Baby throwing food on the floor

How to Stop a Baby From Throwing Food — Malina Malkani

Babies use their hands and mouths to explore the world...

They often eat with pleasure and have no problem smearing food all over themselves and the table. I find it to be such a delight to watch a baby discover new flavors and textures.

Then-

Splat.

There goes the food onto the floor.

Is your baby throwing food? It may help to hear that food throwing during infancy is common, although that doesn’t make dealing with it any easier!

Between a baby smeared with spaghetti sauce and a floor covered in noodles, you already have enough to clean up without having to deal with thrown food. And, providing nourishment isn't the only benefit your baby gets from feedings. Meals offer opportunities to teach table manners, positive eating behaviors, and how to eat at the table with adults (so you can confidently take them to restaurants!)

In this article, I'll give you tips on how to stop your baby from throwing food. But, first, let's dig in on why your 6 - 12 month old babies tend to throw food in the first place.

Why do Babies Throw Food on the Floor?

Unable to hold food or utensils

By 6 to 12 months, babies can hold their heads up, sit on their own, and self-feed bites of food. However, some babies haven't yet developed the fine motor skills they need to hold utensils or pick up tiny foods like Cheerios. As a result, a frustrated baby may push the food onto the floor.

Not hungry

Food throwing is sometimes a baby’s way of communicating that they are not hungry or have finished eating.

Infants can't verbally communicate with caregivers, so they express their needs for cuddles, food and thirst through sounds and movements. Just because it's mealtime doesn't necessarily mean your baby is hungry. So, sometimes they let you know they don't want to eat the best way they know how - by throwing food.

Starting to learn cause and effect

Around 8 months old, babies learn about relationships between events. For example, they realize that they can do simple actions to get a result, including getting a reaction from others.

Babies notice that they can manipulate objects to make them do things, such as banging to make a sound, pressing a button on a toy that leads to action, or throwing food to hear the sounds and sight it makes when it lands. They are also learning what they can do to get your reaction.

Overwhelmed by large portions

A large plate full of food puts a lot of pressure on little appetites and bellies, especially while introducing a new food. Even a hungry baby might reject a large plate of food.

Where do they start? Are they going to be forced to eat it all?

Typically power struggles start a little later, during toddlerhood. However, babies try to express what they want and don't like, including during meal time and often by throwing food.

It’s fun

Throwing food on the floor and watching mommy retrieve it might be a game to your baby. They’ve discovered that they can do something that causes you to do something.

Eating is a sensory experience for little ones. Babies explore different textures with their mouths and hands. So, it's fun to smear purees all over their face and high chair tray. Watching babies get so much pleasure from experimenting with food can be such a joy, despite the inevitable clean up later.

9 Tips to Stop a Baby from Throwing Food

It's never too early to start teaching age-appropriate table manners. Babies learn how to behave in social situations through parent modeling and gentle corrections.

Infants don’t have the verbal language yet to learn from what they’re told. So parents need to find creative ways to teach infants. Here are a few tips to help you get to the bottom of your baby’s food throwing.

1. Pick the right highchair

…and/or make comfortable seating for baby a priority during meals. There are many different highchairs on the market, but some make seating more comfortable and less frustrating for babies.

Look for highchairs that can keep your baby seated upright and that an adjustable footrest to support your baby’s feet. This position helps them stay alert and comfortable during feedings and can drastically reduce food throwing. A high chair that's easy to clean is a bonus for you!

You can also try removing the high chair tray and pushing your baby’s highchair right up to the table. When the baby is seated at the table, throwing food on the floor is more challenging, and babies generally are more engaged with others at the table and less likely to throw food as a result.

2. Wait until your baby is hungry

Hungry babies are more alert and interested in food at meal times.

A structured but flexible baby feeding schedule is one way to help you avoid the trap of offering snacks all day and ending up with a baby who is more interested in throwing than eating at mealtimes. (Note: there is no need for the schedule to be rigid, and we never want to limit a baby's food if they're hungry).

Whether or not you follow a feeding schedule, you and your baby can still benefit from responsive feeding techniques. Responsive feeding is a feeding style that encourages parents to recognize and respond to their baby's hunger and fullness cues.

