Almost from birth, food is fraught with conflict for many of us. Are they getting enough? Are they getting the “right” kind food? Is it healthy enough? Is it safe? We are conditioned to think of food as a collection of nutrients, toxins, calories, and weighted decisions. It’s joy and misery, celebration and stress. But many of us know that food is actually about something so much bigger. Food is about family, community, trust, and relationships. So why doesn’t it feel that way?
This week on the Raising Good Humans Podcast, I spoke with Jennifer Anderson, nutritionist, founder of Kids Eat in Color, and author of a new book, Feed Them Well, A Guide to Raising Healthy, Confident Eaters for Life. Our conversation focused on raising kids with a healthy, judgment-free relationship with food and their bodies, even while navigating picky eating, family pressures, and all the rest of the noise around food.
Jennifer has a term in the book called “embodied independence.” She describes it as a union between two things that we normally consider separate; loving and living in your body and knowing how to take care of it. This approach is about integration. For me it is about the balance between the extremes that come so naturally to many of us. Do we avoid any conversation about food, making us permissive, or do we create limits that make us feel too controlling? Can we teach our children to have a both/and approach when it comes to something that is so loaded even for us adults?
I recently saw something on social media poking fun at how a boomer mom thinks about bodies. It was a post listing all the things that would be associated with a child’s success and happiness, and then a statement saying that a boomer mom would prefer her child to be thin over all of those things. Moms were conditioned to want skinny. Girls were told that skinny was the ultimate goal. Many of us were raised to understand that thinness was preferred, worshipped, and valued. It was celebrated all over pop culture, in our magazines (remember those?) and music videos (now I’m just being ridiculous). Is it any wonder that it is so challenging for us to look at our own children and do things differently? Or notice where these misconceptions are creeping in?
This ingrained judgment shows up in all sorts of ways that we least expect. One of them is the sorting of food into good and bad categories. One is a savior, and one is poison. Each single food becomes a loaded decision. Jennifer reminds us that this approach isn’t benefitting any of us. Like so many things in the field of development, we want to strive towards flexibility. When we sort foods into moral categories, we are creating a framework that is inflexible, hard to sustain, impossible to model, and potentially the early building blocks of disordered eating later in life. Instead, Jennifer suggests that we remember context. Is this food for me? Does it serve me right now? Ever? From that place we can find the time and place for foods without banishing any of them. We can find natural moderation without judgment. We can say “everyone is having one piece of cake” without saying “you can only have one piece of cake because sugar is bad for you.” The outcome of these two statements is the same, but one is just a rule and the other is a comment on your child’s character, a fear tactic, and a judgment.
Meal times at my house are not perfect. They are full of the type of boisterous conversation and chaos that we all experience daily, but they have very little to do with the food being served. That could partially be my cooking, but on the whole it is a reflection of what I try to prioritize; our connection. The byproduct of that is that we eat whatever is in front of us with a little less notice, a little less obsession, and hopefully a little less pressure. This learning of a family pattern of eating, this modeling, is doing more to set the tone than we may realize. A vegetable reappearing each week whether or not they eat it, routine desserts that appear or disappear without being tied to behaviors, choices around portion size and servings, all send a message about food without addressing the foods themselves. But this is hard, and as Jennifer so accurately declares, it takes parental confidence that so many of us lack. If we are swayed by every study, every fad on social media, every parent we overhear talking at school, or one bad night at the dinner table, it erodes our confidence. It challenges the way we want to feel about food and the neutrality we are working so hard to gain. That insecurity does not go unnoticed by our kids. Our fears become theirs (just think of how many young children talk about red dye 40!), our behaviors are passed on, and our meals grow tense. Instead, I urge you to remember that no one decision makes or breaks a meal. Nothing is precious. Every small change is better than what it was yesterday. If we can believe that and have confidence in it, we can chill out on the drama and judgment we bring to the table, and weather the normal developmental ebbs and flows of our little eaters.
Sadly for all of us, the outside world (and all our extended relatives) may not read this article, or Jennifer’s excellent book. That means that by the time they are in their early school years, our kiddos will have encountered a world of complicated messages about bodies and health from their friends, their parent’s friends, TVs shows, movies, YouTube, billboards, and on, and on again. Plus, they have had enough Thanksgiving meals to be confused about the way adults around them handle and talk about food, or received enough well-meaning, but frighteningly inappropriate comments, from grandparents, aunts, uncles and the odd neighbor. Even today, my friend told me that her husband saw some children for the first time all summer and said, “You’ve gotten so tall,” a comment he thought was harmless, only to find out that they are miserable about their new height, and have barely come out of their room for fear of embarrassment. Can we do anything about it? Well, as I LOVE to say, it depends.
My favorite intervention for the messages that our society sends about bodies and health is to talk about those messages directly with our children. Try looking at a billboard (hello, Los Angeles) and saying, “Why do you think the people look like that to sell underwear?” Ask probing questions like, “Do you think that is what beauty looks like?” or “What do you find beautiful?” Make your own thoughts known about things that make you crazy (like teenage movies where the girl takes off her glasses and straightens her hair and is suddenly supposed to be more beautiful than she was seconds earlier), and ask them theirs. The message may be the same, but you have the opportunity to buffer it.
Even if (or when) your child criticizes their own body, curiosity and conversation are your best tools. Try asking, “What makes you say that?” or “Have you heard that somewhere?” before jumping to tell them that what they are thinking, or feeling, is wrong. Learning to love your body is a process, and it is not linear. None of us need to love our body every day, and building a healthy body image isn’t an overnight process. As a means to fortify our children’s image of their own bodies (and to provide balance), try talking about the body as a supercomputer, as an instrument that is capable of magical things. One of my favorites is to talk about needing fat on your bottom in order to sit comfortably. Sitting on bones all day would hurt, and fat can be wonderfully useful!
But when a family member or friend makes comments directly to your child, it is a different story. Sometimes, it means a conversation with that person is necessary. A hard boundary to be set. Sometimes, it may be that you need to explain to your child why that person says or acts in a way that is so antithetical to your own values (building perspective taking, not as an excuse). And sometimes, it may mean that you have to sit with the hurt and resist the urge to fix it. Your relationship with your child is still the best medicine there is. Have faith that the conversations and support you are capable of offering can make a huge difference.
And if your own feelings about food are getting in the way of the family meals you want to have, or the way you want to influence your kids, take the time to address them. Being a parent is a wonderful excuse to face your own feelings, and get help if you need it.
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