Family-style dining is a widely recognized best practice in child care settings, promoting a positive and nurturing mealtime environment. This approach, distinct from cafeteria-style service, involves small groups of children and adults sharing meals at a table, fostering self-service, pleasant conversation, and the passing of food from shared dishes. Understanding the principles of family-style dining is crucial for food service professionals in day care environments to effectively plan and prepare meals that align with this beneficial model.
Research robustly supports the advantages of family-style dining. The Institute of Medicine in 2011 highlighted it as a key component of “responsive feeding,” enabling child care providers to encourage children’s autonomy in serving themselves. Adults participating in the meals serve as role models, guiding portion sizes and attending to children’s hunger and fullness cues. This method cultivates a healthier relationship with food in children, making them more receptive to trying new foods and adopting healthier eating habits by observing adults.
The benefits of family-style dining in child care settings are extensive:
- Social Skills Development: Children learn essential social graces such as saying “please” and “thank you,” requesting items politely, waiting their turn, and sharing.
- Behavioral Improvement: It minimizes negative mealtime behaviors like arguments, food snatching, overeating, choking risks due to rushing, and playing with food.
- Language and Vocabulary Enrichment: Mealtimes become opportunities to introduce food names and describe food characteristics like size, color, texture, taste, and smell, expanding children’s vocabulary. It also encourages general conversation and idea sharing.
- Manners and Utensil Skills: Children learn and practice proper table manners and how to use utensils correctly by observing and imitating adults.
- Peer Relationships: Family-style dining fosters positive interactions and strengthens bonds between children.
- Hand-Eye Coordination: Handling serving dishes and utensils enhances children’s hand-eye coordination skills.
- Decision-Making and Problem-Solving: Children make choices about what and how much to eat, and learn to express their needs and preferences effectively.
- Healthy Choices Modeling: Adults demonstrate healthy eating habits, providing a powerful model for children to emulate, establishing lifelong healthy behaviors.
Creating a relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere is key to successful family-style dining. While minor mishaps like spills and fidgeting are normal, especially with toddlers, they are part of the learning process as children develop independence and physical skills.
Accurate documentation of children’s eating habits is also vital. Daily communication between home and the day care program ensures consistency in understanding a child’s eating patterns and hunger cues. Food service staff should collaborate with program staff to monitor and record children’s food intake during family-style meals. This observation can even be considered a simple assessment tool for understanding children’s dietary preferences and needs in the child care environment.
Implementing Family-Style Dining Effectively in Your Child Care Program
Successful implementation of family-style dining in your child care facility requires careful planning and consideration from the food service perspective. Understanding the logistical aspects will allow you to seamlessly integrate family-style dining into your program.
Budgeting for Family-Style Dining
Budgeting for family-style dining is similar to traditional food service budgeting. Tracking food quantities purchased and served remains crucial for minimizing waste and cost.
Strategies for effective budgeting in a family-style dining setting, adapted from Nemours and Ohio Child Care Resource & Referral Association (OCCRRA) guidelines, include:
- Prioritizing seasonal fresh foods to leverage cost-effectiveness and nutritional value.
- Consulting with food suppliers about healthy food options and bulk purchasing opportunities.
- Aligning menu cycles with supplier sale schedules to maximize savings.
- Calculating serving quantities based on children’s age groups for each meal and snack.
- Accounting for potential second helpings, spills, and food contamination in quantity calculations.
- Including child-sized portions for adults participating in the meals.
- Maintaining records of portions served and leftovers to refine future budgeting.
Essential Equipment for Family-Style Dining
No specialized equipment is exclusively required for family-style dining. However, using child-friendly equipment designed for smaller hands and developmental stages can significantly enhance the experience, reduce waste, and minimize spills. Consulting with day care staff who directly interact with the children can provide valuable insights into equipment suitability. Ensuring serving dishes are not too hot, especially metal ones, is also important for children’s safety.
Recommended equipment includes:
- Wide-rimmed plates and bowls: These are easier for children to grip and pass, facilitating self-service. Alternatively, serving directly from child-sized eating dishes is also an option. Using smaller serving dishes offers an advantage in minimizing food waste and disruption in case of contamination, for example, if a child uses their personal spoon in a shared dish.