3. Don’t react

Let meal times be a positive experience!

A parent's feeding and parenting style can affect a child's food choices and behaviors for years to come. Not reacting to your baby's food throwing behaviors is one way to help create a positive mealtime environment. For example, if your baby throws food on the floor, leave it there without reacting, getting upset or picking it up.

Studies show that an authoritative feeding style is associated with the most positive outcomes for children, including better academic performance in school. The authoritative style encourages children to eat through supportive behaviors. Parents that use this feeding style provide rules and sensitively explain the rules.

4.

Serve small portions

Offering a large portion of food or introducing too many new foods at once can be overwhelming and a recipe for food throwing. Set a realistic feeding expectation for your baby by providing small amounts of food and introducing new foods sensitively.

Young children only need small bites of food, so making every bite count with nutrient-rich foods is essential. To help illustrate this concept, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends that caregivers avoid giving infants and toddlers foods and drinks that have added sugars and/or are high in sodium.

5. Let them feed themselves

You can teach babies to use utensils when they eat solid foods around 6 months old. At first, they’ll probably use the spoon to play with instead of to eat.

Baby-led weaning encourages age-appropriate self-feeding. Parents can offer finger foods and other first foods babies can self-feed and swallow. Babies have the skills to consume finger foods at around 5-7 months old.

6. Switch up the plate

Sometimes babies like to throw the plate instead of pieces of food. Try serving the food on the highchair tray or use a plate or bowl with suction on the bottom, so it stays on the table or tray.

If your baby empties the dish because they want to play with the dish, try giving them a clean dish to play with and allow them to eat off the highchair tray.

7. Teach your baby or toddler to use a “no-thank-you bowl”

A "no-thank-you bowl" is an empty bowl placed on or near the baby's tray during meal time, meant for any unwanted foods. Redirect your baby when you suspect that food throwing is coming and say something like, “...we put food we don't want in the ‘no-thank-you bowl!’"⁠⁠

The concept of a "no-thank-you bowl" can provide an extra tool to help reduce food throwing, helps reduce anxiety in babies who don't know what to do with unwanted food, allows babies to honor hunger cues by providing a designated place for food they cannot finish⁠⁠, and still allows babies to explore texture by touching and moving unwanted food to the "no-thank-you bowl"

8.

Teach your baby sign language

Throwing food may be the only way your baby knows how to express when they’re full.

An infant's ability to understand cause and effect can help them learn a new behavior. Teach your baby to use sign language by demonstrating simple signs they can do to signal when they want more or are done with their meal.

9. Put the dog in another room during meals

If you have one, consider putting the dog in another room during times when you are feeding your baby. There is nothing more fun for babies than throwing food to their furry siblings and watching their dog’s delight in sharing the meal. Unfortunately that fun can be so entertaining that it encourages and reinforces food throwing behaviors more and more over time.

Final Thoughts on Baby Food Throwing

Babies are messy eaters! No matter what, there will be a certain amount of food on the tray and floor to clean up afterward.

In my experience as a mom and pediatric dietitian, the best advice is not to react, feed babies when hungry, and offer small amounts of food at a time. A hungry baby will usually eat the one piece of food they have before them instead of throwing it.

If you’re getting ready to start your baby on solids, download my FREE Baby-Led Feeding Essential Checklist to make sure you have everything you need to get started. You might also want to check out my new online course for parents, based on my best-selling book which will walk you through the whole process of starting solids using a baby-led approach.

Alternatively, if your baby is almost ready to start solids and you’re looking for someone you trust to map out the entire first 12 weeks of your baby’s solid food feeding journey, check out my new Safe & Simple 12 Week Meal Plan! Over 30 recipes, weekly shopping lists, tons of balanced baby meals, a complete plan for top allergen introduction, & lots of guidance (with photos) on how to safely serve each food.

