Between Infancy and Adolescence

MIRIAM E. LOWENBERG.

A CHILD'S growth in height and weight comes in spurts. Other kinds of growth take place between those spurts. The growth also is vital in the building of a sturdy, healthy body: The child is learning to live in his world. He is having mental and emotional experiences. He is forming patterns of eating and attitudes toward food that will influence him throughout his life.

Mothers and fathers recognize the importance of the diet in the first years and often worry therefore when their child does not eat what they think he should.

Or just the opposite: In times of frustration, they adopt the attitude, "Let him entirely alone, and he will eat what he wants," believing that in some strange way the child will begin to eat the food he needs.

Neither leads to success. Rather, one has to take a close look at the demands for growth and even more important to study children and to understand their drives and needs.

We then come to the point of view that happy, hungry children will eat and grow. As we study the child, we also recognize that he has many things to learn in order to eat acceptably. Limits there certainly are on how one eats, be he 8 or 80.

Adults set the stage for children's eating for good or ill, and parents do have a function to perform in regard to children's eating.

Dr. and Mrs. C. Anderson Aldrich, in Feeding Our Old-Fashioned Children, stated the functions of parents thus: "Parents are meant to enter the feeding situation for three reasons: First, to provide food; second, to support a child's progress from simple to mature methods of eating, and, third, to make it easy for him to establish his own satisfying feeding habits."

First, the foods that the growing bodies need.

We have only to follow a 2-year-old around for a few hours to know that his needs for energy are high. Children of all ages running, jumping, and playing hard in a playground often tire adults just to think of the energy being used up.

The child 1 to 3 years old, according to the recommended daily allowances of the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, needs 1,300 Calories a day. That is twice as many Calories as the normal, moderately active man needs or uses in relation to the relative body weight of each of these ages.

Boys 13 to 15 years old, whose average weight is listed as 108 pounds, use almost as many Calories (3000 Calories) as the normal, moderately active man (3,200) whose average weight at 25 years is considered to be 154 pounds.

Children also need proteins, vitamins, and minerals in amounts that are greater in relation to body weight. The National Research Council recommends that children 1 to 3 years old have daily 40 grams of protein; at 4 to 6 years, 50 grams; at 7 to 9 years, 60 grams; and 10 to 12 years, 70 grams.

A man weighing approximately 6 times as much as the child of 1 to 3 years needs only about 1.7 times as much protein.

The adolescent of to to 12 years needs as much protein as the man, whose average weight is about one and one-half times as much.

It is recommended that children 1 to 9 years old have 1.0 gram of calcium a day and 1.2 grams a day at 10 to 12 years. The adult body, however, may be kept in positive balance with 0.8 gram of calcium a day.

For iron. the daily recommendation for the child of 1 to 3 years old is 7 milligrams. The grown man and woman are listed as needing 10 milligrams and 12 milligrams, respectively. If we again compare the relative size of the average child of this age to an adult man or woman, we see that the need for iron also is relatively high.

iron of some nutrients, such as Iron and calcium, should be taking Place during the period of growth. This storage cannot take place on inadequate diets a matter of concern to those who guide the feeding of young children.

ALTHOUGH NUTRITIONISTS must reckon with the needs for nutrients in terms of grams and milligrams, the translation of these quantitative needs into the actual foods eaten daily is much more meaningful to those of us who are not technicians.

How, then, can we check growing children's diets to make certain that they are getting the materials they need for growth? To do this, we need to look at groups of foods that together furnish all the needed essentials in the total day's food.

Important to remember is that a good way to be sure of having an adequate diet is to provide a wide variety of foods.

Protein-high foods, including milk, meat, eggs, fish, and poultry, must bulk large in the child's diet.

Besides milk, the child needs at least one good serving of meat, poultry, or fish at one meal each day. The amount may vary from a 2-ounce portion for children 1 to 4 years old to a man-size serving of at least one-fourth pound for the hungry child of 6 to 13 years.

Eggs, which contribute a goodly share of iron as well as protein, should be considered in planning the child's diet.

