To keep the evening meal pleasant, put more concentrated effort into highchair problems at breakfast and lunch. That does not mean you will not correct during dinner, but the concentrated effort at the other meals can speed up the process of dining harmony. 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. The variable is the place or item of offense, but the constant is the level of expectation. 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 settings and activities vary, parents act as the constant influence bringing to each situation the consistency necessary for orderly development and growth. When a problem occurs at mealtime, consider what other conflicts are present throughout the day.