The plate flies through the air, the food lands on the floor, and you are picking it up for the third time in one meal. Almost every parent describes it with the same words: on purpose. Almost every time, it isn’t.
What is going on in your child’s head
Between nine and eighteen months a child is intensively exploring cause and effect. Let go of an object — the object falls. Every time. To a small person that is a fascinating and completely reliable finding, and one that needs testing another hundred times.
Food is simply the material that happens to be to hand. Your child isn’t throwing food because they are rejecting the meal, or you. They are throwing it because it falls.
When it starts and when it passes
It usually appears around nine months and fades somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four months. How long it lasts depends mainly on one thing: how interesting the reaction around them is.
If you take one thing from this piece: a boring reaction shortens the phase, an interesting reaction extends it. Laughter and anger are both interesting.
Five things that actually help
1. Smaller portions
Two spoonfuls on the plate instead of a full plate. With less food there is less material for the experiment, and once it is eaten you top it up. This one change does the most.
2. A plate that doesn’t move
A suction base removes the easiest route to a throw — pushing the plate over the edge. Your child can still throw an individual piece, but the whole plate isn’t going anywhere. In practice that halves the number of incidents. How the suction base works and which surfaces it holds on, is covered in this piece.
3. A calm, boring reaction
Pick it up without comment, without laughing, without a lecture. Your child is looking for a reaction; if there isn’t one, the experiment stops being interesting.
4. A clear end to the meal
If the throw happens three times in a row, the meal is over. No resentment: “I can see you’ve finished”, the plate goes away, your child comes out of the chair. Children understand that boundary far sooner than you would expect.
5. A mat under the chair
It doesn’t solve the cause, it saves your nerves — and your nerves are an important variable in this phase. An old tablecloth or a silicone mat cuts the clean-up to fifteen seconds.
What not to do
- Don’t laugh. Understandable, because it genuinely is funny — but to your child it is a reward.
- Don’t punish. At this age a child doesn’t connect the punishment with the act, they connect it with the meal.
- Don’t put the food back on the plate. That keeps the game going.
- Don’t end the meal at the first throw. One throw is exploration; a pattern is a signal.
When throwing means something else
Sometimes a throw isn’t exploration but a message. The three commonest cases:
- Your child is full. The throwing always comes at the end of the meal — then it is a signal, not a phase.
- Your child is tired. A meal that lands just before sleep often ends in throwing.
- The food isn’t right. Too hot, too hard, too big a piece. Worth checking before you put it down to a phase.
If the throwing happens almost exclusively with one particular food, that isn’t throwing — that is refusal, and it is covered in the piece about the fussy eater.
How long until it ends
For most children it passes within a few months. Until then it helps to know that this isn’t a parenting mistake and isn’t a reflection of how well you are doing your job. It is a developmental stage with a very messy expression.
