How should parents view highchair behavior?
“When you add them all up, your baby spends many hours of the week in his or her highchair. Take advantage of this time by making it an opportunity for learning. As with many aspects of child development, there are both constant and variable influences with which to contend. Parents are the constant influence on moral training. Whether at mealtime, playtime, or roomtime, parents should be reinforcing and maintaining a consistent level of expectation regarding their child’s behavior. For example, the instructions “Do not drop your food” and “Do not touch the stereo” differ only in the nature of the activity, but they involve the same level of parental expectation. The variable is the place or item of offense, but the constant is the level of expectation. The “no” of the highchair should be the same “no” of the living room. Parents of pretoddlers too often isolate individual acts of behavior, rather than seeing their own need for consistency as part of the same process. Although the sett
