Do Not Give Chocolates to Calm Your Child’s Tantrums: Here’s Why

Chocolate might calm tantrums temporarily, but it can have long-term impacts on children's emotional health and eating habits.

Highlights:

Using food to manage tantrums can foster unhealthy emotional eating in children
It can disrupt emotional regulation and lead to poor coping skills
Experts recommend non-food-based strategies to manage children's emotions

Managing a child’s tantrums is one of the biggest challenges parents face. Whenever it is the child interrupting your work or calling for things they do not need, the case degrades to being incredibly stressful. Many parents will walk up to their children and immediately spank or slap them to try and get them to calm down, or even feed them chocolates ().

However, new findings show the dark side of this behavior that may lead to adverse consequences on the child’s emotional and eating patterns.

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‘Did You Know?
Using chocolate to calm tantrums may lead to emotional overeating. #parenting #medindia’

Food Control and Emotional Health

An empirical research published in the Appetite journal analyzed a specific incentive type, food, especially sweet items, for managing a child’s emotions. The study conducted by the researchers from the University of Florida addressed the effects of this practice with an emphasis on preschool children. The implications of the presented results show that providing candies for comfort could promote low quality emotional regulation and lead to beneficial patterns of emotional eating.

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The Problem with Child Food Control Practices

Cognitive/strategic control is meant to force the child to do something or change his/her emotions using forceful or manipulative power by the caregivers. Regarding food, this often involves the employment of sweetened foods to motivate, divert, or console, especially in situations of tragic occurrences.

It was established that children whose parents used food in this manner had difficulties in emotional self-control. Again, instead of mastering better healthy ways of dealing with feelings such as anger, or feeling sad, these children fed on food. Such conduct is realized as emotional eating, which may cause lifelong problems like childhood obesity or eating disorders.

Additionally, adults whose parents let them eat food as a form of consolation are most likely to have an unhealthy attitude towards food as a substance necessary for the body but as a drug. Such a course may be maintained throughout adulthood leading to poor dieting patterns.

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Emotional Regulation and Overeating in Children

In the study, Coercive control practices by parents to nutrition have effects based on worse emotion regulation and high levels of emotional overeating for preschoolers. The parents were questioned on the measures often taken, involving food, to address the child’s temper tantrum, with special reference to sweet foods.

The results showed a clear correlation: children with parents who used food to regulate their feelings had lower scores in emotional regulation compared to other kids. These children were not only emotional overeaters more often than other children but also had higher levels of emotional dysregulation in terms of recognizing and verbally labeling emotions. This could further lead to anxiety or depression as the child develops making this a difficult hurdle for parents to overcome.

Notably, the study again showed that emotional control while handling foods was a cross-sectional phenomenon which did not bound by socioeconomic or cultural class.

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How Best to Handle Children Involved in Emotional Eating

It just reasons that parents would want to find a fix to a crying child and the experts provide better ways of dealing with anger without turning to food. Here are some strategies to consider:

Acknowledge Emotions: It is helpful to teach children emotional self-acceptance and, thereby, accept their feelings as well. Understanding those emotions leads them to learn how to overcome such feelings contrary to binge-eating.
Offer Non-Food Rewards: Instead of offering treats as a reward or trying to distract the child, try giving other rewards such as more playtime, games, or a sticker chart. Healthy choices do not necessarily mean that they continue to eat all the food rewards that they want to.
Promote Healthy Eating Habits: To reduce hunger, obesity, and related ailments, promote healthy eating and steadiness of meals. Parents should be examples to their kids because when you see your parents eating healthy food, you are likely to follow the same.
Teach Self-Regulation: It is to teach children how to cope with these most important feelings. They include methods such as breathtaking, counting to ten, or finding a quieter place in order to reduce their stress without having to seek solace in food.
Seek Professional Help if Needed: If the problem turns chronic, it may be necessary to see a child psychologist or a dietician. Help from a professional can talk about the underlying issues of emotional eating and what may be done to improve how one manages emotions.

Despite the fact that feeding the kid with chocolates to stop the tantrum may be easier in the short-run it has severe repercussions on the child’s emotional well-being and a repertoire of unhealthy eating habits. Evaluating the study, the significance of the use of food and its effects on emotions, particularly the relationship between subjects and objectification of emotions, as well as the objectification of food as a form of unstable and unhealthy consumption, are underlined.

Parents are responsible for leading their children to become better individuals by using better methods to moderate their emotions. Moving from passivity to activity, prohibited foods, and love handles, parents can model and teach their children about the health advantages of self-care, and emotional coping capable of maintaining good body health and well-being.

Reference:

Effects of sugar on aggressive and inattentive behavior in children with attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity and normal children - (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1945637/)

Source-Medindia