Many childcare feeding guidelines recommend serving family-style meals to children after two years of age. Family-style is defined as allowing everyone to serve themselves from common bowls and pitchers.

Young children should be allowed to serve themselves. For every question that you have as to why children should not attempt self-feeding, there might be answer:

• It will be so messy! So is learning other self-help skills, such as toileting. Each time the child is allowed to practice, there is less mess.
• Little hands just cannot hold those bowls. The adult can hold the bowls until the child’s hands are sufficiently large and strong.
• They spill milk all over the table. Try using a small pitcher or measuring cup with a spout.
• They will take too much food. They might at first. Recognizing they took more than they could eat is an important lesson for children to learn. It is a time to talk about hunger and fullness cues.
• They will take too little food. They can come back for seconds. Always make certain there is some food for seconds (such as bread or fruit).
• Some children will take too much and others may not have a chance to serve themselves. This is a great opportunity to teach about sharing and community building. Serving bowls can initially be limited and then replenished to make sure all children have appropriate quantities of food.

Yes, as children learn self-feeding or other self-help skills, it is messy. Children will master these skills and benefit from their efforts.

Learning to master self-help skills is a process that starts with observation and is followed by mimicry and practice. Some self-help skills, such as crossing the street, require mastery of a series of progressive, increasingly difficult skills.

First, the child learns to look, then to listen and finally to step off the curb while holding an adult’s hand. Eventually, the older child is allowed to complete the process independently.

Self-feeding is mastery of progressively more difficult physical and spatial skills. As the child ages, small and large muscles develop as does eye-hand coordination. Palm-grasping is the first step in self-feeding followed relatively quickly by finger-feeding.

It should not be surprising that preschoolers often resort to finger feeding as the preferred feeding method. It is mastered early in life; it can be done rapidly; and it is efficient.

The more difficult task to master is using an eating utensil, such as a spoon, fork, or knife. With self-feeding, there are mishaps as weak wrists turn and food drops off the spoon.

Learning to navigate the spoon in empty space from the bowl toward the mouth seems a long way for small wrists to remain locked and stable. Getting the contents off the spoon and safely into the mouth is the final reward. All too often, toddlers find much of the food on their clothes or on the floor rather than in their mouths.

Learning to use utensils can be simplified by providing toddlers and preschoolers with child-size items. Small spoons make scooping liquids and soft foods easy. Blunt-tined forks safely spear solid foods.

Finally, dull-edged knives provide a safe way to learn to cut and slice soft foods. Spreading soft foods is mastered with small scrapers and spreaders. Affordable child-sized utensils are available in supermarkets, drug stores and other retail outlets.

More challenging for young children to master are serving skills. Not only does the child need to negotiate inserting a utensil into a bowl or platter and lifting out the food, he or she also must estimate how much to take.

Initially, young children may misjudge how much food to put on their plates. It is helpful to ensure that serving utensils are of an appropriate size for young hands to maneuver.

Consider how accurate you might be if you tried to scoop out mashed potatoes from a bucket with a gardening shovel and place the serving onto a plate. That is exactly what is required when a preschooler is given an adult-sized serving bowl with a long-handled serving spoon. Then, the child is asked to remove the food from the serving spoon without spilling, and place that food onto a smaller plate. On top of that, the child is expected to take the “correct” sized portion!

Picture an adult trying to pour liquid from a 5-gallon can into a one-cup measure. That must be how preschoolers feel when we ask them to take a large container and pour the contents into their small glass. Providing children with a small pitcher (or even a measuring cup with a spout) will make this task easier and neater.

Many of these self-serving skills can be mastered away from the table. Shoveling teaches ladling skills. Water play helps children learn to pour liquids. Learning when an item (such as a pail) is empty or full can be used to teach about hunger and fullness.

While many adults can cope with the messy learning process of self-feeding and self-serving, the question remains about whether children can take appropriate amounts of food. Some may be concerned about children not eating enough and others may worry about overweight and children eating too much.

If self-serving is viewed as a learning experience, then meal and snack time affords great opportunities to teach. For children who do not finish what they have taken, you can ask them to think about how hungry they were. Research has shown that there is actually less plate waste when children are allowed to serve themselves. Maybe next time, they can better guess how much to take to meet their hunger.

Research also has shown that children learn to overeat when adults give them too much food. Preschoolers actually require less food than adults serve them.

Preschoolers also eat less food when they serve themselves. Given today’s concerns about children and weight, allowing children to learn how much food to take at meal or snack time may be a valuable lesson. For children who overeat, this is a great time to teach children to listen to their body cues for fullness.

In childcare situations where food is limited, adults can teach children to share the food by taking small first portions so that everyone gets a serving. Helping children to think about the needs of others is a wonderful introduction into community building.

As a safeguard to ensuring adequate amounts of food, the serving bowl can be partly filled initially. For those children who are still hungry after they have finished their first serving, allow for seconds of at least one of the items served.

Madeleine Sigman-Grant, PhD, RD, Professor and Area Extension Specialist

USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center, 1100 Bates St., Houston, Texas 77030; 713-798-6767; www.kidsnutrition.org

USDA’s Team Nutrition, 3101 Park Center Dr., Rm. 632, Alexandria, VA 22302; 703-305-1624; www.fns.usda.gov/tn

Baby Center, www.babycenter.com/refcap/baby/babyfeeding/1400680.html

How Stuff Works, health.howstuffworks.com/understanding-a-childs-eating-habits-ga1.htm

USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center, www.kidsnutrition.org/consumer/nyc/vol_2005_3/page4.htm

WebMD, children.webmd.com/guide/what-to-feed-your-baby-toddler