Any suggestions on how to teach table manners to toddlers?

[cookie_]

My little boy is turning one in just a few days (hard to believe!). He is a super-duper kid and I love him to pieces, but he's driving me a wee bit crazy with one thing—he loves to throw food. He took to solids really quickly, and loves all sorts of foods. He's at that stage where he really only wants to self-feed with finger foods, which is great except that half of it ends up on the floor. I've been dealing with this by only putting 2 bites or so on his tray at a time, but that's not really solving the underlying issue. He seems to do it a lot for the reaction (he's got a mischievous streak in him), so I try to stay calm, shake my finger and go "uh uh uh". It's not like he's off in a corner eating by himself and he's trying to get my attention. We eat breakfast as a family, he and I eat lunch together usually, dinner he eats in the kitchen while I cook dinner for my husband and I, so I'm almost always by his side interacting with him. He waits for me to make eye contact with him, then looks at me, grins, and throws the food down on the floor. (He also does this with nursing...waits for me to look down at him, then slowly and deliberately bites down.) Is this just a stage, some kind of boundaries-testing? I don't think he's throwing the food down as a sign that he's done or that he doesn't like it (he's pretty good about signing "all done" to me, very emphatically when he's really finished) because he'll pick up another bite a second later and eat it. Any suggestions how to work through this and teach my little savage some table manners over the coming months? I don't really mind waiting this stage out (the mess is fairly minor), but if there's a way to encourage him to knock it off sooner rather than later, I'm all ears!

[PatioGardener]

You mind find that ignoring the throwing gets you further than trying to correct it.

My DS loves to do anything that gets him a reaction. He doesn't do "bad" or "good" things, he just does "things" and if I react in any way (startle, gasp or laugh) he does them again. He's learning about his environment and human interactions and has lots of fun with it.

It's exhausting, and a good friend suggested that we get a dog to take care of the food on the floor!

[somegirl99]

Mine does it because he loves watching the dogs eat the food! 

[P.J.]

This is actually developmentally appropriate. Kids this age love to see what happens when they throw something. Hey, gravity! They derive great joy just discovering and playing like that, simple and boring and annoying as it is to us. IMO to say "no" to something like that is cutting off his life energy, natural curiosity and joy. In my experience this would be one of those "wait it out" small annoyances, nothing requiring real "discipline" or teaching.

I know how annoying it is to clean up the mess, but it's really just part of him learning to eat. My DS is almost (or perhaps) exactly the same age as yours (turns 1 on Tues). We have a splat mat under his highchair and it's much easier to wipe down after meals than the floor, and we take it into the shower and hose it off once a week.

As for getting him to stop, what you can do is find a way fro him to enjoy throwing stuff and the effects of gravity somewhere else. Either give him toys / soft balls to throw during the meal (although he's unlikely to differentiate between that and food so you could only be encouraging more of food throwing), or find another place and time for him to throw. My son has a bunch of bath toys in a net on the outside of the tub. He stands there when I pee or get ready in the bathroom in the morning, and he LOVES to throw them one by one into the tub, and wait for me to put them back so he can do it again, and again, and again! He also likes just throwing balls around, we have some soft ones for inside, you can get a whole collection of balls and play "catch" with him. Maybe if he gets enough throwing /dropping in the rest of the day, he'll not be so into it at meals. Otherwise, if that were me I would just take a deep breath when I get annoyed and remind myself "this will pass"....

[SilverFish]

yeah, much better to ignore at this stage. any kind of reaction is still a reaction. he's getting the pleasure of learning that when a piece of food goes over the edge, mama makes funny noises and waves her hands around (not to mention gravity etc).

for me, lots of food throwing meant that either she was full or didn't like the food. so depending on my mood and how much she'd already eaten, i either ended meal time or offered something different. now that she's 15 months, food tossing signals meal over. one piece over, i say no once, again, and we get down from the highchair. if it's only one kind of food item, i just tend to intercept and say, "if you don't like it, give it to me" and she usually dumps all the offending pieces in my hand, lol. anyway, she very rarely tosses food with the glee that she did it a few months ago!