- Short-handled serving spoons, scoops, and measuring cups: These utensils are easier for children to manage due to their size and weight, making scooping and pouring food onto plates simpler. Using appropriately sized serving utensils is crucial for portion control. For instance, if a serving size of carrots is half a cup, a half-cup serving utensil should be used.
- Pitchers in varying sizes: Offering different sized pitchers accommodates the varying developmental stages of children. Toddlers might benefit from smaller pitchers, while preschoolers can typically handle larger, child-sized pitchers.
- Drinking cups with fill lines: Visual cues like fill lines marked on cups help children understand appropriate beverage portion sizes. These lines can be easily drawn with permanent markers on plastic cups. Durable 4 to 8 oz plastic cups are ideal for young children, minimizing breakage.
- Clear plastic squeeze bottles for condiments: Smaller, clear squeeze bottles are easier for children to handle and squeeze. The clear design allows children to see the contents, promoting independence. Labeling these bottles with words and pictures supports early literacy development.
Family-style dining also presents opportunities for children to develop responsibility. Involving children in after-meal cleanup, such as wiping spills, teaches independence and reinforces the idea that mistakes are normal and can be corrected. Providing child-sized cleaning supplies like brooms, dustpans, paper towels, and accessible trash cans encourages children to participate in cleanup tasks.
Dining Room Setup for Family-Style Dining
Whether meals are served in a classroom or a central dining area, arranging the space to support family-style dining is important. Tips from the Family Style Dining Guide for optimizing the dining area include:
Pre-Meal Setup:
- Place napkins, plates, utensils, and cups on tables to involve children in setting up.
- Provide multiple sets of serving utensils to prevent cross-contamination.
- Use several small serving dishes for each food item and limit the initial portions in each dish.
- Ensure each table has enough portions of all food items for the children seated there.
- Keep extra servings of each food in the kitchen for refills or to replace contaminated dishes.
- Fill pitchers partially to minimize spills during pouring.
Post-Meal Cleanup:
- Provide child-sized cleaning tools like short-handled brooms and dustpans for spill cleanup.
- Designate containers for children to place used dishes, cups, and utensils.
- Provide trash cans for napkin and food waste disposal.
The dining area should be furnished with child-appropriate tables and chairs. Children should be able to sit with their feet touching the floor and arms resting comfortably on the tabletop. This ergonomic setup promotes comfort and allows children to focus on eating, relaxing, and socializing.
Portion Control in Family-Style Dining
Guiding portion control in family-style dining requires a balanced approach. While the core principle is children’s autonomy in choosing what they eat, younger children, especially those aged 12-18 months, might need more active guidance from day care staff. Older children generally manage self-serving more independently. Occasional instances of children taking too much, too little, spilling, or refusing food are expected and should be addressed patiently by supervising adults.
A helpful guideline for portion sizes is to consider a child’s stomach to be roughly the size of their fist. Food service staff can support portion control by:
- Using child-sized pitchers, serving dishes, and utensils.
- Initially placing smaller portions in serving dishes, ensuring at least one portion per child, and refilling as needed to reduce waste.
- Utilizing child-sized plates, bowls, and cups to naturally encourage appropriate portion sizes.
- Recognizing that children’s appetites fluctuate due to growth spurts and individual variations. It’s normal for children to eat varying amounts day to day.
- Ensuring sufficient quantities of nutritious foods are available to allow for second helpings.
Empowering Children to Choose How Much to Eat
Teaching children about appropriate food intake is crucial, especially with rising childhood obesity rates. Family-style dining provides a practical setting for children to learn about serving sizes and make informed choices about how much to eat. Preschool-age children typically need around 1,200 calories daily, while school-age children need between 1,200 and 1,600, depending on activity levels. Meals should be balanced across the five food groups as represented by MyPlate, a visual guide to balanced meal composition. Resources like MyPlate Daily Checklists, available for different age groups, offer specific guidance on recommended servings from each food group.
Parent resources on nutrition, such as the USDA’s Food Nutrition Service “Nibbles for Health” newsletters, are valuable tools for reinforcing healthy eating habits at home and can be shared with families in your day care program.
