When a child is overeating, it can be concerning…and confusing. Why do kids eat too much? I’m sharing my top reasons from my experience as a pediatric dietitian.

When kids eat too much, there can be several underlying reasons, and it may not be due to real hunger.

I’ve worked with kids who overeat for a variety of reasons. In this article, I outline the most common reasons your child my eat too much, along with ways you can help.

What You Will Learn about Overeating in Kids:

• Why kids want to eat all the time
• The reasons behind overeating in kids
• What you can do about the child who eats too much

Reasons Why Your Child Eats Too Much

1. Being too Hungry or Hangry
2. Exercise
3. Peer Influence
4. Sensory Stimulation
5. Boredom
6. Parties!
7. Emotions
8. Restriction
9. Erratic meals
10. Enjoyment
11. Disordered Eating or an Eating Disorder
12. Food Responsiveness

Help! My Child Wants to Eat All the Time

In a perfect world, your child would eat for the right reasons: true hunger, health and nutrition.

In my years as a pediatric dietitian, I have come to know that we eat for a variety of reasons. Health and nutrition aren’t always the main drivers, especially when it comes to kids.

Sometimes our kids (and we) overeat — whether we intend to or not. Just think about how hard it is to control your eating at a party!

When it comes to kids, you might worry that your child has a big appetite. Or you notice they’re a big eater. Or maybe you wonder why your son eats everything in sight.

Feeling confused (and frustrated) by your child’s desire to eat, and tendency to overeat, you may feel yourself getting pulled into the role of the food cop.

Here are the most common causes of eating too much food and what you can do to help your child (without making things worse). 

The Sneaky Signs of Overeating

Aside from the obvious evidence of overeating, there are other, more subtle signs that make parents concerned about their child’s eating habits.

Over the years, I’ve heard stories about moms finding empty candy wrappers hidden in their children’s rooms. Tales of kids who are eating too much food at a birthday party, especially sweets and treats.

Parents who fret about children who don’t seem to have self-control around unhealthy, indulgent foods like candy and chips. And, accounts of teens who can’t stop eating sugar.

Poor Self-Regulation: A Main Reason Kids Eat Too Much

When kids eat everything in sight, it can be disturbing. This issue of self-control around food, or self-regulation, versus loss of control with eating has been one of the most common frustrations I hear from parents.

Parents don’t understand the underlying reasons that cause kids to eat, or why their child participates in excessive eating.

Often they think overeating is a food problem. But, I’m here to tell you, oftentimes, the reasons are deeper and perhaps, multi-factored.

Most commonly, overeating stems from poor self-regulation around food, and this can be caused by many factors.

12 Reasons for Overeating in Children

Here are the most common reasons why a child eats too much, from my experience.

1. Being Too Hungry (or Hangry)

Hunger is the signal that tells our bodies to seek food and eat. A child’s appetite is closely tied to their growth. Since children are in an eighteen-year growing process, hunger will always be a primary driver for eating.

You will naturally see greater hunger during the baby and teens years (the adolescent growth spurt). These are the two highest growth periods in childhood.

If kids don’t get more food at these times, they can experience extreme hunger. Mostly, children are adept at up-regulating their eating to compensate for this accelerated period of growth.

How You Can Help:

• Don’t let your child get too hungry.
• Stay ahead of hunger by setting up a regular eating schedule, offering meals and snacks at regular times of the day, generally every three to four hours. These eating intervals are “opportunities to eat,” not mandated eating times.
• Better yet, make sure you’ve got a balanced meal plan in place–it helps quite a bit!

2. Exercise Stimulates Hunger

Active kids burn calories. When they’re active or participating in sports, they get hungry as they burn through their calorie reserves, signaling the brain it’s time to refuel.

That kicks the hunger signals into gear. Depending on the intensity and duration of exercise, hunger can be a real driver of eating.

How You Can Help:

• For recreational exercise lasting less than an hour, stay on a routine of timely meals and snacks. There is no need to provide extra food.
• For the athlete exercising longer than an hour, offer a small pre-exercise snack and an after-exercise snack, making sure both provide some quality protein and carbohydrate. 

