Does your adopted child hoard food? Do you find food in your child’s bed, under the bed, or in the child’s dresser drawers? When you do find the food is it barely recognizable because it has rotted or been flattened? Perhaps you located the food by the odor permeating the air or the trail of ants leading to it. Hoarding food is a common behavior in children who have been deprived of adequate sustenance early in life. What can we, as their adoptive parents, do to help these children feel safe and possibly overcome this behavior?

One reader, livsmommy, made the following recommendation today commenting on Kelly's blog Food Hoarding vs Stealing.

Discipline does not help hoarding, it just increases negative behavior. The child needs help, not humiliation. So sad!

Yes, it is sad that these children suffered for years without adequate nutrition before coming into care. If you have adopted a sibling group of children who are all hoarding food in their bedrooms you may have trouble with several types of infestations. Depending on where you live, your home may be overrun with ants, mice, cockroaches, or flies. Unfortunately, livsmommy, didn’t give us any ideas on what has worked in the past for her to help children overcome this problem.

However, MamaS has successfully helped a child overcome hoarding. She tells us in her comment that her daughter was adopted at the age of four from an orphanage. Apparently, her daughter was sleeping with food on a regular basis, rendering the food unusable. She devised a simple yet cleaver plan to make her daughter feel safe, protect the food, and protect the room from infestation. A parent would not need to spend a lot of money or time to try this method out.

Here is the advice that MamaS gives us.

We solved the problem by my giving her a tupperware container filled with food for her to sleep with. It was tightly sealed so as not to spill out in the bed and most of the time she never even opened it. She just slept with it under her covers. Later, she became secure enough that she put it in a drawer of her bedside table. She is 25 years old now and she STILL puts a food item in the drawer beside her bed!

I am all for trying something at least once to see if it will work. Obviously, if your children are taking items because of control issues then this probably won't help. However, if they are truly hoarding because of the fear of not having food tomorrow, then this may solve your dilemma. Remember also, if your child's hoarding is something new, it can be a sign of depression.

Related blogs
Hoarding can be a Sign of Childhood Depression
My Child Doesn't Know She is Full
Children With Obesity Risk High Blood Pressure

Photo Credit Julia Fuller 2007