Dear Laura... How can I teach my kids that a 100% cake-and-pringles diet is not OK?

Hey team - welcome to ‘Dear Laura’ - a monthly column where I fashion myself as an agony aunt and answer the questions that readers submit. If you’d like to submit a question for me to answer next month - then you can leave it as a comment below or submit it here.

I’m happy to answer Qs about anti-diet nutrition, developing a more peaceful relationship to food and weight-inclusive health, annoying diet trends and news stories, body image challenges, and, of course, challenges with feeding your kiddos. Please give as much detail as you’re comfortable with and let me know if you’d like me to include your name or keep it anon.

Please remember that these answers are for educational purposes only and are not a substitute for medical or nutritional advice; please speak to your GP or a qualified nutrition professional if you need further support. (I have a limited number of family nutrition spots available for Feb - if you’d like to work with me then you can email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk to book a preliminary call to see how I might be able to help you.)

Dear Laura... As a parent who's new-ish to anti-diet ideas, one thing I'm not clear on is how to make sure my kids grow up with some basic nutritional knowledge as well as a healthy relationship with food. For example, is there a way to instill the idea that it's important to eat fruits and vegetables, and prefer whole grains when they taste just as good, without implying that other foods are ‘bad’? I want them to enjoy eating birthday cake and Pringles without guilt, but also if they become adults who think they'll be fine on a 100% cake-and-Pringles diet, I'll feel like I haven't done my job.

So, let’s be real: there is precisely zero chance that your kids will learn that a 100% cake-and-Pringles diet is OK.

Even if you say nothing about nutrition. They will know. 

Know how I know?

Because nutrition is hammered into kids from as young as three years old. 

And why is that?

Because, fatphobia. 

What I think is perhaps a more interesting thing to consider here, is do we *need* to teach nutrition in the conventional sense? Most of the information that we think kids need to know - which foods are high in protein, how we should replace saturated fats with unsaturated ones, and the importance of calcium - are actually not really appropriate until secondary school. This isn't shit your 7 year old can even make sense of, let alone use. So what I think might be more helpful here is to talk about developmentally attuned food education. 

For this, I’m bringing out the big guns: Anna Lutz and Elizabeth Davenport, AKA Sunny Side Up Nutrition. Anna and Elizabeth,  both dietitians, are the GOATs of weight-inclusive, anti-diet nutrition support for families; I’ve asked them to share their thoughts on positive food and nutrition education. We’ll try to map kids’ cognitive development, food preferences, and how we can support them to learn in each stage.

OK team, let’s go.

I don’t know that anyone has ever tried to define ‘anti-diet’ parenting, but if you asked me, it’s about challenging dominant ideals about feeding kids that are rooted in, well, problematic shit. This extrapolates to norms around nutrition education; the idea that kids don’t know shit about shit, so we need to tell them in a top-down, didactic kind of way. 

It makes sense that we would reject the ‘healthy plate’ and ‘how many cubes of sugar in you freakshake’ rhetoric that is so blatantly rooted in anti-fatness. But so often I see parents get stuck in the place of ‘well I just can’t say anything about nutrition then’  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 ‘I think that is a common misconception’ explains Anna. ‘However, through an anti-diet or weight inclusive lens, we teach nutrition in a different way and with different goals than how our society may think of nutrition education. It’s important to keep in mind the age and cognitive development of the children you’re teaching.’

We don’t know the age/developmental stage of the readers’ kid(s), however, I think it’s important to look at nutrition education relative to the main stages of development. To help us,  we can look at the Theory of Cognitive Development which was developed by Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget. For the purposes of this conversation, there are three key stages of development that map well onto food preferences and how kids process information about food and nutrition. As they move through these stages, kids go from being more concrete, rules-based thinkers, to being able to understand more abstract concepts. The preoperational stage is from ages 2-7; the concrete operational stage is ages 7-12; and finally the formal operational stage is age 12+. Although these seem like discrete stages, it’s important to note that there will be a huge amount of variation between children within each stage; brains are as diverse as bodies, so this is just a broad strokes overview. (1)

So starting from the top: ‘Young kids don't need to know anything about nutrition.’ Elizabeth notes. ‘There's so much information, and the vast majority of it is abstract, so kids won't understand it, and it can potentially scare them’.

Between the ages of roughly  2 and 7 years old, kids are in the preoperational stage of development. Kids in this stage have a hard time differentiating between imagination and reality; they believe that everything is real. They make sense of their world through pictures, sounds, and through associative rather than rational thinking. Food preference in this stage is based on taste and texture, and they dislike food based on…wait for it… appearance (!!!!). If your kid rejects food on sight, you’re not imagining it. Their thinking in this stage is also very concrete, meaning that nuance and abstract ideas are incredibly hard for them to grasp. Writing about preschool nutrition education and kids in the preoperational stage of development  Başkale and colleagues say:

‘Children may not understand what is explained to them about nutrients and the relationship between nutrients and food. They may not understand the effects of food on the body, either. When adults explain nutrition and health to children, they use words like vitamins, minerals, nutritional food, digestion and risk of illness. It is difficult for children in the preoperational stage to understand and explain abstract concepts like the definition of health or the importance of nutrition. In the preoperational stage, children consider themselves healthy if they can laugh, walk and run.’

Because of this concrete, all-or-nothing thinking in little kids, sometimes the message that ‘milk gives you strong bones’ morphs into ‘if I don’t drink milk my bones won’t be strong’. ‘The concepts are abstract, and kids don't need to worry about them’ explains Elizabeth. ‘Honestly, I can remember eating lots of carrots for some time in elementary school because I was worried something might go wrong with my eyesight if I didn't eat enough of them’.

What does this mean for communicating that we don’t eat Pringles and cake all day, every day?