And if you're looking for personalized nutrition support for yourself, your babies and/or your kids, I am currently accepting new clients in my virtual private practice. Looking forward to meeting you online…

How to stop your baby from throwing food off the high chair

Photo: iStockphoto

The first few times your baby grabs food off her high-chair tray and throws it on the floor, you laugh, pick it up, smile and say in your gentlest voice, "No throwing, honey." You might even snap a picture because it’s so adorable. But when the cuteness wears off, and food throwing becomes a game—one where you're the loser—it can become frustrating (the mess!) and worrisome (there's more food on the floor and wall than in your baby’s mouth!).

Food throwing is a popular topic in my nutrition counselling practice; most parents deal with it at some point with their little ones. I always reassure my clients that it’s normal—most kids go through a food throwing phase in their early years. Mine sure did. Just the other day, I lunged towards our highchair to catch a full bowl of uneaten spaghetti from my one-year-old’s hands (I was unsuccessful) while simultaneously exclaiming, “Nooooooo!”. So I definitely understand the frustration.

In many cases, food throwing is a result of learning how to control and coordinate food, and developing fine motor skills. In fact, in babies ages six to eight months, food throwing is rarely intentional. For older babies (nine to 12 months), it becomes an exercise in learning cause-and-effect. What will happen if I throw this bowl full of oatmeal? Will it make a noise? Where will it go? Will it come back? Fast-forward to toddlerhood, and food throwing becomes an intentional attempt to trigger a reaction—positive or negative—and can easily turn into a power struggle, creating stress at mealtimes for everyone.

Here are five tips to stop food throwing, and keep family meals positive (and as mess-free as possible!):

1. Don’t react

Babies and toddlers are natural attention seekers who thrive off a reaction. To avoid encouraging the behaviour, do your best to stay calm and neutral. Pick up the food (but don’t return it to the tray or table) and say something like “Food belongs on the tray” or “Food stays on the table. ”

Be consistent with the phrase you use, and be sure to use one that indicates what you do want to happen, as opposed to a phrase like, “We don’t throw food,” which indicates what you don’t want to happen. By not returning food to the tray, you’re teaching your baby that once it’s thrown, it’s gone—they learn quickly!

2. Get the whole family on board

Talk to older siblings about why it’s important not to react to food throwing. As a mom of three, I know that my two older kids are often tempted to egg on my youngest when he throws food. It becomes their mealtime entertainment! But this attention fuels the food-throwing fire and usually intensifies it. Make a family plan to stay really calm and not react when the young one throws food. Make it a challenge to see who can be the calmest.

3. Consider ditching the tray

When older babies are learning about gravity and can see over the edge of a tray, it makes the food throwing game more enticing . The fact is, watching the dog scarfing down a piece of meat or the marinara sauce splattering all over the floor is fun! Consider removing the tray, and pushing the highchair up to the table so it’s harder to see the floor. Your baby will now be focused more on his food and interacting with other family members, which is less isolating and includes them more in the family meal. Bonus: It also offers more opportunity to model healthy eating.

4. Put the dog outside

When you’re a baby, what’s more fun than throwing food and watching the dog gobble it up and beg for more? If you can, let the dog out during mealtimes (or even just remove him from the kitchen) when you have little ones in the food-throwing stage.

5. Take it as a sign

Flinging food might very well be your baby’s last-resort effort to tell you “I’m full!” It’s easy to have a feeding agenda—you serve an amount of food that you believe is right for your baby, so you expect (and in some cases pressure) your child to eat it. When he turns his head, tightens his lips or pushes food away, it’s a sign that he’s full, and you need to respect that, and let your child determine how much he will eat at each meal and snack. Too often, well-meaning parents don’t recognize these signs, or choose to ignore them, by pushing food closer to their baby or following the baby’s mouth with a spoon, because they want to make sure that their baby receives enough nutrition.

Babies are born intuitive eaters—they know how much they need and when to stop, so we need to trust this and not pressure them to eat more. By offering five to six eating opportunities daily (meals and snacks), with lots of variety, we can rest assured that our little ones will meet their nutrition needs over the period of a week. Serve portions that aren’t large or overwhelming (this in itself can trigger food-throwing), offer more if your child indicates so, and take the pressure off. This will make for a much more pleasant eating experience, and nurtures your child’s natural ability to eat intuitively.

