The Best Way to a Kid’s Stomach is Through the Heart: How to Use Kids’ Emotions to Form or Deform the Appetite

Oct 10, 2011 by

“L’appetit est la conscience du corps.”  (The appetite is the conscience of the body)

— Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo

If “the appetite is the conscience of the body,” a child’s appetite is, in theory, able to lead him to eat what is good and avoid what is bad.

The problem is that kids are born with raw, unformed appetites along with immature, uninstructed consciences.

A child “is born to love the good and to hate the evil, but he has no real knowledge of what is good and what is evil, . . . but yields himself to the steering of others,”  states educational reformer Charlotte Mason.

Kids are…

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How we cured our son’s ADHD

Jan 20, 2010 by

Much of what I have to say about feeding children comes from my experience with my son, which I haven’t said much about here at “Sacred Appetite.”

Almost from birth, my son had symptoms: of what, we didn’t know. I later came to blame it all on him being put on antibiotics at birth and the hospital failing to give him the breast milk I was pumping faithfully while he couldn’t nurse because of the IV stuck in his head. I also wonder what role the immunizations he got as a tiny infant (who stayed home with his mom, risking no illnesses) might have played.

Starting early and continuing, he had asthma, insomnia, enuresis (a fancy word for bed-wetting), digestion-related ills, crusty eyes,…

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Foolish freedom: Why some kids refuse to eat, even to the point of harming themselves

Dec 17, 2009 by

CHILDREN CAN BE like sheep, or wild mice. - photo by Anna Migeon

“Leave them alone, and they will come home.” — Little Bo Peep

Sometimes a kid can be like a wild mouse, according to some lab studies of mice. Though I oppose the conditioning of young humans with incentives as if they were rats in a lab, test animals’ reactions can sometimes illustrate something about why kids—or grownups—do what they do.

A group of wild mice was brought into a lab and taught to turn on their own cage lights. Given the choice between bright light, dim light or no light at all, the mice would always choose dim light. But whenever the dim light was switched on for them, they would run and change it to either bright light or no light.

In another test, the mice, who for their own good needed and wanted to run about eight hours a day, were given a wheel to run on and also…

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How to get kids to do what you want: Good deed its own reward

Dec 14, 2009 by

I hope the kids of San Antonio don’t hear that they might win an award if they do something nice in the next 60 days.

The San Antonio Police Department with the sponsorship of Valero Energy are handing out the first of 5,000 coupons for free drinks at local Valero convenience stores to kids they catch doing a good deed.

These rewards will be less detrimental if they come as a surprise after the fact than if dangled in front of kids’ noses like a carrot on a string.

It’s a saving grace also that the pay off for a selfless act is so low. The bigger the carrot offered, the more…

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The habit of paying attention (or not) and the role of eating in forming it (or not)

Dec 4, 2009 by

Would you say your child is usually:

• Focused on what she is supposed to be doing at any given moment?

• Fully present or mind elsewhere?

• Interested in what you or teachers present to him?

• Bored and disengaged by school work or healthy meals?

• Easily distracted and has difficulty in paying attention?

• Ready to do what it’s time to do?

Maybe it’s not just those preservatives and food additives that are causing attention deficit in kids. Whether you child generally pays attention and is interested in what’s going on or whether instead he is habitually inattentive and bored can be largely a matter of training and habit. Functioning in a continual state of distraction instead of focus can be the result of conditioning.

It depends on a few simple differences in tactics, including at the dinner table.

In what ways are we building the habit of not paying attention in our children through…

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