Helpful Course: My nutrition class for young athletes is called Eat Like a Champion and I have a companion book for parents.

3. The Influence of Peers & Media

In the school age to teen years, the influence of peers and media is strong. It’s developmentally appropriate, so you should expect this.

Children and teens want to eat what their friends are eating. This is often influenced by commercials and advertising kids see on TV and the computer, and can be the reason for more food requests.

Helpful Podcast Episode: The author of Kid Food on the podcast and she sheds lots of insight into how food marketing affects kids — take a listen!

How You Can Help:

• Don’t be too restrictive with sweets or “processed” food. When you do this, kids tend to want those sweets and treats you are trying hard to control. Rather, find a way to work reasonable amounts of these foods into the diet, emphasizing that treats are for occasional eating.
• I encourage you to adopt what I call the 90 – 10 Rule for Sweets and Treats. It’s a balance of 90% nutritious, wholesome foods and 10% sweets or salty foods (aka Fun Foods).

4. Heightened Senses: Food Turns on All the Senses

The smell and appearance of food can entice a child to dig in. Additionally, research shows that prior enjoyment of a food can trigger a desire to eat delectable foods when they’re seen again. The pleasure center of the brain triggers a desire to eat. Fond memories of eating or food experiences can do the same.

How You Can Help:

• Make healthful food like fruits and veggies look and taste good! Studies suggest that kids and teens are more inclined to taste a food if it looks good. The sensory appeal of food can encourage your child to eat it. And if these foods are nutritious, it’s a win all around. Makes sense!

• Helpful Read: 10 Smart Ways to Serve Vegetables to Kids

5. Your Child is Bored

Some kids turn to food when they’re bored. Children learn to eat because of boredom between ages five and nine. This phenomenon is called Eating in the Absence of Hunger.

There’s been plenty of research conducted on this topic. In a nutshell, kids get bored, and they don’t know what to do, so they eat. Over time, they learn to turn to food when they’re bored.

Overeating due to boredom may occur when there are a lack of strong boundaries around food and eating.

How You Can Help:

• There are many ways in which you can create stronger boundaries around food. For one, you can close the kitchen after meals and snacks.  
• Other ways you can ‘tighten the ship:’ Encourage your child to ask first before they help themselves to snacks or extra food.
• Plan and serve structured meals and snacks.

These three boundaries can help you combat boredom eating.

6. Celebrations & Party Food Trigger Overeating

I think we all eat more at celebrations. I know I certainly do! It’s part of the party mentality: Dig in, indulge, and let go.

The challenge with kids is that there are many opportunities to celebrate: Birthday parties, holiday celebrations, end of sport season, and on and on.

The multitude of parties to which your child is exposed makes it hard to help your child eat for real physical hunger rather than the common food triggers that are present at the party scene.

How You Can Help: 

• Feed your child a regular meal or snack before heading out to a party or event.
• Monitor your child’s eating during the day. Not so you can tightly control their eating, but so you have a sense of the food balance. That way, you can adjust what you offer at home.

Staying on track with meals and snacks before attending a celebration will lessen the likelihood of over-indulging (hopefully!).

To learn more tips for handling parties and celebrations with your child, read How to Handle Kid’s Eating at Parties .

7. Emotions May Spur Too Much Eating

When kids are eating too much it may be a side-effect of learning how to deal with uncomfortable or negative emotions.

Comforting or soothing a child with food may teach him that eating is the thing to do when faced with feelings of sadness, loneliness or unhappiness. For example, if your child is sad because he didn’t get invited to a party, you may offer to make cookies.

Or, when your daughter doesn’t make the team, you ask her if she wants to go out for ice cream.

None of these are bad reactions, but they may encourage an association with food as a comfort mechanism rather than other, healthier behaviors. As mentioned above, this is tied to more body fat and poor eating habits. 

How You Can Help:

• Encourage your child to communicate about her feelings and work through them in healthy ways, rather than turning to food for comfort. 
• Teach your child about mindful eating and practice it.
• Listen to my podcast that investigates The Science of Emotions and Eating with a psychology expert.

