March is National Nutrition Month! Nutrition is of the utmost importance for growth, brain development, and healthy living. Making informed decisions about what’s fueling our brains and bodies has a significant impact on our physical and mental health. This is even more true for children as they have growing brains to support!
Ensuring a child receives adequate nutrition is considered part of living within a safe environment as children need to have access to healthy well-rounded meals to support their growth and development. Ensuring a child receives adequate nutrition is considered part of living within a safe environment as children need to have access to healthy well-rounded meals to support their growth and development. Over the years there have been many studies conducted regarding children, nutrition, development, and behaviors which have shown how certain diets and consuming foods with higher sugar content and food dyes negatively affect children’s behaviors, especially children with a history of behavioral disorders. Children with disorders such as Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), anxiety, learning disorders, and processing disorders may have increased behaviors based on certain foods they consume. Some common triggers for behaviors in relation to nutrition include dairy, gluten, added sugar, and added food dyes. Not only do these impact a child’s behaviors and brain function, but they can have detrimental effects on the child’s physical health as well. Consuming too much added sugar, unhealthy fats, overly processed foods, and snacks contribute to negative physical health outcomes such as childhood obesity.
Last week, we had an excellent PACES Connection post about non-clinical recommendations for children who receive the Benchmarks’ TiCCA. That post can be found at Beyond Therapy: The Importance of Non-Clinical Recommendations in Trauma-Informed Clinical Assessments | Benchmarks’ Center for Quality Integration (NC) | PACEsConnection . The post goes into more detail providing examples of non-clinical recommendations. These are recommendations within the TiCCA that go beyond your typical behavioral health therapies and services. Non-clinical recommendations can be something simple, yet very impactful, such as recommending that a child be allowed to sleep with a night light due to fear of the dark. Nutrition falls into the category of non-clinical recommendations. The assessing clinician is trained to go through questions and identify any concerns surrounding food and nutrition for each child. It’s important to note that children who are involved with child welfare may have experienced trauma surrounding this specific domain. Other traumatic experiences may also directly impact the child’s eating habits as well.
Promoting healthy eating and healthy relationships surrounding food and nutrition are extremely important. For clinicians completing TiCCAs, it’s important to remember these nutritional details about the child, their history, and previous diagnoses when making non-clinical recommendations. The recommendations made for children about nutrition influence their mental and physical health. The TiCCA clinician can provide recommendations that take the child’s history into account if there has been neglect or food insecurity, such as the parent or guardian offering a “snack bowl” with healthy snacks that the child can go to whenever they’d like. There is an opportunity to begin the groundwork of improving a child’s relationships surrounding food and building strong relationships with caregivers. Not only are we working to improve relationships, but fostering resilience when a child is within an environment feeling safe, secure, and in control of certain choices. Other recommendations clinicians make will directly influence both mental and physical health. These could include age-appropriate nutrition education, recommending an appointment to meet with a child nutritionist, or suggestions on how to limit added sugar intake. Recommendations such as these can impact the entire family unit, helping to improve everyone’s physical and mental health using nutrition education!
Using nutrition as a gateway to think outside the box, clinicians and social workers can help improve various life domains for children and families involved with child welfare, putting them on track for better physical and mental health over their lifetimes.
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