Walking On Eggshells About Weight And Food
Why avoiding conflict isn't helpful and what to do instead
Hello! I hope you and your family are doing well!
Many parents tell me they’re walking on eggshells with their child who struggles with eating and mental health.
Maybe you, like them, avoid talking about food and weight to avoid triggering anger, sadness, or fear. I get it!
However, walking on eggshells creates more anxiety and tension and leads to larger and more dramatic meltdowns and explosions over time.
While it may seem like it is your only option to keep your child happy and regulated, walking on eggshells prevents your child from learning conflict resolution and emotional regulation skills. Oh no!
Unfortunately, our desire to keep the peace can accidentally interfere with our child’s ability to feel good again.
Why?
Because constantly monitoring and censoring yourself means you’re not showing up authentically and confidently. Your child can sense your unease and sensitivity with their big feelings. Your avoidance of conflict can paradoxically create more conflict. It also teaches kids that weight and food are dangerous, explosive topics.
To help your child, you can stop avoiding conflict and learn to step into it with skill and confidence.
I live in California, where we have a wildfire problem. Paradoxically, one of the things that got us here is a lack of regular small fires. Without regular burns, our hillsides are overgrown with dry fuel, leading to explosive and uncontrollable fires. The strategy we’re working towards is controlled burns. These intentional fires are set and managed on purpose to reduce fuel load and lower the risk of uncontrolled wildfires.
As challenging as this is to hear, when you walk on eggshells with your child, you put your family at higher risk of massive emotional wildfires. Like California, your family is an ecosystem. You must manage, not avoid conflict to maintain health and well-being.
When we walk on eggshells we suppress our emotions and model for our children that we can’t tolerate their authentic emotional experience. When talking about food and weight swings from being strenuously avoided to explosive yelling matches, we create more problems than solutions.
On the other hand, when we learn to skillfully and regularly engage in conflict with our kids, we reduce the severity of each experience. We teach our kids to talk about tricky topics like food and weight and also learn to regulate their emotions, an essential skill for mental health.
Rather than avoiding conflict, we need to skillfully engage in conflict regularly.
Massive meltdowns and explosions are less likely in these conditions because kids feel safe enough to share their authentic opinions and needs. They trust you can handle conflict and aren’t triggered by their sensitivities. When we thoughtfully engage with rather than avoid conflict it’s less likely to cause damage.
California is pursuing new research, training programs, and partnerships with indigenous communities to learn how to use controlled burns to reduce massive wildfires. Setting fires on purpose after more than a century of trying to avoid fires is counter-intuitive but necessary.
Similarly, managing conflict in our families is rarely intuitive but it’s a skill that, with effort, we can learn.
Whether your most difficult conversations are about weight, food, screentime, or school, managing small, frequent conflicts in your family will make large meltdowns and explosions less likely and less damaging. It will support your family’s ecosystem and each person’s mental health.
As you engage in skillful conflict, your child will trust they can get their needs met in your family environment and make progress in their emotional development. Let me know if you’d like some help with this.
Ginny Jones Parent Coach / More-Love.org
Coaching Notes
Here are some stories from the last few weeks of my coaching sessions with parents who have kids with eating and body image issues:
My clients explored their frustration with how the lack of structure this summer is negatively affecting their son’s eating behavior. We set up a plan to get back on track.
I helped my client open a conversation with her young adult child about the food budget in the context of binge eating. This was a tricky conversation, but now she and her daughter feel more confident and secure.
Another client realized that her child needs more autonomy over things like clothes and religious activities to balance her lack of autonomy over food right now.
Communicating Non-Defensively When Your Child Has An Eating Disorder
Listening to your child act out and talk about their eating issues is hard, and it’s common to get stuck in defensive communication patterns. However, it’s more effective to practice non-defensive communication while still holding boundaries about treatment and recovery.
You have more power than you think, and learning to communicate non-defensively is the fastest way to increase trust and motivate your child to embrace the change required for recovery. I have a course on this concept.
My 8-page guide and workbook gives you information about non-defensive communication when your child has an eating disorder or other troubling behavior and six steps you can take to have non-defensive, productive conversations.
Paid Subscribers: Click the button below to get your printable and start parenting more confidently today.