Because milk and milk products contain more calcium than other foods, the child should have 3 to 4 cups of milk a day. Later I discuss ways of getting children to drink milk.

Fruit and vegetables are important for children because they furnish minerals, such as iron, vitamins A and C, and a goodly amount of several of the B vitamins.

Because children in the United States get less vitamin A than they need, we must direct special attention to including in their meals dark-green and yellow vegetables, such as broccoli, leaf lettuce, collards, kale, spinach, escarole, curly endive, carrots, sweetpotatoes, yams, and winter squash.

Tomatoes, cream, butter, and fortified margarine also add a goodly amount to the vitamin A in the diet. Liver is especially high in vitamin A. A 2-ounce portion yields more than twice the average daily recommendation for the growing child.

Many investigations have disclosed that American children do not get enough vitamin C, largely because they do not eat enough citrus fruit, tomatoes, raw cabbage, raw fruit, and vegetables.

In planning meals for children, parents ought to give special attention to including the following each day:

Milk in each meal, as a drink, if possible;

Another protein-high food such as meat, fish, poultry, cheese, or an egg, in each meal;

At least one serving of a raw fruit and a raw vegetable in each meal. Special attention should be given to citrus fruit and juices (canned, fresh, or frozen) and tomato juice;

At least two good servings of cooked vegetables, especially dark-green and bright-yellow vegetables;

Three to four servings of enriched or whole-grain cereals and breads;

Mildly sweet desserts, which mostly contain either milk and eggs or fruit or a combination of them;

A vitamin D preparation.

We need to know how to help children to eat happily the foods they need. I mention here only the foods that are hard to get children to eat enough of.

MANY CHILDREN do not like all vegetables. If we are to do something about it, we need to understand what children do like and why.

Children generally like crisp, raw vegetables better than cooked vegetables. If young children develop a habit of eating raw vegetables and if their parents eat salads with at least the appearance of enjoyment, the child usually will eat raw vegetables well.

As soon as children can chew pieces of raw carrots or celery, leaves of green lettuce, wedges of raw cabbage, and other crisp foods, they should appear in at least one meal a day preferably two.

Even it young children may prefer raw vegetables, however, they cannot eat enough of them to get the nutrients we expect from vegetables.

As we study the eating patterns of children, we get clues as to what they do and do not like about cooked vegetables.

I have observed that the most important factor probably is flavor. Children in general have keener senses of taste and smell than adults. Strong flavors and odors in some of the vegetables may be really obnoxious to young children. The sulfurous vegetables, such as cabbage, onions, and turnips, become more popular with children when they are cooked in an excess of water, so that much of the strong flavor is washed away. Some valuable food nutrients are lost in doing this, but that loss may be less important than that children eat them.

Texture of vegetables is important. A child prefers celery or green beans that do not have tough strings on them and carrots that are tender. He finds tough parts difficult to manage, and he will not bother with them. When he first encounters sticks of raw celery and finds part of it inedible, he has no past memory of the food to tell him that some celery does not have tough strings on it. It requires only a small amount of effort by the parent to choose frozen or canned green beans that do not have strings in them or to remove them from fresh beans. It is easy to break a piece of celery in two and remove the strings.

The consistency of vegetables is another point. Many children refuse dry or gummy mashed potatoes and dry baked potatoes. Because they prefer their food lukewarm in temperature, mashed potatoes that were soft and fluffy when hot may become too dry or gummy when the child lets them cool to lukewarm.

The combination of vegetables also should be thought of in planning meals for children. They find it hard to eat at one time two vegetables that are not well liked.

Cooked, dried lima beans and beets, for instance, make a poor combination from this standpoint but a child may eat willingly even a large serving of fluffy mashed potatoes with a small serving of tender, cubed, buttered beets.

NOT ALL children dislike all vegetables. There are some cooked vegetables that even a finicky child does like, and because we have such an array of dark-green, bright-yellow, and other vegetables, it is always possible to find some that any child likes.