Continued from part one.

Why would a child feel a need to hoard, binge or sneak food? What is behind a need like this?

The best explanations I’ve come across center around the same basic philosophy. The child needs to have some control over his life, whether consciously or subconsciously recognized. The child is not yet willing to trust an adult to properly care for him/her. Likely, there were times in the child’s past where an adult did not respect that trust. This caused the child to feel that he must rely on himself to have his needs met. This would, of course, extend on a primal level to trusting only him/herself to meet his needs with food, to keep himself alive.

In some cases, this can be explained most simply. The child did not always have enough food to eat before he came to your house. He does not yet expect that there will be enough food at your house either. He will need to learn that.

However, sometimes a child might have had food, but not enough of other forms of nurturing. This can also show up as an eating issue. Eating does equal nurturing in many ways. In these cases, the child needs to learn that there will be enough nurturing at your house, with your family, with you as the parent. As that happens, as the trust increases, the eating issues will gradually decrease.

These ideas considered, it’s important also to be aware of your child. Sometimes a newly adopted child, particularly one new to the country and foods, tends to eat a lot in the beginning for a variety of reasons. If this does not seem to be harming your child (such as a child ingesting so much that they are throwing up), many families swear by the idea of letting the child have as much food as he wants while waiting several weeks to see if the child will begin to regulate on his own. At that point, it is possible to again reevaluate to determine if a problem exists. This idea is even addressed on a recent blog for Haitian Adoptions. Blogger Wendy B. says “My personal philosophy is to let a newly adopted child eat as much as they want in the beginning.”

On the Ethiopian adoption blog, there is this great post about similar eating issues.

In the next blog, I'll give a few ideas I've learned about how to help children who continue to have troublesome eating issues.