Stephanymtr
commented
2 years ago Interesting! Generally, giving kids choices helps them feel like they have some power and control over what they do. I found some interesting articles like Early emerging system for reasoning about the social nature of food but unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any research articles directly related to this topic. Most of the Google results are about picky eaters. For instance, I bumped into short (aka useless) articles like Should I Let My Child Choose What Food to Eat? and learned that parents resort to letting their child choose what to eat to prevent them from becoming a picky eater, but letting a child freely decide what to eat might mean that he will stick to his favourite foods and be less likely to venture out to try new things. I understand you would only give Alex a choice between two foods and I did find news articles like Is Your Approach to Feeding Your Kids All Wrong? encouraging the idea of giving choices, but they don't go into details: Give kids real choices. Let your child have a say in what she eats by offering her a choice. Giving younger children two choices and older kids three options works well. You might ask, for instance, “Would you like an apple with peanut butter or crackers with peanut butter?”
iteles
nelsonic
Would it be interesting to allow the child a choice between two foods for one of his meals a day?
I'm thinking this could be a set of cards for each of:
First, it might be worth 1 pomodoro of research into giving babies choice in their food (if there's anything out there) - costs and benefits and whether there are specific anecdotal suggestions on how to do it at a young age (hello mommy blogs).