If you want to break the diet trap cycle in your family, here are my top 6 things to do to help prevent you from becoming an almond mom or otherwise a dieting caregiver:
- Do your own work to keep you from projecting your own fears onto your children
- Many people find Ellyn Satter’s Division of Feeding Responsibilities helpful guidelines. It is:–parents choose when and what to eat and the kid chooses how much to eat if at all
- It’s ok if this doesn’t work for you sometimes or at all. I found it didn’t always mesh well in my family and I had to choose other ways.
- When your kids ask you about good vs bad foods–and they will–let them know you will only provide them with safe food (i.e. no moldy food). Teach that foods aren’t able to be categorized as good and bad or healthy vs unhealthy. Don’t worry too much about hammering this point verbally too much since modeling is most important. Explaining food nuance verbally is complicated and most kids won’t understand the concepts until their teens. What will they understand?
- Don’t call a food yuck–not only does it hurt you, the chef’s feelings, but you don’t want your kids to be the jerk in the cafeteria making fun of kid eating their cultural food or shelf stable food that is all they can afford.
- Teach kids that no one wants to hear how their body looks. And yes that includes compliments about weight loss, youthfulness, nice legs, how hot someone is. Be mindful of your own practice of this–this will be the difference between a kid internalizing whether their body is for other people’s pleasure only or their own.