Minimizing Choking Hazards in Child Care Meals
Ensuring food safety, particularly preventing choking, is paramount in child care settings. Choking incidents are rapid and often silent. Safe foods are generally not round, hard, small, thick, sticky, smooth, or slippery. Refer to resources like the “Reducing Choking Risks” fact sheet for detailed lists of choking hazards and prevention strategies. Continuous supervision of infants and toddlers during mealtimes is essential, with caregivers remaining within arm’s reach and in sight. Food service staff plays a crucial role in minimizing choking risks by preparing foods in age-appropriate textures, cutting food into small, manageable pieces, and avoiding high-risk foods for young children. Common examples of foods that pose a choking risk include whole grapes, hot dogs, nuts, and even raw carrots if not properly prepared.
Safety Considerations for Meals in Day Care
Mealtime safety is paramount in day care. While requiring children to sit while eating reduces choking risks, it doesn’t eliminate them entirely. Certain foods are recognized choking hazards, and children under 4 should not be served items like whole hot dogs (or sliced rounds), whole grapes, raw carrot rounds, hard candies, nuts, seeds, hard pretzels, chips, popcorn, rice cakes, marshmallows, spoonfuls of nut butter, or large meat chunks.
Regardless of age, staff must monitor children to ensure they take appropriately sized bites and intervene if a child overfills their mouth or takes too large a bite. Infants and toddlers require food to be cut into very small, age-appropriate pieces. Preschoolers can typically cut their own food but may need assistance. Serving foods that naturally minimize choking risks is beneficial. Preventative actions include:
- Cutting food into pieces no larger than one-quarter inch and reminding children to chew thoroughly.
- Serving cooked, thinly sliced or smaller portions of meat instead of hot dogs.
- Cutting meat and chicken across the grain into pieces one-quarter inch or smaller.
- Slicing round foods like grapes, cherry tomatoes, hot dogs, and sausages lengthwise and then into quarters, ensuring pieces are no larger than one-quarter inch.
- Cooking carrots and celery until slightly soft, grating them, or cutting them into matchsticks.
- Spreading nut butters thinly on bread or crackers, avoiding thick globs.
- Removing all bones from fish, chicken, and meat before cooking.
- Removing seeds and pits from fruits.
- Ensuring children eat while seated at a table, avoiding running, walking, playing, or lying down with food in their mouths. Day care staff should actively supervise children during mealtimes.
Portion Facts and Education in Day Care Settings
Portion control is a cornerstone of healthy eating. Educating school-age children about appropriate serving sizes and portions is essential. Using the MyPlate system as a guide and visual aids like placemats showing actual portion sizes can help children understand appropriate food quantities. MyPlate resources, such as posters and print materials, can be used in the day care facility to reinforce healthy eating habits. The principles of family-style dining, combined with practical tools and education, create a comprehensive approach to nurturing healthy eating habits in child care settings.
## Benefits and Steps for Family-Style Dining
## MyPlate Daily Checklist: Find your Healthy Eating Style – 1200 calories
## MyPlate Daily Checklist Find your Healthy Eating Style – 1400 calories
## MyPlate Daily Checklist Find your Healthy Eating Style – 1600 calories
## Healthy Portions for Preschoolers in Each Food Group
## More Examples of Healthy Preschooler Meal and Snack Portions
## Family-Style Dining Guide: A Mealtime Approach for Early Care and Education Programs
## American Academy of Pediatrics’ Choking Hazards Fact Sheet
## Reducing Choking Risks Fact Sheet
Glossary
Family-Style Dining: A food service method where adults and children share food from common dishes, manage their own portion sizes, and engage in conversation at a shared table.
Cafeteria-Style Dining: A food service method where children select or are given pre-determined food items in a serving line.
References & Resources
Community for Child Care Council of Santa Clara County, Inc. (2018). Overview, Child Care Food Program.
Lifsey, S. (2015). Pass the peas, please: The benefits of family-style meals. Altarum: Solutions that Matter. Health Care that Works.
National CACFP Association. (n.d.). Why you should serve family style. Washington, D.C.: Early Childhood Learning & Knowledge Center. https://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/video/attachments/family-style-dining-tips.pdf
Nemours, & Ohio Child Care Resource & Referral Association (2016). Family style dining guide: A mealtime approach for early care and education programs. https://cdn.occrra.org/documents/fsd.pdf
United States Department of Agriculture. (n.d.). Choose My Plate. http://choosemyplate.gov
