How Food Shapes YOU! | Building a Child’s Lifelong Relationship with Food with Louise Mercieca
Louise Mercieca — Early Years Nutrition Consultant at Tiny Tums by The Health Kick, Author of "How Food Shapes YOU!"
Louise Mercieca is an early years nutrition consultant at Tiny Tums by The Health Kick and the author of How Food Shapes YOU!, a children's book that teaches preschoolers how food supports their bodies. Her central message is that food in the early years does more than fill a child up: it shapes biological development, and the language adults use around food shapes a child's relationship with eating.
In this interview with host Myles, Louise explains why "healthy eating" is a grown-up concept, how a cast of characters turns biology into a story children can touch and talk about, and why using sweets as rewards sends the wrong message. Her work with parents, nurseries and early years educators is available through the Tiny Tums by The Health Kick website at tinytumshealthkick.com.
Louise argues that healthy eating is often a grown-up term, and that the reasons adults eat healthily are very different from what a child needs in the formative stages of development. Children need different food from adults, and different language around food too.
In the nought-to-five window, she says, we are literally shaping the biological foundation. A great deal of brain activity happens between nought and three, and food also contributes to skeletal foundations. In her view, feeding a child is not only about hunger; it is about shaping their development.
The book is Louise's second. Her first was aimed at parents and was titled How Food Shapes Your Child. After years of working more directly with children and the people who care for them, she saw a gap between what adults think about food and what children can and should know.
The new book introduces children to their bodies in a child-friendly way. It follows a typical preschooler's day, including doing a puzzle, climbing a climbing frame, sitting in the garden and going to bed. Along the way, it explains what is happening inside the body and what role food plays. Louise believes children are capable of understanding their own biology, and suggests adults often assume they would not want to know because of our own disconnect from the food we eat.
The book describes a tiny team inside the body that children cannot see but that works for them all day. Billy Bones helps with climbing, and Bessie Brain, who looks like a pink cloud, helps with putting a jigsaw together. Louise says the characters simply "were kind of just born" from a busy, creative mind, and that talking about the brain in abstract terms does not make sense to a child.
The characters also exist beyond the page as toys and stickers, so children can physically engage with them. Louise gives educators resources for use beyond the book. At mealtimes, adults can ask what Bessie Brain or Billy Bones would say about the meal. A child wearing a Billy Bones sticker invites a question, and the answer, that they ate a meal which supported their bones, opens a very different conversation from "I was good and ate my vegetables."
Louise separates the biological side of early childhood from the psychological side. Words such as good, bad, treat, reward, comfort and bribe matter because a young brain is designed to make connections quickly and firm them into pathways of behaviour. If the pathway is "you've been good, you deserve cake," cake is reinforced as a positive reward. She notes that children do not think of cake, sweets or chocolate as rewards until a grown-up introduces the idea.
Louise says many adults feel like "feeders" and panic when a child does not eat, especially when the child is in their care and going home at the end of the day. Even when the intention is kind and the language positive, she explains, the child picks up on the adult's anxiety. Children borrow adults' emotions to stabilise their own because they cannot yet regulate them, and in her words, an anxious child will never eat.
She adds that a child may simply be preoccupied with an activity or not physiologically hungry at a given meal. She says concern is reasonable if there is a pattern of not eating, but not overplaying the effort to feed a child is the key.
Her biggest frustration is that children have no concept of food as a reward until adults introduce it, yet incentives for small children are almost always non-nutritious sugary treats. She cites sweets on the counter at the hairdresser, treats at the dentist, and packets of sweets handed out by schools. She calls this the grown-up perception of a treat, not the child's, and questions why we reward children with something non-nutritious and build an emotional connection to food that has the opposite biological effect on their wellbeing.
The Tiny Tums by The Health Kick website at tinytumshealthkick.com hosts free resources, including a Parent Zone written for the home rather than for settings. It includes advice for parents choosing a nursery, booklets on asking confident questions about food, allergies and individual needs, and a link to buy the book, which is not free. Louise also runs child health campaigns, including one with an animation, a song and resources led by Captain Red Pepper Pants, which aims to flip the script on how we use food language with children.
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