has different rules surrounding food, or different food preferences, than their family of origin. 
• They might be more sensitive to blood sugar spikes and drops, leading to behavioral problems, meltdowns, or exhaustion when they get hungry.
• They might be less sensitive to their body's cues, or have trouble interpreting that what they are feeling is hunger or thirst.

As we care for them, it is our job to set them up for success by doing our best to remove the anxiety surrounding food. I recently created a simple tool that has been very helpful in our home. It's a daily meal/snack schedule, which I laminated and hung in our dining room. Using wet-erase markers, I can fill it out each day with what we are having for breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, and bedtime snack. Seeing everything laid out like that not only helps my kids feel less anxious by knowing what they can expect, but I've found that it also keeps ME on track with making sure I fit in all of the snacks they need to keep going.

Click on the image above to download a printable copy of the daily meal plan. Hopefully this can help some other families as well!

As a side note, I do still keep snacks freely available for them to grab themselves at any time - that is what is referred to on the bottom of the menu as the "yes box." It's just a simple bin on the bottom shelf of my pantry that's stocked with fruit cups, crackers, granola bars, raisins, applesauce pouches, and other quick healthy snacks. 

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