International Women’s Day
About a hundred years ago, a pediatrician named Dr. Clara Marie Davis asked a question that shook up infant feeding: what if babies could be trusted to choose their own food? What she found helped plant the seeds of what we now call responsive feeding.
Every International Women’s Day, we celebrate women whose ideas changed the world, and few changed the way we think about feeding children quite like Dr. Clara Marie Davis. At a time when strict dietary prescriptions ruled pediatric care, Davis boldly challenged conventional wisdom. Her research suggested something radical: given the right environment, children can instinctively choose the nutrients their growing bodies need.
Her work in the 1920s and beyond helped lay the groundwork for what we now call responsive feeding, an approach that honors a child’s internal cues of hunger and fullness and builds a lifelong foundation for healthy eating habits and a positive relationship with food.
A Historical Glimpse: How Feeding Practices Have Evolved
Throughout history, infant feeding has been shaped by necessity, cultural beliefs, and scientific discoveries. Here’s a quick tour of how we got to Davis’s day.
- Until roughly 10,000 years ago Before farming Babies were fed mainly on their mother’s milk, with foraged and hunted foods added once they were ready.
- From around 5,000 BCE Early farming communities Small clay feeding vessels with spouts first appear in Europe. Some were small enough for a baby to hold, and some were shaped like imaginary animals. They became far more common through the Bronze and Iron Ages. Chemical analysis of three of them, found in child graves in Bavaria and dated to roughly 1200–450 BCE, turned up traces of milk from cattle, sheep, or goats (Dunne et al., 2019). Researchers think babies in Central Europe got other foods from about 6 months and were weaned by age two to three. Animal milk may have helped early populations grow, but it is not a nutritional match for human milk, and it may have brought new risks.
- The 1890s to the 1920s The era of strict schedules Feeding advice became increasingly rigid as a “scientific” approach to mothering took hold. In 1894, Dr. L. Emmett Holt published The Care and Feeding of Children, a bestseller reprinted dozens of times. Its message: feed by the clock, and follow the specialist’s rules rather than the baby’s cues (Holt, 1894; Fischer, 2023). Pediatricians prescribed detailed meal plans that parents were expected to follow precisely. The result? Plenty of mealtime battles, with many children resisting the strict diets imposed on them.
A telling statistic
Reports suggest that up to 90% of pediatric visits involved concerns about children refusing what was prescribed, a phenomenon then labeled “anorexia.”
Into this world stepped a Chicago pediatrician with a very different idea.
Dr. Clara Marie Davis. Image source: Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/21704043/clara_m-davis
Meet Dr. Clara Marie Davis
Dr. Clara Marie Davis earned her medical degree in 1901 and was practicing pediatrics in Chicago in the 1920s (Fischer, 2024). She had a keen interest in child nutrition, and she wasn’t impressed by the overly rigid advice the “experts” were handing out. So she asked a radical question: what would happen if infants were given complete freedom to choose their own foods? Could they, without parental pressure or guidance, instinctively nourish themselves well?
Could babies, without pressure or guidance, nourish themselves?
The Experiment: 15 Babies, 34 Foods, Zero Pressure
To find out, Davis ran an unprecedented study that began at Mount Sinai Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, and later continued in Chicago. Over about six years, she observed 15 infants between six and eleven months old, some of them orphans and others the children of single mothers. At each meal, the babies were offered a variety of whole, natural foods: fresh fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, fish, and dairy. She reported her early results in 1928 (Davis, 1928) and presented the full findings to the Canadian Medical Association in 1939 (Davis, 1939).
The house rules were simple
Free choice
Babies could choose from around 10 foods at each meal.
Foods served separately
Each food came in its own individual bowl.
A very quiet nurse
She offered a spoonful only if a baby pointed or reached for a dish, and could not comment, encourage, or guide their choices in any way.
No manners police
No correcting manners, no portion control, and no stepping in on their selections.
The Astonishing Results & the Birth of Responsive Feeding
Davis’s findings were nothing short of revolutionary:
Nearly everything got a taste
The babies sampled almost all 34 foods. The only holdouts: one baby never tried lettuce, and another never tried spinach.
Every baby built a different menu
Each child developed unique taste preferences, sometimes eating only two or three favorite foods for a stretch. No two babies ate the same diet on any given day, week, or month.
On paper, a dietitian’s nightmare
Davis herself called some of the menus a dietitian’s nightmare, like a breakfast of a pint of orange juice and liver, or a supper of several eggs, bananas, and milk.
Every baby thrived
Several babies arrived undernourished or with rickets. By the end of the study, all 15 were healthy and well nourished. In Davis’s words, all of them “throve.”
The cod liver oil story
One baby arrived with severe rickets, a bone-softening condition caused by too little vitamin D. Davis placed a small glass of cod liver oil on his tray. He took it on and off, in varying amounts, until his rickets healed. Then he never touched it again.
Davis saw it as evidence of the body’s own wisdom. It was only one baby, though, and researchers have debated how to interpret it ever since.
The nutrition added up
A 1987 review of the records of three of the babies found that their nutrient intakes well exceeded the recommendations of the time, with the possible exception of iron (Story & Brown, 1987).
Definition
Responsive feeding
A feeding practice in which caregivers provide nutritious food options and allow the child to decide how much to eat, without pressure, rewards, or coercion.
Davis’s study was an early forerunner of this idea. Researchers have since explored how responsive feeding relates to children’s eating habits, mealtime stress, and their ability to tune in to hunger and fullness.
