As much about parenting as feeding, this latest release from renowned childhood feeding expert Ellyn Satter considers the overweight child issue in a new way. Combining scientific research with inspiring anecdotes from her decades of clinical practice, Satter challenges the conventional belief that parents must get overweight children to eat less and exercise more. In the long run, she says, making them go hungry and forcing them to be active makes children preoccupied with food, prone to overeating, turned off to activity, and likely to gain too much weight. Trust is a central theme here: children must be able to trust parents to provide as much food as they need to satisfy their appetites; parents must trust children to eat only as much as they need. Satter provides compelling evidence that, if parents do their jobs with respect to feeding, children are remarkably capable of knowing how much to eat.
Early in her 40 years endeavors as a parent and feeding- and family therapist, Ellyn Satter concluded that trying to get children to eat and weigh does more harm than good. Children become whining food sneaks, siblings become spying tattletales, parents become police officers and children get fatter, not thinner. In Your Child s Weight, Satter considers babies through adolescents and shares her evidence- and experience-based discoveries about what does work. Satter is the internationally acclaimed author of best-selling books including Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family.