If you can weather the food-throwing storm, stay calm and focus on teaching your baby or toddler what you want them to do (keep food on the tray or table), it will pass and mealtimes will remain positive and low-stress. And you can invite the dog back in post-meal for clean up!

This article was originally published on May 26, 2019

Why a child throws everything on the floor: the root cause and consequences

Hello, dear readers!

In today's article I would like to discuss with you a vital topic, why does a child throw everything on the floor? And after all, without exception, all children do this, I decided to figure it out, because for some reason they do it.

In my example, I experienced such a period. I do not remember exactly what time it started, but it lasted a very, very long time.

Everything flew to the floor: clothes from the sofa, dishes from the table, and everything that could be thrown or thrown.

If you're lucky, everything ends up on the floor, and if you're less lucky, it will fly into you.

For someone this period comes earlier, for someone later, but it definitely comes. But not all parents feel the same way.

Well, all right, first things first:

At the age of one, or thereabouts, it is different for everyone, children move on to the next stage of their development.

The little man learns how to quit, how to clench his fingers, which still do not obey him well. How to make the throw itself, when to unclench them - the most difficult work is going on, and the throw is practiced again and again.

They learn about the world by throwing objects, thus they learn their properties.

You may have noticed that when throwing from a children's table, the child usually (but not always) carefully watches the fall.

How will a thrown toy behave: will it roll or stop immediately?, or will it jump?, what sound is made when it falls?, how will the spilled liquid flow?

And for some reason, mother's reaction is always different, so mother immediately gave a toy, then not immediately and says something.

And the next time he doesn't want to give back at all, he just keeps talking and talking again. The child observes both you and your behavior.

He experiences a sea of emotions about this. And how will this fall, and how will that fall?

And so on ad infinitum until your baby grows up. Everything happens at a subconscious level, the child is not yet aware of the actions taken.

And all the more he becomes nervous if his father suddenly stops his studies.

But of course, all this brings countless troubles to moms and dads.

Don't scold the young researcher, don't forget to explain why you shouldn't do it, because now mom will mop the floor, but she could play with you.

Talk, explain that you can't throw porridge - its place is in the plate, you can throw the ball and throw it not at the table, but in the nursery or on the street.

In general, it is possible to throw, but only certain objects, and in a certain place. The child will understand much better than you that you can’t throw this, but you can throw something else.

When the child is a little older, you can explain and show that you can throw things properly.

For example, dirty socks in the laundry basket; pillow on a sofa or chair; balls in the ring; used tetrapack in the trash can.

Teach your child to clean, the sooner you start to teach him to do this, the sooner he will learn to do it on his own.

Place fewer dishes in front of your child at the table when eating, so that he is less likely to throw something.

When my son did not walk on his own for about a year, but only holding on to the sofa, all the toys from the sofa inevitably flew to the floor. Then I taught him to hold on to the sofa with one hand, and to bend down and pick up the thrown toy with the other.

Of course, at first he was surprised what his mother suggested, but a day later he even liked it and he began to do it himself. Sometimes it turned into a whole gymnastics: he would pick it up and immediately drop it again, and he could do this several times and was very pleased.

Alternatively, you can fix toys. For example, in a car seat or on a dining table, in a stroller.

Do not forget to praise if the child does not quit. Be patient and ready to say the same thing over and over again 100 and 200 times.

Only then will the child finally get used to it and in no case do not deviate from the ban, otherwise everything will have to start all over again. You can read more about how to forbid a child here.

I hope the article was useful to you.

Go to the social. networks and write in the comments how your baby throws everything or does not throw.

See you soon!

Sincerely, Yulia Polonskaya

8 tips on how to wean a child from throwing things, objects and food

food. How to wean him from this habit? Read on UAUA.info.

Throwing things, objects, and food is a new and enjoyable skill for many children between the ages of 1.5 and 3. Unclenching the fingers and releasing the object requires fine motor skills of the fingers, as well as eye-hand coordination to not just drop the object, but throw it. No wonder your little one wants to practice this exciting skill! But your desire to wean your child from throwing things is also understandable.

