Respectful and Responsive Mealtimes

🕯Respectful and Responsive Mealtimes🕯

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As part of my training in Early Childhood, a number of years ago, I took a course called HENRY and trained to become a HENRY practitioner. It stands for Health, Exercise and Nutrition for the Really Young. The course centred about helping parents and carers instigate healthy habits around food, and therefore enabling children to have a positive relationship with food, enabling them to make healthy choices in life. It has been a valuable piece of training and speaks a great deal of common sense...common sense which now sometimes can get so lost and drowned out in today’s fast paced world.

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Food is the cornerstone of our social world..it’s the sustenance we need to survive. Globally every big life event from Birth to Death is marked by the sharing of food. Respectful and Responsive mealtimes ensure we are not only enabling children to form healthy eating habits..but we are also nurturing complex social skills, love, care, consideration and respect in them from day one. Mealtimes are anchors for our day and if we can keep them calm and respectful times - no matter what happens in the day we can try and foster a sense of rhythm and security for our children

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What are the elements of Respectful and Responsive mealtimes?

• Sitting down together free from distractions.

• Allowing children to be independent whenever possible in eating, helping prepare snacks and setting the table.

• Allowing babies and children to self feed - thereby recognising their own fullness and hunger cues.

• If you do feed a baby, feed them facing them rather than on your lap and look for fullness cues.

• Not using food as reward (e.g you have have a biscuit if you...)

• Not pandering to last minute meal requests (short order cooking)

• Always allowing fruit and yoghurt even if a child has not eaten their main meal.

• Creating an environment whereby children feel they can eat, chat, laugh and enjoy mealtimes as a space for socialisation and feeling good about themselves and their place in the world.

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How do you make mealtimes and snack times your anchor in a busy life?

Chinese New Year Nature Table and Lanterns

Our Seasonal Table for the Lunar New Year is taking shape and the children have enjoyed making these Chinese Lanterns from wool felt. The idea came from an activity we did at Steiner Parent and Child group at Christmas, using felt to make Christmas baubles, its so simple and fun, have a go!

You will need:

Wool batting for wet felting

Red wool roving for wet felting, I used orange too to make a tangerine at the same time (which are lucky at Lunar New Year)

A bowl

Soap

Warm water

A hand towel

Gold embroidery thread

Gold tassles (or tie 6 strands of embroidery thread together knot at the top and trim to desired length.

Red thread

A sewing needle

Apologies for the grid of images, I am trying to work out how to create a better gallery on this blog builder, for now this was the most simple way to display the images As they didn’t seem to be loaded in order every time I tried!

Have a go and bring some Lunar New Year Luck into your home! Don’t forget to tag #wedswillingttc

Free Chinese New Year Story

So I admit defeat. I haven’t been able to do my Chinese New Year guide as I have been too exhausted with the little ones new sleep pattern (or lack thereof). I did however manage to write the story, illustrate it and write a little rhyme! Going forward I would like to do this with ideas for puppets, creating puppet shows and actual storytelling if anyone would be interested in this?

For now you can click on the link here and download the story and song for free!

Have an amazing day everybody!