This is Part 3 of my series on Helping Kids Build a Good Relationship with Sugar. If you’re just joining us, you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
As a refresher, we’ve covered:
How public health messaging around sugar often causes us to be overly restrictive and send mixed messages around sweet foods that can inadvertently cause kids to freak out about these foods
How when we give kids more freedom (within safe boundaries) we can support them to find out what feels good in their bodies
What preoccupation with sweets looks like in our kids and what constitutes ‘enough’ and ‘too much’ sweet food
Whether it’s ever OK to set boundaries around sweet foods
And why we need to unpack our own stuff around sugar if we want to support our kids
Today we’re going to troubleshoot some of the sticky parts of this conversation that often get overlooked, like what’s going on when it’s ‘not working’, or when you do all of the things, but your kid still seems to be low-key obsessed with sweets.
LFG.
When it’s ‘not working’
Something I hear from families I work with is something to the effect of ..
‘I’m letting my kid eat ALL THE SUGAR, and they’re still going HAM. This isn’t working!! What do I do now?’
There’s a lot to unpack here, including going back to our original aim of what it means to help support a child to have a positive relationship with sugar - are we trying to help them feel comfortable around sweet foods and prevent them having a shame-based relationship? Or, do we secretly still just want them to eat less?
If we’re approaching this work with a hidden agenda of hoping that our kids will naturally have no appetite for sweets it indicates that we might still have some work to do. Unpacking our own biases around what ‘too much’ looks like and what comes up for us when we see our kids eat large quantities of these foods is well worth exploring (on your own or with an anti-diet professional). Likewise, if we approach any of this work (anti-diet parenting, intuitive eating, ‘body positivity’) without having developed our politics around body liberation, then it is no more evolved or liberatory than straight-up diet culture; it’s a diet in disguise.
Likewise, the idea that having a relaxed approach to sweets ‘doesn’t work’ needs some interrogating. First of all, we need to acknowledge that if you have been super controlling around sweets, it will take time - often a lot of time - for kids to work their way out of a feeling of restriction and deprivation. They will want to push your limits and make sure you’re not punking them when you say they can have as much as they like. That they can have dessert with dinner. That chocolate isn’t ‘bad’ for them. If your kids are older, it’s worth having a conversation with them about the changes you’ve introduced. You can tell them that you had bought into some beliefs that were based on anti-fat bias and diet culture, and that as you’ve learned more, you’ve discovered that you were wrong. And, for an extra serving of humble pie, you can apologise for your mistake and model repairing a rupture with your kid (so wholesome!). It will probably still take time for them to build trust and learn that you’re for real. How much is anyone’s guess.
Another thing to look out for is if you’re watching every little thing they do. Did they eat their dessert before their main? Did they have a second serving of crumble and ice cream? Did they actually touch a vegetable? Kids can perceive our heightened anxiety when they eat these foods; they might notice us watching them more closely, or we might try to push the ‘healthier’ thing on them. These are subtle ways that we reinforce the idea that there’s something special about these foods. ‘Mum seems kinda cagey about these sweets, maybe I need to eat them all now before she changes her mind.’
‘The emotional energy we bring to food matters,’ cautions Katja Rowell, a responsive feeding specialist and author of Love Me, Feed Me. ‘If you offer a doughnut with a lot of fretting, teaching about moderation, how sugar is OK, but we can’t eat too much so that we get good variety… and then you set down the rice and beans and try to make them eat that and talk about how good for you it is then the child learns: doughnuts have power, mom really cares about it, it’s so good I have to be careful and afraid of it, and then here’s this healthy stuff I’m supposed to eat…’
Look I get it, it’s hard to just sit on our hands and relax. Especially when feeding a child feels like a high-stakes blood sport in Yummy Mummy WhatsApp groups. Remember that feeding a child has ups and downs. It is not a pass/fail situation. You will have days where they eat something vaguely resembling ‘balance’ and other days they will eat cereal for every meal of the day. It will all work itself out in time.
I want to just take a step back and think about a missing piece of this puzzle that usually gets overlooked when we talk about a preoccupation with sweets.
