When Your Child Picks up Food Remains from the Ground

Are you surprised when you see a young child picks up some food remains from the ground and then puts them into his mouth? You may say for a child raised in a poor, uneducated family, it is a commonplace. However,   it is also not uncommon for a well dressed child with a good family background eating those remains on the ground. This disgusting habit has nothing to do with the child's development environment,   it is just the display of human's basic nature. 

According to the record of Mengzi, one of the Chinese Confucian works, a human being's needs for food and sex can be viewed as the 2 basic human natures. If this is true, for a young child, when he is not mature enough to have real sex need, the demand for food must be one of the strongest motivations of  his actions. Though Sigmund Freud's theory says that a child's sex need can also be satisfied by another way like sucking. Whatever it is, picking up food from the ground is not an evil behavior, but a natural behavior which is connected with a human being's biological needs. If you observe carefully on a winter campus of an elementary school, you can see a lot of young children holding some snow in their hands and chewing enjoyably.  In this situation, it is the intimate relationship between the children and nature that may recall the wonderful memory of your childhood, and the children's eating behavior makes them more lovely than ever before.  

That's why when you are seeing your young child doing this, do not be nervous and shout at him, your overly intense reaction must frighten him. He may probably be crying and throw away the food remains, not because he understands why he cannot eat them, but because he has been threatened by your scream or severe accusation.   As a result, maybe he will never do that again in front of you, but when you are absent, he may do that again and again. For him, this kind of behavior is not disgraceful because of his lack of awareness of shamefulness.

So from the standpoint of early education, and for the consideration of your child's physical health, you can stop him in an alternative way, such as give him some other food and replace what he is picking up, or present him a toy to distract his attention from the remains on the ground. After all, It is not too bad because the strong desire for food at least indicates that your child has a good appetite at that time.