Please Please Please

One of my brilliant clients that works with children in a creative space once told me that they love working with children because they love giving children the opportunity to dream big before the moment when adults or adulthood tells them that things are not possible. I loved that, and I think about it often. 

I am thinking of it as I walk past a parent in the grocery store telling their kids that that is too much sugar for today, as I watch the parents in my community say at meal times not this (“bad” food) until that (“good” food), and as kids, especially the ones on the higher end of the weight spectrum, check with mom to see if another bagel is “okay”. 

I am not a birth parent. And I am not here to jump on the shame, blame, and judgement that I see in the parenting world all the time. We don’t give parents, especially moms, enough support, and we as a culture are constantly asking them to do more and more in the absence of structural support. This is not okay. I want to give parents all the space and grace in the world. And some may say, what does she know, she is not a parent. But what I am is an eating disorder dietitian. I once was a kid. A kid that understood what all this control and monitoring meant, and a kid that developed an eating disorder. 

Perhaps we aren’t telling our kids directly to diet anymore, but we are telling them to stay thin, to stay “healthy” by continuing to restrict and monitor food. This is being done because this is what public health messages are saying to do, doctors and pediatricians are re-inforcing these ideas, and of course- so many adults are still dieting to control their bodies, but calling it something different.

These behaviors are not benign, and it hurts my heart and soul every time I hear these discussions. Which are happening everywhere, all the time. I am not angry at the parents, I am angry at the lack of real and relevant information out there on what health is (okay, so your kid never eats sugar or continues to monitor, restrict, and feel shame and blame when they do, but do they trust their body on how to eat? Can they identify their own pleasure and desires? When we take this away from them at such a young age and with such a necessary and vulnerable thing: the impact is big. What are we considering when we consider “health”? Food choices? This is a limiting and prison-like idea of health that bypasses so much of our humanity).

I want to offer that the parenting strategy that is most often taught when it comes to food and our kids is misinformed. That it will keep our future generations in the same trap that us geriatric millennials find ourselves in, as a direct result of our parents’ stuff related to their shame and hatred of their bodies, and the stress, fear, shame and control response around food that arises from it. 

I know that we want better for our children. I know we want our children to have some peace with their bodies, and to innately trust themselves with food. In order to do this, we have to actually foster that trust. And the things that get in the way of fostering this in our children? The control. The monitoring. The eat this not that. My mentor Dana Sturtevant often reflected to me in the early stages of my practice when I was working with children and adolescents, that we are not aiming to raise “healthy” eaters, we are aiming to raise “competent” eaters. I’d like to expand our narrow (and silly) definition of health to one that includes competence. Competence leads to agency and sovereignty, and these will allow our children to trust not only their bodies and how to feed themselves, but how to live their lives from a place of internal knowing and guidance. This far outweighs any benefit that might come from sugar and “bad” food restriction (there are no bad foods, just eating disorders and disordered eating that arise from the idea there are) and allows our kids the chance to grow into adulthood with a solid foundation and trust in themselves to create the lives they want to live and to focus on the things that matter, which is not body control that plagues so many of the adults I know. 

Let’s give our young people the opportunity for better.