Getting
your child to eat the food they’re served is not the easiest task in the world.
While children are busy watching
something or playing on an app, they’re distracted enough to quite literally,
gobble up their food.
And not just that…
Most of us adults love having some “quiet
freedom” from our children’s constant noisiness at the table, be it at home or
in a restaurant.
Here’s
why using mobile phones while eating is the worst thing for your child:
1. Leads to severe
addiction:
Here’s a startling fact — research
shows that 90% of children interact with smartphones even before they turn 2.
And this is scary because children at
this age (and the early years in general) should be engaged creatively to
receive maximum brain development.
Handing over a screen, even if it’s
just during mealtime, can be a huge mistake.
Because what starts off as showing
the child YouTube rhymes or Peppa Pig while eating, will slowly turn into a
habit that the child finds hard to break away from.
And once this habit forms, the child
won’t even want to try to escape from it.
This behavior of not being able to
disconnect from their smartphone may also creep into other aspects of their
lives and can lead to a severe addiction.
2. Eating too much or too less:
Children learn to eat in accordance with these
external distracting cues.
They tend to eat a lot more slowly, lazily, and in
an uninterested manner than if they focused on the food.
Increased focus on eating
and the dining table environment will lead to your child relishing the food
they’re eating as well as eating exactly as much as they need and not any more
or less.
So, if under-eating or overeating is a problem your child has, it may come
down to this root cause.
Eating distractedly can cause them to overeat and
eating extremely slowly because of the distraction can make them under-eat.
3. Not chewing properly:
Eating distractedly can also result in your child not chewing properly. Swallowing pieces
of food that haven’t been chewed up properly can be a choking hazard and can
also lead to indigestion and even an upset stomach.
4. Lack of interaction with family members:
Another important reason
to keep the screens at bay while at the table is mere interaction.
How much time do you
spend in a day, seated with your family while really interacting with them?
Think about it.
In most modern day
families, the answer would be ‘not much’.
Making meal time a
collective activity that your family is engaged in teaches your child the
importance of keeping in touch with family and can give you details about your
children’s lives and interests as they’re growing up.
This directly helps in
strengthening the bond you have with them.
Looking at it from
another perspective, if you were to hand your child a screen during meal time,
the kid learns that interacting while being seated right beside your family
members for an extended period of time is unimportant.
This may lead the child
to believe that the family ‘doesn’t talk much’ and this sort of behavior
can be seen constantly repeating itself on family trips and events.
The child can tend to use
a smart-phone to avoid interaction with family members and can develop an idea
that he/she simply does not get along with their family.
So what now?
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