Why should we not reward or punish our children with food?

In consultation I find that fathers sometimes punish or reward their children through food. "If you do not 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'll give you a cookie ”,“ if you don't do your homework today you will have to have dinner vegetable".

Also on many occasions we fill our children's boredom with cookies, popcorn or sweets, that is, 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 others as positive. This type of punishment is a serious mistake that can lead to problems in the long term. We will be conditioning the behaviors to the privilege of eating a sweet or simply eating.

• Related article: "What is punishment in psychology and how is it used?"

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 prize that is within a negotiation, such as choosing dessert. This can be a privilege that we can give to our son, who chooses the weekend between three desserts that we offer him.

We need 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 son is restless, we cannot give him a cookie so that he can hold out for a while longer without "bothering", if our son is crying in the middle from a supermarket we cannot give him a cookie to calm him down, if our son is bored, the solution is not to give him some little worms ...

With this act we are sending our son different implicit messages: "I am not available for you, your discomfort bothers me and I do not know how to manage it, mom or dad are only okay with you when you are well. The solution is to eat because that way you calm down "... We end up fostering emotional hunger in the long term, increasing the risk of being overweight and feeding.

• You may be interested: "Emotional hunger: what is it and what can be done to combat it"

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 the negative emotional states of our children.

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

How will a child who has calmed down through food manage his emotions as an adult? Probably in any situation that is overwhelming or for which you do not have the necessary management resources, what you will do is calm the discomfort by going to the fridge.

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

If we learn from childhood that eating calms, it will be a very difficult cycle to break. Using sweets or processed as prizes we are not helping the little ones. They are unhealthy foods.

If we want the behavior of our children to be good, it is best not to make a relationship between the behavior and this type of food, since we will be giving special importance to this type of food. If we want your behavior to improve, our role is to explain and teach them why to behave in one way or another and how. The best reward will be the verbal and emotional reinforcement.

An inappropriate 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 neither does it favor the child's eating. What will happen is that a greater tantrum will appear when the child has to eat that dish that he likes so little. In addition, if they eat this type of food as a punishment we will get even less that they like them, since they will become somewhat aversive.

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

If we associate the misconduct or behavior of our child with a punishment in which he has to eat some food that she does not like it, he will associate that food as something unpleasant and negative, so he will not want to incorporate that food into his diet of her. On the contrary it will happen with the prizes like trinkets and sweets. 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 becomes a pleasant time with the family, in which it is not colored by arguments or is a moment of punishment. In this way, no negative associations will be made to food intake.

Conclution

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

When setting a consequence, it is important that the chosen consequence is related to the behavior that the child has initiated. For example, imagine that our son has started to play with a bottle of water which he has spilled all over the floor and we punish him by saying that tonight he will eat green beans. The child gets angry, cries, screams, while we collect all the spilled water.

Also, at dinner time and when you have to eat the beans, the tantrum will return. What has the child learned from the situation? Has the initial problem been fixed? Have we taught the child what to do in this situation? In such a situation, the child will not find a relationship between the behavior performed and the consequence.

It is important that the consequence be established immediately to the behavior and are related. In this case, if the child has spilled all the water, we will have to teach him what to collect and how to do it. That something that has been fun for him turns into something a little more tedious like collecting. In this case, we will be teaching the child to repair those negative behaviors that have been set in motion.