Reflect

Whether it’s encouraging a toddler to ‘eat it all up’, managing the emotional rollercoaster of a fussy eater or wondering whether a 12-year-old’s reluctance to move is a sign to act on, food often becomes the backdrop for deeper concerns within family life. And as our children grow, those concerns may only evolve. One minute you're negotiating broccoli bites, the next you're trying to de-code whether your teenager’s fixation on protein shakes and calorie counts in restaurants is harmless curiosity or something more worrying. Perhaps you have a very sporty child whose diet you worry about 'getting right'? Perhaps you have a child who refuses to eat anything other than one or two items? Or a child who is showing signs of managing tricky emotions with binge eating? Or maybe you have a child in a bigger body who you are worried is gaining too much weight?

Parents are left wondering: When do I step in? When do I stay quiet? What do I say without shaming? Is that stash of sweet wrappers under the pillow a ‘red flag’ or just classic childhood mischief? Should we tread gently with our children or take a more direct approach?

How we talk about food matters just as much as what we serve. So how can we be sure we are doing or saying ‘the right thing’ when talking to our children about food and their relationship to it?

Dr Anna Colton, clinical psychologist and author of the freshly published How to Talk to Your Children About Food will take it from here. Below, Dr Colton explores everyday parenting dilemmas that can arise around food and eating habits. She will guide, motivate and empower us with words of wisdom steeped in clinical practice, a rich evidence-base and her own experience as a busy mother of four.

Motivate

Many of the issues we face with our children’s eating in early childhood are developmental. Picky eating in particular is extremely common, with a prevalence of 22% globally in children under 30 months and up to 59% across childhood, depending on the country, age and criteria. In the majority of children, picky eating eases by the age of six, though it persists for some. The best way through it is to remain calm, be curious and compassionate rather than critical and corrective, know it will pass, and continue to offer foods your children refuse – exposure – in a relaxed manner, without any cajoling, bribing or forcing. We know that when parents are anxious, or control or coerce children’s eating, the incidence of picky eating is higher, as is children’s desire for highly palatable foods, and they tend to be less able to self-regulate their intake.

This isn’t about blame. Rather, I want to make clear the importance of knowing what presses our buttons as parents. When parents are anxious about healthy eating, weight gain, ultra-processed foods and sugar intake, children pick it up. They are like sponges, absorbing how we feel, and it plays out in their eating. Some become anxious around food, leading to fussiness and fear about eating at friends’ houses. Others feel that there is scarcity of the foods that they like, such as chocolate and sweets, and thus they seek them out secretly. Hidden sweet wrappers usually indicate that kids are seeking and hiding sweets that they don’t feel are allowed at home. The response, conversely, is to offer more so that they realise that they don’t have to find them elsewhere and keep it secret.

Neurodiversity also brings issues with food and eating. ADHD is often associated with impulsive or binge eating and ASD shows up in food rules, ARFID (avoidant, restrictive food intake disorder) and restrictive anorexia.

In addition, eating disorders are booming. NHS data shows that between 2017 and 2023, possible eating problems increased from 6.7% - 13% in 11 -16 year olds and from 44.6% to approximately 57% of 17 – 19 year olds. Likewise in that period, hospital admissions for eating disorders rose by 84%. Whilst the data has not yet been released, these upward trends are continuing. There is a plethora of research showing that tweens and teens of parents who diet, who over-evaluate weight and shape, are fat phobic or talk a lot about weight and eating, or who have a history of eating disorders, have a significantly increased risk of developing eating disorders. And we know too, that social media algorithms exacerbate the problems. One study found that teens who are concerned about their shape and weight are fed 4343% more content focused on disordered eating compared to teens without this preoccupation.

Support

With so many possible scenarios, specific ‘feed them this, say that’ advice is difficult. However, there are five foundations that are protective: a good relationship with food; healing your own relationship with food as a parent so that you break the cycle of intergenerational transmission; recognising and rejecting diet culture; strong emotional literacy, with as broad an emotional vocabulary as possible; and good distress tolerance.

Food neutrality is at the core of a good relationship with food. Being food neutral is not code for letting children eat whatever they want, when they want. It means removing all pejorative and value-laden language, such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘rubbish’, ‘junk’, ‘healthy’, etc, from food. It means using the correct names for foods: chicken, lettuce, chocolate, crackers, crisps. It requires you to be specific when talking about nutrition, for example, “carrots contain vitamin D which helps us see”. It rejects narratives such as, “You can have pudding once you’ve eaten all your veg”, and likewise the use of food as reward or punishment. Because all of these link emotions with food, usually reward with sugar, they also set up a food hierarchy where the foods you don’t want your child to eat so much of (ice cream, cake, crisps, etc.) become more desirable than the foods you want them to eat. In turn, linking food with emotions contributes to binge eating, hiding food and establishes the neural pathways linking food with reward, which leads to rewarding oneself with food well into adulthood.

Along with food neutrality is responsive feeding and teaching our kids to notice and trust their bodies' hunger and full signals. Responsive feeding means noticing and responding to our child’s needs and teaching them to do the same. These are not just in the form of stomach rumbles, but may be about feeling hangry or lethargic. Being tearful or feeling weak. When we insist on two more mouthfuls or make dessert conditional on finishing the main, we inadvertently communicate to our kids that we as parents know more about their hunger and satiety levels than they do, and that teaches them not to trust themselves and to override their bodies.