8. Restriction: You’re the Food Police

If kids have experienced an overly restricted food environment at home (ie, no sweets, no junk food, or no second helpings), they may be seeking these forbidden foods when you aren’t around to monitor them.

In other words, restrictive diets and tightly controlling your child’s food choices, or the amounts they eat, may backfire, leading to food seeking behavior and overeating. Making any food forbidden or scarce can cause more problems and probably isn’t helpful.

Learn more: Forbidden Foods on The Nourished Child podcast.

How You Can Help:

• Expose your child to foods like candy, sweets and fried foods on a regular basis so they aren’t novel or scarce. This doesn’t mean to load them up in the house and say yes to every food request.
• Use my 90/10 Rule to get started with a framework that will help you be in a better balance with sweets and treats (above).
• Also, having a sweets strategy your family can live by can be useful in normalizing your child’s relationship with them.  
• I challenge you to dig into your feeding style and see how that may be influencing your child’s eating, too.
• And, last, review your knowledge of parenting food — it’s a key to feeding kids well.

9. Meals and Snacks are Erratic

When your child has a ravenous appetite and tends toward excessive eating, the timing of meals and snacks may be the culprit. Hunger can build up when the time between meals is too long, leading to food-seeking behavior and overeating.

Also, when meals don’t contain enough food or aren’t nutritious and satisfying, children can desire more food later and become too focused on food.

[Listen to Healthy Snacks: Satisfy Hunger with 3 Key Nutrients]

When the focus on food is high, the likelihood for kids to eat too much is higher.

How You Can Help:

• Turn your focus to diplomatic feeding (formerly called authoritative feeding).
• Stay on a regular meal and snack schedule, and offer a balanced plate of all food groups: protein, grains, vegetable, fruit and dairy foods.
• Implement food boundaries, and appreciate where your child is in his developmental path.

10. Your Child Enjoys Eating

Eating is an enjoyable endeavor for many children—the process of eating, the taste, the smells, and community with others—all together making eating an exciting and pleasurable endeavor.

If eating is enjoyable for your child, congratulations, you’re halfway to nourishing a healthy child!

We should all be striving to have children who enjoy eating, who light up when it’s time to come to the table. And just because your child enjoys eating, doesn’t mean he’s overeating.

What You Can Do:

• Hold steady with plenty of food variety. Create a positive meal environment.
• Stay on schedule with structured meals and snacks.
• Put food and eating in its place—at mealtime or snack time and at a regular location.

11. Disordered Eating or an Eating Disorder

Binge eating is defined as eating a large amount of food in a short amount of time, and while doing so, feeling out of control. This is more likely in older kids and teens, and when engaged with regularly, can turn into an eating disorder.

There are often underlying psychological concerns that prompt disordered eating, so if you’re concerned, discuss this with your medical provider or therapist.

What You Can Do:

• Learn more about eating disorders.
• Keep the lines of communication open with your child and help them cope with their emotions in positive ways.

12. Food Responsiveness

A child’s food approach is genetically inherited. Food responsiveness is one of the appetite traits that play out in children as being very interested in, motivated by, and pulled toward food. These are the kids who talk about food more than other kids, seem concerned about what and when they’re eating, and can seem to enjoy food “too much.”

When kids are food responsive, they need more structure around food because they may lack self-control. I dive into this specifically in the Eating Pillar in my book, Kids Thrive at Every Size.

What You Can Do:

• Have regular meals and snacks.
• Keep eating and food as predictable as possible, as this calms food responsive kids.
• Allow sweets and treats as part of the diet, but giving a child who is food responsive unlimited access is likely to backfire.

Understand Your Child and Take Positive Steps

If your child is eating too much, understanding the root of the issue will help you correct course and feed your child with love and limits.

Parents find there’s a lot more that goes into it than they expect!

Don’t go it alone.

Resources

• The Nourished Child Blueprint is my online program for parents who want to learn about nutrition and food balance, effective feeding, and healthy habits for a lifetime. 
• Kids Thrive at Every Size: How to Nourish Your Big, Small or In-Between Child for a Lifetime of Health and Happiness
• My other nutrition classes, workshops and guidebooks over on TheNourishedChild.com.

This post was updated in August, 2024.