Unbearable two-year-olds: what to do if a child at 2 years old does not obey and behaves badly

But you must remember that everything that happens after the throw is also very instructive. The child learns that everything he throws falls down, not up. He can't pronounce the word "gravity", but he can certainly watch it in action. If a child throws a ball, it bounces. If he tosses a plum, it breaks.

Of course, spaghetti flying around the kitchen or a pacifier that lands on the sidewalk will drive you crazy. But for a child, this is all pure pleasure.

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If a child does not throw a rock at a neighbor's window or aim directly at someone, threatening to bash their foreheads, they should not be scolded or punished. It is useless to try to get a child not to throw objects at that age. Instead of worrying about the action itself, limit your "throw" and "target" items.

Show your child what things or objects can be thrown

The child will quickly understand that throwing things, objects and food is impossible if many options are offered, what can and even needs to be thrown. The first is balls, of course. But other fun stuff too. For example, throwing pebbles into the river, a two-year-old will really like it, especially.

The idea is to make it clear that you can throw things, but only certain things at certain times in certain places. If a child throws something inappropriate, say, a shoe, calmly pick up the object and say that you can’t throw shoes, but you can throw a ball.

Stop Aggressive Object Throwing

What to do when a child throws what is impossible? At first, try to ignore it. If a child understands that your attention can be obtained simply by throwing something at someone, he will definitely do it again and again.

If your toddler often throws things at other kids, it's important to stick to the same tactic, as kids learn through repetition. If the child starts throwing things, say sternly: “it’s impossible, it hurts so much” and take the child aside for a time out for a while to make it clear what “No” means and that you need to cool down.

The main thing is that the timeout should last up to a minute (there is an unspoken rule, how many years - so many minutes) so that the child does not forget why he was stopped and torn away from what he was doing.

If you notice that the child begins to throw objects at other children because of anger, when he "crazes", explain that you need to express all your experiences in words.

It's okay if the child is judging by your tone or if you're upset by their behavior, but don't let the anger take over. Try not to yell at your child, and never hit him - even on the arm - to wean him from throwing things.

If the baby continues to rush and hurt further, and you have already tried in every possible way to wean him, you have no choice but to follow what falls into his hands.

Mom, I don't love you: what to do when a child is angry with parents

Attach toys to the rail in the stroller so your baby can't throw them

If your child is in a stroller or in a child seat in a car, attach a few toys so that he can easily reach them (carefully tie toys with strings or elastic bands, without leaving long ends, for safety).

The child will quickly discover that in addition to throwing toys, they can also be pulled back to him. Double the fun for your little one - make the job easier for you.

Clean the room with your child

Do not ask your child to collect everything that he has scattered. For this age, this task is too difficult. Get on your knees and do all the work together quickly and together, saying “Let's see how fast we collect all the cubes” or “help me find yellow M&Ms”.

Set a good example for your child

Do not neglect such things as simply throwing a pillow on the sofa as an example for the baby. On such subjects, you can just teach the child what you can throw and what you can’t. The next time he throws something “off the list” again, walk around the house and together toss socks in the basket, tissues in the bin, and toys in the toy box.

Sit nearby while the child eats

This period is quite "dirty" in terms of food intake. But to teach a child not to throw food, you can only sit next to him, and gently, but strictly let's understand that you should not do this every time the child swings at the throw. It is better to grab a hand or a plate in time than to crawl under the table later, collecting crumbs for dinner.

In addition, sitting next to you will make sure that the child chews food well, and not just swallows it in pieces.

If a child throws food, use children's safety utensils

Don't put your best china on the table when it's time for your baby to eat. Buy a set of unbreakable tableware for children with straws that can be attached to a table or high chair. Remember that this may save you from scattered dishes, but will not stop the child from trying to tear off the "stuck" plate or glass from the table.

If the child rushes to eat, feed him in small portions

If you put small portions in front of the baby and do not report the supplement until he finishes the contents of the plate, then he will be able to throw away less food.

No need to force the child to finish eating everything to the end. Most children don't throw food until they're full and bored.