The Twist Most People Miss
It’s not “let them eat anything”
It’s tempting to read Davis’s study as proof that kids should be handed whatever they want. That isn’t what happened. Davis herself pointed to the study’s “trick”: she chose the menu. Every food on offer was a whole, nutritious option, and she deliberately left out things like sweets and heavily processed foods.
Her conclusion was that choosing which foods are available belongs “in the hands of their elders” (Davis, 1939), while children decide what and how much to eat from those choices. That is exactly the balance responsive feeding aims for today.
One more thing to keep in mind: this was a small study of 15 babies, so it’s best read as a powerful early clue rather than the final word.
Why Davis’s Work Still Matters
Davis’s study offered compelling early evidence that children offered a variety of healthy foods in a supportive, pressure-free setting can regulate their own intake and thrive. Later research on genes and environment, below, helps fill in the rest of the picture.
Her work helped shift pediatric thinking and influenced well-known figures like Dr. Benjamin Spock, who encouraged parents to trust their children’s appetites rather than rigidly control them. In his 1946 book Baby and Child Care, Spock famously wrote:
A mother can trust an unspoiled child’s appetite to choose a wholesome diet if she serves him a reasonable variety of natural and unrefined foods.
Dr. Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care
Science Confirms What Davis Suspected
Modern research keeps backing up the idea that both nature and nurture shape what children like to eat. In a large UK study of 2,686 three-year-old twins, researchers found that it depends on the type of food (Fildes et al., 2014):
Food preferences can also be shaped, especially in early childhood, through repeated exposure and positive modeling by caregivers.
Responsive feeding fits neatly with these findings. Children may arrive with innate tendencies toward certain foods, but their environment plays a crucial role in shaping their eating habits. When parents provide a structured yet pressure-free eating environment, children are more likely to develop balanced and diverse diets.
Appetite can also be shaped by what’s happening in the body. Read Medical Reasons That Can Contribute to Picky Eating.
What This Means at Your Table
You don’t need a hospital ward or a very quiet nurse. Here’s how to borrow Davis’s best ideas at home:
- You choose what’s offered. They choose what and how much.Offer a variety of nutritious foods, then let your child decide how much to eat.
- Serve foods separately.Davis served each food in its own bowl. Try offering foods side by side so your child can see and choose each one.
- Be the quiet nurse.Davis’s nurse never commented, encouraged, or guided. Skip the bribes, the bargaining, and the “just one more bite.”
- Look at the whole day, not one meal.Davis’s babies ate wildly different meals, yet their overall daily intake stayed steady. One odd plate doesn’t tell the story.
- Keep offering, and keep eating together.Repeated exposure and seeing you enjoy food are two of the most powerful tools you have.
If your child eats a very limited range of foods, has trouble gaining weight, or mealtimes feel stressful no matter what you try, that may be more than typical picky eating, and individualized support can help.
Ready to put this into practice? Rebuilding Trust at the Table walks through the four steps of responsive feeding.
The Legacy of Dr. Clara Marie Davis: A Message for Women Today
On International Women’s Day, and every day, we honor Dr. Clara Marie Davis not only for her contributions to child nutrition but also for embodying the spirit of fearless inquiry, innovation, and trust in the innate wisdom of children. She defied the norms of her time, advocating for a feeding philosophy that respected children’s natural instincts. Her work continues to inspire parents, pediatricians, and feeding specialists to create environments where children feel safe, supported, and empowered to explore food at their own pace.
As women, we can carry forward Davis’s legacy by embracing our own intuition, whether in feeding our children, making decisions about our families, or challenging outdated norms.
Sometimes the best way to nourish the future is to listen, trust, and create spaces where children and women can thrive on their own terms.
Want Help Bringing Responsive Feeding to Your Table?
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Selected References
- Davis, C. M. (1928). Self-selection of diet by newly weaned infants. American Journal of Diseases of Children, 36(4).
- Davis, C. M. (1939). Results of the self-selection of diets by young children. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 41(3), 257.
- Dunne, J., Rebay-Salisbury, K., Salisbury, R. B., Frisch, A., Walton-Doyle, C., & Evershed, R. P. (2019). Milk of ruminants in ceramic baby bottles from prehistoric child graves. Nature, 574, 246–248. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1572-x
- Fildes, A., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Llewellyn, C. H., Fisher, A., Cooke, L., & Wardle, J. (2014). Nature and nurture in children’s food preferences. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 99(4), 911–917. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24477038/
- Fischer, H. (2023). Fixed schedules and no kissing: Child rearing according to Drs. Holt and Watson. Hektoen International. https://hekint.org/2023/02/03/fixed-schedules-and-no-kissing/
- Fischer, H. (2024). Dr. Davis discovers desirable dietary decisions. Hektoen International. https://hekint.org/2024/02/15/dr-davis-discovers-desirable-dietary-decisions/
- Holt, L. E. (1894). The care and feeding of children: A catechism for the use of mothers and children’s nurses. D. Appleton and Company.
- Kleinman, R. E., & Coletta, F. A. (2016). Historical overview of transitional feeding recommendations and vegetable feeding practices for infants and young children. Nutrition Today, 51(1), 7–13. https://doi.org/10.1097/nt.0000000000000137
- Story, M., & Brown, J. E. (1987). Do young children instinctively know what to eat? The studies of Clara Davis revisited. New England Journal of Medicine, 316(2), 103–106. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM198701083160208
- Strauss, S. (2006). Clara M. Davis and the wisdom of letting children choose their own diets. CMAJ, 175(10), 1199. https://www.cmaj.ca/content/175/10/1199