Alongside these sits the division of responsibility (DoR), developed by paediatric dietician Elleyn Satter, which says that you as the parent is responsible for the food on offer and the times you offer it and your child is responsible for whether and how much they eat. This model is game changing if you don’t yet know it and it continues throughout adolescence, meaning that it’s absolutely fine to expect your teens to join family meals and for them to know that. The DoR allows meal times to be about connecting and chatting, with the food as the incidental component, rather than the reverse. I’m sure you can cast your mind back to a stressful meal at some point and remember how quickly you wanted to get out of there. Your kids are no different: stress at mealtimes whether due to food, parental expectations around table manners or general family disharmony causes many eating difficulties across all ages, so reducing it is extremely important in eating disorder prevention, as well as making everyone’s lives better!

Most of us carry baggage around food, some of which will be the beliefs, rules, attitudes and habits that your grandparents passed to your parents and your parents wrapped up with a bow and passed on to you. Children learn from modelling – by watching and copying us – so unless you heal your relationship with food and make a conscious choice to reject any beliefs and behaviours that have distressed you and which you don’t want your children to carry, you will be destined to pass them on, through non-verbal communication in particular. This is what we call intergenerational transmission. When you heal your own relationship with food, you break the cycle of intergenerational transmission and that is the greatest gift you can give your children.

I can rant about diet culture all day, but will keep it brief! Diet culture is a value system that lauds thinness as being morally valuable: a demonstration of self-care, willpower, dedication and weight loss as inherently good. It derides those in bigger bodies, believing them to be morally reprehensible, lazy, lacking in willpower and making a choice not to take care of themselves. Not only is this belief system factually wrong (weight and health are a complex mix of genetics, socioeconomic status, education, biology and more), but it is also deeply damaging to society, to us all and most importantly to our children. Diet culture shows up everywhere: in the endless array of diets and fitness programmes, on socials through #fitspo, #skinnytok, #summerbody #beachbodyready and so on. The new PSHE curriculum which teaches about healthy eating through the lens of healthy and unhealthy (aka good and bad) and asks children to rate the foods in their cupboards at home, is informed by diet culture. The fear of fat is diet culture.

It’s inevitable that our kids will be exposed, so we need to be ready to give them different messages. To teach our daughters that they must gain both weight and body fat as they go through puberty because without these they cannot ovulate or get their periods. To let our sons know that going to the gym with friends is great, but that loading with extra protein shakes and bars is unnecessary and could even damage their kidneys. And to promote body acceptance and passionately reject the relentless messages that their body is all about the aesthetic. Instead, focus with your kids of all ages on how amazing their body is, talk about all its functions, most of which we take for granted and all of which allow us to live life. Champion their qualities rather than their looks – their friends will love them for their humour, wit, kindness, sense of fun, and not because they are shrinking themselves to get into a body that’s too small for them.

Good emotional literacy is highly protective against eating disorders with studies showing that both high emotional intelligence and good emotional regulation lead to lower rates of eating disorders. When our kids and teens can express their emotions, they avoid having to ‘act out’ – to show us through behaviour. Much better that they tell us they’re angry, disappointed or jealous than showing us through aggressive behaviour, bingeing, starving or self-harming. It’s never too early to start teaching our children this. Indeed, when we comfort them when crying as babies, we might say, “Are you hungry” “Does your nappy need changing”, “It’s ok, I’m here”. This is the start, and as your child grows throughout childhood and adolescence you help them understand and name what they’re feeling in an age-appropriate way. Emotion wheels are a great tool for you and your kids.

Which beautifully leads me onto distress tolerance. It’s a clunky term, but it is exactly that: an ability to feel distress in whatever form, ride the emotional waves and tolerate that distress until it eases. It sounds easy when put like this, but it’s far from it. It requires you to allow your kids to feel angry, upset or anxious and not immediately jump in to fix it and take their pain away. It means letting them fail early and learn by experience. During adolescence, when your teen’s emotional dysregulation is high, it requires you to walk alongside them with curiosity and compassion rather than criticism and correction. And it’s essential that if their distress is about their body, you don’t jump in and help them diet or sort them out with a work out plan. Instead, you need to listen and validate how they’re feeling, acknowledge it’s tough and be there by their side when they want to talk. It’s hard for us as parents, but this is an absolutely essential component in both parenting and eating disorder prevention.

I’m aware that these foundations may feel non-descript or not prescriptive enough. But if you can implement them, you’ll have no need for food rules, eating schedules or professional advice on how to feed your kids and teens, because it will be intuitive and they will hopefully be intuitive eaters. You’ll be able to answer the questions at the top of this article because you’ll have a framework that makes sense. Remember that it’s a long game: much better your kids like broccoli and eat it for life than just for the reward of ice cream now.

And finally, if you’re worried about your child’s eating, don’t wait to seek help until you are sure there is a problem. By the time you’re sure, your teen will have been struggling with eating for weeks or months and their difficulties will already be entrenching or entrenched. Early intervention is the best prognostic factor in the treatment of all eating disorders, so seek advice quickly and the worst (or best) that happens is that all’s ok.