Welcome to Small Steps to Health where we do not take orders from a cookie!
This post is a discussion of a parent’s role in raising a child with emotional eating problems.
It is pretty astonishing the amount of emotional baggage that we being to the dinner table. Each time we sit at the dinner table, we are eating with the shade of our childhood disappointment with food.
From hparis’ comment at Want to Feel Normal Again post:
“Growing up, I had a warped sense of what constituted a vegetable. My dear grandmother wasn’t exactly a Suzy Homemaker, so her home cookin’ came out of a box or a can. I remember her sending me to the cupboard to pick a “vegetable”; I’d open the cupboard and my choices were corn, cream corn, or peas. Sometimes there were canned green beans or asparagus. Can you say, “sodium?” Also, the choice of a “fresh” vegetable in the house was potatoes!”
All these years and hparis still cannot stop associating vegetables with the canned, soggy, and salty vegetables that she ate as a child. No wonder she has an aversion to vegetables as an adult. She has her vegetable problem and I have my ice cream problem. Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to sit down to a meal without any emotional baggage associated with your food?
Do Parents Think of Inventive Ways to Screw up Their Child?
Parents do not wake up each morning thinking that “I am going to screw up my child’s perception with food today.” I am sure most parents have their child’s best interest at heart. Emotional eating is even more unusual when the parents have no emotional baggage with weight or food. That is the last thing on their mind while they are getting the children ready for school and rushing off to work.
And yet, somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we end up either habitually cleaning our plates at every meal or stuffing our faces at midnight in front of the refrigerator when we are upset. And how is it that one child leaves the nest perfectly well adjusted and the other child leaves the nest with a distorted image of self and food?
Be Afraid, But Do No Harm
My husband and I are almost ready to be parents. I can hesitatingly say that we might start trying next year. But the idea of irrevocably harming our future children with their relationship with food and self image is quite terrifying (but apparently, not terrifying enough to stop us from wanting children).
Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. As a potential parent, I am sure that when I hold that helpless baby in my arms that I will vow to do the same. But as a practical person, I know that things could go astray even with the best of our intentions.
Until next time and thanks for stopping by Small Steps to Health.
Photo by: ella.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh I came from that family where my mother had no emotional baggage, my sister turned out fine and I eat under any pretense. I realised though that I needed to fix this because I didn’t want to pass it on to the next generation and my husband keeps talking about wanting kids. While it’s a fair way off yet, I know it will take time to shed years of emotional food baggage so I figured it would be a good time to start. I have wondered if that would be enough (because it wasn’t in my case) but I guess if you are aware of it, you do the best that you can.
@Spring Girl – Awareness is at least the first step to making a change. The family dynamics is such a rich area for learning about myself. I always thought that my sisters and I would have pretty much the same childhood. But whenever I talk to them, they would constantly surprise me with the stuff that they remember and the stuff that they don’t. It sometimes almost seem like we are from two different families. Thanks for the comment Spring Girl.
I think my parents did the best they could with the information they had at the time. They were both children of the depression and grew up learning that nothing should go to waste and that eating well was a privileged and they wanted to give us the security of never knowing scarcity the way they did. Unfortunately all of the “clean your plates” and “be a good girl and you’ll have ice cream” really warped for me when I used food to feel better after experiencing traumas at age 6 and up. I don’t have kids but I’m happy to report that my siblings kids all have very healthy and normal relationships with food. The cycle can be broken. Now I just need to break it in myself
@Scale Junkie – I understand what you mean about growing up with parents who had very little. My parents came from a fishing village in China, where having a chair is considered a luxury. So I often feel a tinge of guilt when I throw out food.