How to talk to your kids about food (October 2024)
—Carrie Dennett, MPH, RDN
Parents want their kids to grow up happy and healthy. A healthy, uncomplicated relationship with food is a gift that will serve them well for decades, possibly even inoculating them against the food myths and misinformation they’ll inevitably encounter from friends, the media, and society at large. So how do you talk to kids about food in a way that supports them in meeting their nutritional needs while reducing the odds that they develop disordered eating or food obsessions? Being thoughtful about your words and actions is a good place to start.
The low-hanging fruit is to remove words such as “good” foods and “bad” foods, “healthy” and “unhealthy” from your vocabulary. Like it or not, those morality-tinged labels tend to bleed over from the food to ourselves. Why teach kids that they are “good” or “bad” based on their food choices, that their worthiness is dependent on the foods they eat? Similarly, “healthy” and “unhealthy” are somewhat subjective. These labels can make kids anxious about food and may even lead to sneaking food or otherwise engaging in secret eating. This behavior can linger for decades.
It can also help to simply let kids learn from experience. Let’s say your child eats a lot of candy, then tells you they have a tummy ache. Rather than say, “You shouldn’t have eaten so much candy,” or “That’s because candy’s not good for you,” you could gently ask age-appropriate questions that help them make a connection between what they ate and how they feel physically. Going forward, that ability will help them make food choices—and possibly other choices—that are congruent with how they want to feel in their bodies.
Is there ever a place for talking about nutrition? Sure. For example, if your child starts going through a phase when they don’t eat breakfast, only to end up falling asleep in class, that could prompt a discussion about how food is fuel for our bodies (but not that its only purpose is fuel). On the flip side, research has found that pressuring kids to eat or, conversely, restricting what they eat can lead to disordered eating in childhood and beyond. As with the candy-related tummy ache, helping them see the cause-and-effect that they are actually experiencing can be a gentle-but-effective teaching moment, no pressure required.
The saying “actions are louder than words” also applies to how we talk to kids about food. Many parents who have recovered from an eating disorder, or perhaps grappled with a fraught relationship with food and their bodies, want to spare their kids the same fate, so they watch what they say about their child’s eating and body, but send a very different message via the words and actions they direct towards themselves.
Kids are astute (OK, they’re like sponges), and will pick up on it when a parent or caregiver is dieting, obsessed with “eating clean,” or has major hangups about their body. That’s especially true if parents talk about their diet, or how they hate their belly, their thighs, but it’s also true if a child notices their parent avoids bread and pasta or suddenly starts eating nothing but salads. They will receive those messages loud and clear and apply them to themselves. So, avoid criticizing anyone’s food choices (and anyone’s body) in front of your kids.
It’s key to also model a healthy relationship with food, because kids look to adults—especially their caregivers—to learn how to behave. If pressuring and restricting leads to a less-than-healthy relationship with food, modeling joyous, varied eating that’s responsive to hunger and satiety cues makes it more likely that your kids will do the same. When they see you not being anxious about dessert and eating vegetables not because they’re “good” foods or “healthy” foods but because they’re tasty, they’re less likely to put dessert on a pedestal or see vegetables only as a tool for personal virtual or to shrink their bodies.
A handful of research studies have found that parents who are intuitive eaters are more likely to raise kids who also eat intuitively as well as more nutritiously, and the reverse is also true. It’s not surprising that one factor that prompts parents (often mothers) to start working on their own food and body issues is having kids (especially daughters). They want the cycle of diet obsession and body hatred to stop with the next generation.
To learn more, the books “How to Raise an Intuitive Eater: Raising the Next Generation with Food and Body Confidence” by registered dietitians Sumner Brooks and Amee Severson, and “Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture” by Virginia Sole-Smith have been helpful for my clients with young children. Also, Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding model provides a framework and guidance for raising competent eaters.
—Carrie Dennett, MPH, RDN
