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How to feed your kid?
I found this interesting interview of Dr. Chapin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, where she tells of her experience parenting while doing fieldwork in Sri Lanka. The simple act of feeding your child can be interpreted in a variety ways depending on the cultural context. While she would encourage, urge, and, ultimately, bribe her child to finish eating his meal himself, Sri Lankan mothers would simply switch to feeding their child themselves over a longer period of time. They would keep on popping rice balls in the child's mouth until the plate was empty... be it 30 minutes or an hour later, be it in the dining room or the living room.
Chasing small kids with platefuls of food is common practice here in Cambodia as well. Every day I see nannies act as mobile feeders, chasing after their charges with bowls of rice and whatnot. 'Since toddlers tend to have notoriously short attention spans, it's better to let the wild little things do their thing and provide nutrition half-unnoticed,' seems to be the idea. The best example of this in practice has been a particular nanny-toddler combo where the nanny squirts rice porridge into the 2-year olds mouth. Equipment required for this method: syringe (those ones used for liquid oral meds - note, no needle!!), bowl of sloppy rice, a quick-squirting hand, and a wandering toddler. This squirting takes place everywhere and anywhere... inside, outside, you name it. From my observations I'd say the boy seems to be developing just fine. For parental sanity's sake, though, I think having a paid employee do this is key! As for myself, I don't chase and I haven't done much squirting beyond medical purposes but I have to admit I have now started providing my older son with breakfast in bed... so I can sleep while he eats, i.e. Sleep-Led Parenting ;)
How to feed your kid?
I found this interesting interview of Dr. Chapin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, where she tells of her experience parenting while doing fieldwork in Sri Lanka. The simple act of feeding your child can be interpreted in a variety ways depending on the cultural context. While she would encourage, urge, and, ultimately, bribe her child to finish eating his meal himself, Sri Lankan mothers would simply switch to feeding their child themselves over a longer period of time. They would keep on popping rice balls in the child's mouth until the plate was empty... be it 30 minutes or an hour later, be it in the dining room or the living room.
Chasing small kids with platefuls of food is common practice here in Cambodia as well. Every day I see nannies act as mobile feeders, chasing after their charges with bowls of rice and whatnot. 'Since toddlers tend to have notoriously short attention spans, it's better to let the wild little things do their thing and provide nutrition half-unnoticed,' seems to be the idea. The best example of this in practice has been a particular nanny-toddler combo where the nanny squirts rice porridge into the 2-year olds mouth. Equipment required for this method: syringe (those ones used for liquid oral meds - note, no needle!!), bowl of sloppy rice, a quick-squirting hand, and a wandering toddler. This squirting takes place everywhere and anywhere... inside, outside, you name it. From my observations I'd say the boy seems to be developing just fine. For parental sanity's sake, though, I think having a paid employee do this is key! As for myself, I don't chase and I haven't done much squirting beyond medical purposes but I have to admit I have now started providing my older son with breakfast in bed... so I can sleep while he eats, i.e. Sleep-Led Parenting ;)
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