Dear Perplexed,
You ask how to help your daughter build healthy eating habits, especially when you’ve had a rough day. You write about your recent snow day of overwhelm, when all you wanted for dinner was comfort food—tomato soup and grilled cheese, or pizza. And TV.
But then you remembered you had to feed your daughter too. All the advice about colorful plates, half-filled with fruits and veggies, reared up to shame you. And absolutely no meal-time TV, scolded the healthy-eating police. You didn’t want to add parental failure to that miserable day. But you were depleted. How is it that mealtimes, which could be pleasurable, have become such a burden?
You’ve heard the message: You shape your daughter’s eating. You’re the role model, nutrition educator, shopper and cook. Meanwhile, pitfalls surround you. One in six American children are overweight. And if it’s not obesity, it could be anorexia, bulimia, or simply the battle over broccoli. Food so easily gets co-opted by emotional concerns and as a weapon between parents and children. Remember trying to get pureed peas past your toddler’s pursed lips? Every parent gets caught. You intend to teach love of vegetables, but instead you learn the limits of parental authority. Humbled, you fret about potential malnourishment. From day one, you’ve felt responsible to keep your daughter alive and growing. No metric reassures as tangibly as her progress on those growth charts.
I’ll try not to add to your over-heavy burden. However, I can’t help but connect the food minefields to food’s role in early life. The anxieties and pleasures attached to food run deep. We all start life as babies, utterly dependent on our mothers for food. The mother expresses her love through the well-timed delivery of milk. This fills the baby with bliss. In those early days, food truly is love.
But even then, babies play their part in a successful feed. They’ve got to find the nipple, latch on, suck and swallow. From the beginning, feeding is a cooperative dance, a partnership that requires coordination and adjustments on both sides. A satisfying feed becomes a model of pure pleasure, an experience that builds trust in the goodness in mother and baby and in their well-coordinated link. It’s the full-bodied experience of success, a primal foundation of confidence in one’s self and one’s partner. No wonder we reach for comfort food when we’ve had a bad day.
Likewise, the inevitable feeding glitches terrify the infant. Those moments of piercing hunger, before mother and milk arrive, mean—in the infant’s mind—starvation and death. The baby has no sense of time. The baby’s panicked state of hunger is absolute, an all-consuming eternity. In our ancient histories, we all know these terrors. The dark side of food grows from these roots. Usually, for parents and kids, the early anxieties go underground. But sometimes, without our knowledge, food anxieties get hooked. Then, we’re emotionally swamped, without solid footing for rational thought and action. Patience with yourself helps you course-correct, so you can help your daughter do the same.
With food, remember that you and your daughter have divided responsibilities. On one hand, this sounds simple. Yours include buying and cooking healthy food. Hers include eating, and registering when she’s hungry and full. On the other hand, this is a complicated moving target. The division of responsibilities keeps changing as your daughter grows. And there’s always the shared responsibilities. For example, once she begins school, you can talk together about food groups and nutritional needs. You’ll still keep track of that balanced diet, but she can help too. This prepares her for the next step in shouldering responsibilities herself. When you see a power struggle brewing, step back and think about your divided responsibilities. Most likely, you’re holding onto a responsibility that she’s ready to own.
Here are two tips for dividing responsibilities.
Tuning in to sensations of hunger and fullness. You set the structure that connects your daughter’s eating to her bodily needs. Most school-aged kids get enough food with three meals and a snack. They learn to fuel up at predictable times. Without a food schedule, it’s too tempting to reach for popcorn to evade boredom or some feeling.
A schedule promotes eating, mixed with conversation, as a mindful activity. That’s how we learn what our bodies need. Serve your daughter a reasonable portion. She’ll notice when she’s hungry for more and when she’s had enough. Remind her that it takes time—20-30 minutes—for her body to register fullness. If she’s still starving after a reasonable snack, set the timer and keep her company with a game or a book. Then, if she still wants that second snack, she’s listening to her body signals. She’s the expert on her body cues, not you. You can also talk about “just a bit” hungry. That edge of hunger is our friend. It’s more enjoyable to eat when your body tells you it needs food.
Connect your daughter to food production. Projects that involve her in growing and preparing food teach appreciation for food’s value. And this mindful appreciation supports eating what’s needed, not mindless gorging. From the endless options, you’ll find food projects that fit your family. Pick strawberries. Grow tomatoes on the deck. Make muffins together. These are shared responsibilities, opportunities to teach your daughter to savor the whole experience, from anticipation to enjoyment to fond remembrance. There’s nothing like the taste of fresh local strawberries. Unlike the endless supply of chips, local strawberries are a time-limited treat. When the season ends, we remember their pleasure and look forward to their return next year.
With food, we can trust natural rhythms. Toddlers often binge on one food at a time, but over several days, they’ll eat a balanced diet. So, when you’ve had a rough day and crave comfort food, be gentle with yourself. It’s only one meal. And if you don’t feel like talking, you’ve got options besides TV. How about a book of riddles to get the family through dinner? It gives the group a shared focus for chatting between those bites of pizza.
Then, make sure you refuel with your partner or friend or therapist. We often persist in saying we have to feed our kids, long after they are feeding themselves. Perhaps this is because we experience their hungers, including for food, as an onerous burden. The over-focus on our children’s needs, at the expense of our own, strains everyone. Dividing up responsibilities, and claiming our responsibility to self-nurture, relaxes the family atmosphere.
Remember the maxim: Eat to live, don’t live to eat. It reminds us that food is a supporting player in a full life. Let yourself trust that eating is on good-enough footing, chugging along, fueling your bodies for all the activities you love.
Thoughtfully yours,
Dr. Miriam