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By: Jacqueline A. Reilly,
MS, LMSW
Professionals
are encountering a growing number of families concerned that their children
are not receiving proper nutrition. Parents are also expressing anxiety
about the national statistics recording skyrocketing obesity among young
people. In response to these emerging dynamics CEDaR's
registered dietician, Elyse Falk, MS.
RD, CDN, and I have developed a lecture titled
"A Food Healthy Household". Our talks are mostly attended
by parents of school age kids, who want to facilitate a healthy eating
environment at home and avoid setting the groundwork for future eating
disorders. These families also tend to live in school districts that are introducing
wellness policy changes in their school lunch menus. With increasing
awareness about healthy eating and fear of obesity, parents have become more
involved in the food choices their kids are making all the way from preschool
to high school. Although we agree that parents are well within their
right to craft a food healthy household, Elyse and I are dedicated to
spreading the word about appropriate learning styles correlating with
different ages particularly regarding learning about food. Well meaning and
loving parents anxious to support healthy eating among their children often
increase areas of control regarding food in their homes. The result can be
devastating. Power dynamics that may be played out around food usually have
to do with unresolved emotional and relational conflict and should be dealt
with outside the realm of food.
There are three areas I will be addressing here. First, I will discuss
how to foster a normal relationship to food in the home. Secondly,
drawing from concerns parents express at our area talks, I will illuminate
some of the pitfalls that commonly occur with generally well meaning parents.
Finally I will discuss why we do not want the relationship to food to be
laced with feeling states and power dynamics that do not belong in the arena
of food. In essence, we seek to protect our food related behaviors within a
category of nurturing that can be relatively separate from emotions such as
shame, anger and possible associated self destructive impulses. We want
to move the experience of food off the list of possible sites where
psychological power dynamics might be played out.
The food environment at home should be devoid of power relations as much as
possible. What does this mean? Well, a growing child has an innate sense of
fullness and hunger, their job as a learner about this innate sense is to experience
food and taste, fullness and hunger and to listen to their internal
biological guide. When one is able to have an unhindered experience of their
own natural signals they learn to trust their body and to understand food as
a source of nourishment and comfort. Food is about sustaining a growing
healthy body, enjoyment, celebration and comfort. A parent encourages
this natural process by providing nourishing foods and many food choices
presented in a calm, stress-free environment. Preschool and elementary school
aged kids learn through experience and copying what is most frequently
presented to them in their everyday lives. Modeling a healthy
relationship to food may be one of the most valuable learning tools a parent
can give to their growing child.
Let me further discuss this by pointing out how we intuitively
understand effective learning styles in how we teach kids about reading. We
are encouraged to read to our children daily, to be a reading household, and
to turn off other distractions such as the television and the computer in
order to foster a natural love of reading. This same sensitive, age
appropriate learning-style is often not extended to how we encourage a
healthy relationship to food in the environment of learning at home. With the
advent of knowledge about healthy food and eating, families have become
highly verbal regarding “good versus bad” food choices. We do not constantly
warn children about the dangers of not reading; instead we cultivate a love
of reading and healthy reading habits. When it comes to food we seem to apply
a different set of learning tools. Parents frequently feel that they need to
micromanage during mealtime. Well meaning parents discuss with us,
their need to get their kids to eat one kind of food or another or to
influence the portion size of what their kids take in. They will wonder if it
is ok to force kids to eat this or that food that may be routinely rejected.
Others talk of a constant negotiation around food, for example it is common
for parents to continually remind kids of what they have already eaten and
direct them to think of what their next choice should be. We often find kids
in this learning environment to be pre-occupied with food and parents
complain of constant food seeking behaviors that in turn inspires parents to
further increase control of the child's intake. This helicopter parenting
undercuts a child's learning process especially regarding an individuals understanding
of their own fullness and hunger. They hear their parent's voice rather than
their innate sense of satiety regarding food. A food healthy household would
promote learning about food as a soothing and non-reprimanding experience;
understanding that children often need multiple, up to fifteen, un-pressured,
nondirective exposures to a new food before they might try it. Anxiety that
parents express in pressuring their children regarding food choices and body
weight, shape and image can backfire for reasons that one might not suspect.
As established above in the comparison to how we typically teach kids to
read, we saw that facilitating a healthy relationship to reading involved
making it a good experience. With a growing fear of obesity parents often
struggle within themselves about how much they should enforce good eating to
head off imagined future problems. The results can be rather
problematic. We all understand that too much pressure while teaching a young
person to read will imprint a resistance to that activity in a growing child.
Thus, we make reading a soothing experience. When it comes to food we
often put the pressure on, undermining our children's learning about their
innate sense of fullness and hunger. This can insert an unwanted power
dynamic into the child's relationship to their parents and certainly disrupt
the child's sense of trust of their own bodies regarding hunger and fullness.
Will a pressure infused environment regarding early learning about food
create an eating disorder? Not necessarily. What it will do however, is
inject power dynamics into an area of learning where it does not belong. This
could set someone up to have the arena of food as an option to play out power
relationships, and related unresolved emotional conflicts. This is the thrust
of the message we deliver here. Respect the natural relationship that growing
children have to food and remove any power-struggle that may appear therein.
Aside from enabling a child to know their own gentle relationship to
food it will provide an area where kids can connect to their parents in a
safe and nurturing environment with food as a symbol of health and
celebration. Parents often leave our talk with a sense of relief; what they
have heard has granted permission to ease up and let dinner time once again
be a safe haven of nurturing, relating and joy.
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