When it feels like food is ruining your relationship
Honoring your feelings about feeding your child
Hello! I hope you and your family are doing well! Today I wanted to talk about the fact that sometimes it feels like food is ruining our relationship with our child.
A child who is struggling with food tends to be prickly. They make it very hard for you to give them the love and compassion you know they need because they’re so resistant to your efforts to engage and connect with them around food.
It’s painful to have a meal you carefully and thoughtfully prepared for your child rejected, picked at, or rushed through. You’re a person with feelings! Of course it hurts when your child doesn’t treat food the way you’d like them to.
If your child has disordered eating behaviors, there’s a good chance that you’re feeling frustrated and disconnected from them. As much as you want to feed them and help them be healthy, a child who is struggling with their relationship with food can easily (and seemingly heartlessly) reject your best efforts to help.
Sometimes it feels like food is ruining your relationship. And worse, sometimes it seems like the harder you try to help them eat in a regulated way, the harder things get.
Feeding our kids is primal and instinctual. It’s one of the first things we do for them. In the first few weeks, it feels like pretty much all we do is try our best to feed, diaper, and snuggle them. And even when they grow up, we don’t lose the instinct to help them feel safe, fed, and loved.
Kids who are struggling with food can throw off the most confident parents. But the good news is that it’s never hopeless. I know you can help your child eat in a more regulated way. You’ve got everything it takes!
If you’re worried that food is ruining your relationship with your child, here are 4 things you can do:
1. Reflect on what’s driving the food behavior. Often we’re so focused on the behavior that bothers us, whether it’s restricting/dieting, binging/overeating, sneaking food, or purging, that we can’t see what’s driving it. Behavior is a vital form of communication, so we want to try and understand what your child’s behavior can tell us about their lifestyle and how they’re feeling. We want to look at physical behaviors like how often and how much they’re eating and whether they’re getting enough sleep, as well as psychological and social experiences like whether they believe they need to control their body to be loved, accepted, and safe.
2. Have open-ended, curious conversations about eating. When your child is doing something you want them to stop doing, it’s natural to rush in with advice. You may just want to say “knock it off” or “stop doing that!” This approach makes perfect sense but it has limited efficacy when it comes to eating behaviors. The older our kids get and the more times we’ve tried this approach, the less effective it is. Instead of telling our kids what they should (or shouldn’t) do, we need to have conversations in which they feel seen, heard, and understood. Have open-ended conversations and be genuinely interested in understanding your child’s point of view. Don’t try to change their mind, seek only to understand. Paradoxically, this is more motivating than trying to persuade them to change.
3. Hold boundaries around behavior (with guidance). Parents are responsible for upholding behavioral boundaries in the home. For example, it’s appropriate for you to have boundaries about coming to the table, being polite, not throwing food, not criticizing the food, etc. However, we must be very thoughtful if we’re trying to set boundaries around what goes in our child’s mouth. It’s not that you can’t have expectations (for example, if you’re tasked with feeding a child using FBT), but most of us need someone on the outside to help us identify appropriate boundaries around eating. This is something I work with my clients on, and it makes a huge difference and changes the table dynamics quickly.
4. Have post-meltdown conversations. If your child is struggling with food then there will be meltdowns around food and meals. You can’t prevent every meltdown, but you can help your child learn and grow by not shying away from talking about what happened. The key to doing this is not to tell your child what they did wrong, but rather to go back to those open-ended conversational skills to try and understand what went wrong and help your child feel safe enough to seek your comfort and support moving forward. Sometimes the greatest shifts in eating patterns happen during these meaningful, compassionate reviews of what went wrong.
All of this might sound simple, but can be tricky because you’re trying to change family dynamics around your child’s most alarming experience right now: eating. Yes, it’s challenging, but I know you are 100% the right person for the job! Let me know if you’d like some help.
Ginny Jones Parent Coach / More-Love.org
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