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.
Ellyn Satter, MS, RD, LCSW, BCD is an internationally recognized authority on eating and feeding. A family therapist and feeding and eating specialist, Satter has a private psychotherapy practice in Madison, Wisconsin. Her books, journal and magazine articles, teaching materials, seminars and media interviews have made her well-known to the lay public, professionals and the media as the leading authority on nutrition and feeding of infants and children of all ages.
Satter's stated mission is to revolutionize feeding and eating. Her unconventional advice? Do what comes naturally. "As long as adults do their jobs with feeding, children do a good job with eating. They intuitively eat the right amount of food to grow well. They naturally push themselves along to learn to like new foods. We did too, at one time. We did, that is, until it was educated out of us by well-meaning adults and misguided, puritanical rules about eating." Satter knows whereof she speaks, given her 40 years' experience helping people of all ages with their eating and with feeding their children.
Satter's clear and vivid explanations of normal and distorted eating and feeding have made her a popular interviewee and speaker. The author of the Division of Responsibility in Feeding (parents are responsible for the what, when and where of feeding, children are responsible for the how much and whether of eating), Satter has led nutrition, health and mental health professionals as well as the general public to adopt wise and emotionally healthy approaches to feeding and eating.
Satter's books are valued by both professional and lay readers as authoritative, practical, humorous and entertaining. Your Child's Weight: Helping Without Harming (Kelcy Press) recommends solving the problem of children overweight throughout the growing-up years by "doing the opposite of what seems right...feeding children rather than restricting them." Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense (Bull Publishing) helps parents observe and understand their children and translate that insight into good feeding. Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family (Kelcy Press) teaches fast, efficient, delicious and nutritious food management for the "thinking cook." How to Get Your Kid to Eat...But Not Too Much (Bull Publishing) details feeding and solving feeding problems, birth through adolescence.
