“Stay in Your Seat!” Teaching Your Toddler How To Eat With the Family
My 2 year old daughter, Annabelle, is a grazer. She doesn’t eat a meal in one sitting. Instead, she takes a few bites, leaves it, plays, and comes back for a few a bites more. It can take her 3 hours to eat 5 chicken nuggets. If we are at a park she will carry her sandwich around with her. Of course, I know this is a problem that I partly helped to create.
I want my daughter to eat and if that means that it took her a few hours to eat, so be it. Right when she wakes up from her nap I would serve her dinner, so she could get a head start. It never seemed like she ate enough, so I let the problem begin by letting her eat whenever she wanted.
We also had a problem with her easily getting in and out of her seat. For a while booster seats and high chairs became like hot molten lava and she wouldn’t touch them. So we let her sit on her knees in a regular chair. When we went to restaurants she didn’t want to stay seated at all. I was so worried one night that she was going to touch her tomato sauce covered hands on our neighbor’s white shirt. We got a booth whenever possible to corral her.
Last week my husband and I were ready to tackle this issue. We have 2 goals to teach our 2 year old.
1. To learn to eat with the family.
2. To stay seated while she ate.
We were ready to stick out whatever tantrums and protests she threw. She needs to learn how to eat with the family.
- We bought a new booster seat
The first thing I did was buy a new booster seat. I decided on a backless seat that does not have a tray. I don’t need the back to support her and she uses the table like the grown-ups to eat. The seat I bought is a Safety First brand for $10.50 at Wal-Mart.
That evening I attached the booster seat to a chair. I had her help me attach the seat. Next, I got some Disney Princess stickers and let her put a few on her seat wherever she chose. The whole time I kept saying in a very enthusiastic tone, “This is Annabelle’s Princess Chair!”
- Everyone eats together
That same day I waited to feed her dinner until my husband and I could sit down with her. She was so hungry she was already sitting in her chair, before I even served dinner. She stayed seated the whole time! She even ate almost everything I gave her and stayed in her seat until after we left the table. The booster seat was a big hit! Apparently, a part of her problem was that she wasn’t comfortable sitting at the table in a regular chair. Now she calls her seat “Annabelle’s Chair.”
- Use the “All Done” rule
In addition to the chair, I have reinstated the “All Done” rule. When she was a baby I taught her the sign for “all done.” Now we ask her if she is all done. If she says yes, we immediately take her out of her seat, wash her hands, and put her plate away. I will let her have liquids after dinner, but after that there is no more until the next meal. She remembers this rule from before, so it hasn’t really been an issue.
We were ready for tantrums and protests, but didn’t get any. What a thrill it is to have a tackled a behavioral problem successfully. I know that all them won’t be this easy, but I am counting my blessings for this one!
Have you had a problem with getting your toddler to stay seated? Do they eat really slowly? What problem are you currently tackling?
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Nice job!!
Wow! Great job Amanda. I will have to try some of your ideas. Our boys never sit through an entire meal. The only time they will really eat is when they are confined in their carseats. Horrible habit, I know. Thanks for the tips.
The problem we are tackling (and have been for months) is keeping the 4 year old in bed. There is lots of interrupted sleep in our household right now.
We follow the same rules- everyone always eats together, always at the same time each day; we stay seated; when you’re done, you’re done.
And I think that is why we have always had such an easy time taking our kids out to restaurants. (they tend not to act like some of the screaming little ones that everyone dreads to sit next to)
Thank you – great article. Our son is 15 months old and just starting to work on some of these ideas.
That is so funny that I came across this post tonight,because I could have written it myself. My son is 2 and the progression you wrote about is exactly the same. We finally, this week, bought a new booster for dinner. I don’t mind letting him be finished when he says he is, but the rest of the fam (grandparents and even my hubs) doesn’t like it because they like to treat him with dessert and my rule is if he doesn’t eat dinner he doesn’t get anything else that night. It still is a struggle, but worth it now versus later!! Boundaries and manners are good for kids to learn, earlier the better. I am hopeful that he “gets” it soon! And we can move on to the next toddler lesson : )!
We also struggle with this one! Our 20 month old uses the booster seat and stays in it until everyone is done and bath is drawn. Our 4 year old learned the hard way! I’m embarassed to say that we didn’t always sit at the table for dinner when he was young (mostly b/c we didn’t have a dining table!). We just got a table about 1.5 years ago and it was hard for him. We just really interacted with him during his meals and encouraged him and praised him when he stayed in his seat. He still sometimes likes to get up and run to get something during meals, but it is tremendously better now! Great tips!
Our 4 year old foster son had this problem – he would never stay seated at the dinner table. As far as dinner time goes, I think that he never actually ate dinner at a table with his bio family, and I think he ate whenever he felt like it – everything was on HIS time, and he spent a lot of time alone.
It sounds a little mean, but his therapist recommended that we set a timer for dinner, and when the timer went off then dinner was over and he could leave the table, and whatever food was left was immediately picked up. Dinner was over. End of story.
We found that ten minutes was a good time for him – it gave him plenty of time to eat (which is weird because I like a lot longer than that), and expecting him to do anything stationary for more than ten minutes was asking for a meltdown. Ten minutes was the longest he could display good behavior while sitting in the same spot, so we wouldn’t push him further than that. We weren’t trying to push him, we just wanted him to eat on a schedule.
He went without food quite a few times because the timer would go off and he had refused to eat or refused to stay in his seat, which usually ended with chairs being thrown across the room or food being thrown on the floor, but that’s another story
If he got up from his seat, then dinner was over as well. He eventually learned that if he didn’t eat dinner when I gave it to him…well, then he didn’t get to eat at all.
It sounds harsh, but this kid had to learn that he was on our time and not his time, and that when we said “If you get up then dinner is over” that we meant it and we would follow through with it – every time, every day. Forever and ever, amen
We weren’t denying him food – it was his choice.
While this is probably not the approach that most traditional families would take, it worked well for our foster son. Sometimes it was really hard to follow through with, but it paid off in the end. He became rather happy with his timer, and on his good days he was so happy to finish dinner before the timer went off. We miss him.