Young Children’s Learning about Hunger and Satiety through the Lens of the Norms of Those Who Feed Them

Abstract

This article focuses on parental perceptions of signs of hunger and satiety in children under 4 years of age and their effects on feeding practices, in a sample of parents of children with typical development. Discourse analysis shows the close relationships between social food norms, nutritional norms, medicalized child care norms, and educational norms in adults’ determination of children’s appetites according to their perceived needs and psychomotor development. The results also indicate how these norms are expressed according to social position, parental experience and context. More broadly, this article addresses top-down education—from adults to children—in food socialization, and points to the varying attention paid to the signals given by the child. It thus highlights some of the processes by which biological, psychological and social factors interact in socializing children to food.