by Jennifer Shipp

Created on: June 27, 2009

Babies control their food intake. A normal, healthy infant who arrives home from the hospital, will consume perhaps 2 ounces of milk in a feeding, pulling his or her mouth away from the bottle or the breast when he or she is full. A few weeks the later, baby will eat 4 ounces, then 6 ounces. Parents may try to force the young infant to consume more milk at a time, perhaps to get the baby to sleep longer and in some cases parents may be successful. But, healthy, normal human beings will regulate their eating from a very young age.

All healthy, normal humans are born with some measure of control over themselves and their environment. The younger the person, the less control he or she has over themselves and the world that surrounds them. As people grow and age, they develop more control over virtually everything. However, a normal, healthy person born into a dysfunctional family environment may develop physiological control over eating, but never be given the right to regulate control over their food intake.

Parents who maintain strict control over their child's eating, at an age when the child is conscious and capable of controlling his or her own eating habits often don't realize the follies of their authoritarian approach to food. Parents who wish their children could be little babies forever will often try to regulate their child's eating. These parents are not being malicious, they are simply in denial that their children are turning into adults. One may call them ignorant, but calling these parents abusive would be a bit harsh.

On the other hand, there are parents who grew up in clean your plate families. These clean your plate parents pass along their ideologies to their offspring. They are not attempting to control their child's feeding per se, but rather, they are attempting to do loss prevention at the dinner table. In an effort to teach their children about the almighty dollar, parents will enforce a clean your plate rule thereby ensuring that no food is wasted at any meal. Although many, if not most children are overfed in clean your plate families, if the food being served is healthy and children are not being grossly overfed or suffering from physical or psychological repercussions, one could say that requiring a child to clean his or her plate is not abuse.

Certainly, there is a breed of overfeeding that qualifies as abuse. Forcing food into a child's mouth would most certainly be abusive, for example. But what about the sort of

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