There are numerous reasons to why an adult shouldn’t carelessness feed their children the meals on an adult’s menu, instead of what is available on the kid’s menu. Some people have their reasons to why they would do so, but it shouldn’t be done generally. We will go over reasons why in this post that adults should order food for their children from the kid’s menu, instead of the main menu, when it is available.
The options on the kid’s menu are often designed to be proportional to the size of the children. This means that feeding a child meals occasionally that are adult-sized can lead to health problems for the child. The main problem would be obesity. We have seen children being fed this way by their parents and this happening. It is not good for a child to be overweight at such a young age.
Some people believe that getting overweight is mostly about the type of foods that they eat, but it actually has more to do with the proportion of food that they eat. A child is going to become overweight if they are fed adult-sized meals on a regular basis. The food is intended to fill an adult, not a child.
Another huge problem is the habitual practices that the parents are teaching their child and ingraining into the child when they do this. If a parent repeatedly gives their child adult-sized meals when they eat at a restaurant, then the child may end up learning to later eating this way all the time. They may end up growing up into their teens and adulthood and eating more food than what they should.
The human body recognizes when more food is being taken in on a regular basis. The body will adjust and ask for more food (get hungry), even if it doesn’t need it at certain times when these intervals are broken and a new eating pattern is taken. For instance, a human being is capable of eating two good meals for the day, without ever getting hungry again for the rest of the day, just from their daily eating habits. This can become a life-long habit. It is also possible for it to be just one meal for the entire day. This isn’t a bad thing in every circumstance, but it is out of the ordinary 3 meals that most people are used to.
A child is too young to know the difference in the changes in its body to take note of how their eating habits might effect them later in the future. It is the job of the parents to make sure that their child is eating properly, but also getting the right portion of food. Restaurants create a kid’s menu, majority of the time with the idea of giving children of a certain age the proper portion of food for their size.
Even if the child is taller than what most children their age are, unless they are the height of an average adult, they shouldn’t be fed the same sized adult means that adults would eat at the restaraunt. They are still eating more than what they should be. Of course, if a child is significantly taller than most children their age, then they should be fed more. However, the amount of food should be proportional to their size, not that of an adult.
The adult feeding the child should consider what size the meals are that are provided by the restaurant on the main menu for adults. By doing this, they can be more sure that they aren’t stuffing their child like a turkey with adult-sized meals at a restaurant. Then, they should order the meals provided from the kid’s menu for their children, and add on extra food items for their child from the kid’s menu as needed.
This does depend on the size of the child, which we are going to emphasize that should be judged mainly by their height, not their weight or width. Many health charts judge being overweight based off of an individual’s height. This means that taller people can naturally eat more food than shorter people, with less risk of becoming overweight. They have more structure to support.
Of course, we all know that tall people can end up overweight too however, by simple eating too much, but they still would generally eat more to maintain a healthy diet. This is why it is not a good idea to feed a tall child adult-sized meals from a restaurant, just because they are taller than the average kid. They could still be shorter than the average adult. They only need to be fed a little more food, not treated as if they are an adult at a restaurant.
What if the restaurant doesn’t have a kid’s menu for children at a restaurant?
It is still not okay to feed a child adult-sized meals at a restaurant just because the restaurant doesn’t have a kid’s menu. Parents can order food for their children from the main menu and split up the portions to an exceptional amount for all their children. Families do this all the time, and sometimes for different reasons other than the restaurant not having a kid’s menu.
The kid’s menu options available for a child at a restaurant could be terrible choices for the children in the eyes of the parent. So, they may order food from the main menu instead. The parents will sometimes split up the adult-sized meal they order for their children, to feed two kids instead.
Sometimes this requires the parent to order a large-sized meal from the main menu, just to get the proportions right for two children. We have seen this done by families that have children around the age of 12 or their early teens too. This way the children are able to eat the right proportions for them, even if all the meals were adult-sized meals from the main menu.
