07/22/2024
Children receive so many messages about the food available to them. It can sometimes be hard to remember that we are able to reframe the message to increase nuance and understanding—even for very young children.
I love this post, not just for the wording she provides, but because it helps us take a moment to think about our relationships with various foods.
Before you react, read the whole caption. First a few notes:
- When you have chocolate, simply enjoy it with your child (without comment), this is the best way for everyone to have a good relationship with it
- this post is specifically for the case when your child said someone told them their chocolate/candy was “unhealthy,” not a recommendation that you bring up this topic with your child
- this post is not recommending you start telling kids there are “sometimes foods” “yellow foods” or explain that we need to eat a lot of some foods and a little of other foods
Foods are morally neutral, that doesn’t mean they are the same. Foods can be different and good at the same time. Kids are surrounded by messages that say that foods are either bad or good. When someone throws that message in their face, it can be powerful to refame for them by communicating, “sure, it’s different, but it’s still good - we need all the different kinds of foods.”
When my son came home from school at age 5 telling him his friend told him chocolate was unhealthy, I came up with “some foods do a few things and some foods do a lot of things” on the spot. Ever since that conversation, when someone tells him that his chocolate is unhealthy (and it’s happened every year), he comes home angry with them and tells me “Just because it does a few things in your body doesn’t make it bad.”
This is an important idea and I’m glad that I got to give it to him during a key period in his development so that it’s stuck with him. He can’t escape the messages that foods are different and the opinions that foods are bad, but he can have the idea that different doesn’t equal “bad.”
We’re feeding kids in a complicated world. There is no playbook. There is no research telling us specifically what to say to our kids in the face of diet culture, the food industry, child health issues, and more. One thing is sure though, we do need to teach our kids to think critically, to have nuance (once their brains are developmentally ready for that), and to trust their bodies.
