We all know that feeding kids is hard. Aside from food neophobia, the constant shopping, cooking, cleaning up the mess, and and the worry of whether they're getting what they need, we also have the mental load. All the tiny invisible mental notes, planning, prioritising, and juggling that add up throughout the day that can leave us feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, unsupported, and taken for granted. This week I'm talking to Registered Dietitian Maeve Hanan about something Kid Food Influencers rarely discuss or acknowledge: the mental load of feeding a family.
In this episode we get into:
👉 The expectations vs. reality of feeding a family 👉 Different types of labour in the home (visible and invisible) 👉 How naming terms like 'mental load' and 'household manager' can help create more equal distribution of labour 👉 How the mental load of feeding a family can influence our relationship with food 👉 The unnecessary mental load we absorb from Kid Food Influencers 👉 How ultra-processed foods have a role in reducing the mental load of feeding a family
You can follow Maeve on Instagram here, and check out her website here, including her courses and ebooks for supporting your relationship with food and your body.
Transcript
Maeve: When you're standing there and you're like, oh my god, I can't even figure out what to make for dinner, it's not because you can't figure out what to make for dinner, it's because there's so much going on and you're like, you're constantly keeping stock on what's in the fridge and what do I need to buy and what's clean and I'm also maybe minding my son at the same time and I've just remembered that there's a birthday party at the weekend and if you're trying to take that out of your head and put it in a list, put it in a spreadsheet, that's Like, it would be an insanely long document, and it just probably wouldn't even be possible because it's so many little things that are just constantly happening.
Laura: All right Maeve, can you start by introducing yourself and your work?
Maeve: Sure, my name is Maeve Hanan. I'm a disordered eating specialist and food freedom dietician. I run Dietetically Speaking, which is all about dispelling nutritional myths and promoting evidence based nutrition and helping people to heal their relationship with food.
So I'm on social media and I have a website.
Laura: And you are also a parent. You have a little one, don't you? How old are they?
Maeve: I do. Yeah, he's 18 months now.
Laura: I'm really curious to talk to you today about feeding kids, feeding families, and I'm especially interested in kind of what your perceptions or your expectations were around feeding a kid as a nutrition professional before you actually had a kid and then maybe how that has shifted since having a kid.
Maeve: Yeah, that's a really good question. So I had previously worked as a paediatric dietitian. So I was kind of prepared that it can really vary so much and I tried not to have too much of a set expectation of how he would be, but I think I did have an expectation of how I would be.
Laura: That's interesting.
Maeve: Absolutely, I mean, I thought like, oh, he could have allergies or, you know, he could be neurodivergent and like all these different things could impact his eating.
But I probably thought that I'd be more prepared, I'd be more on top of it, thought I'd probably enjoy the process of planning and preparing food for the family more. And I mean I do sometimes, but a lot of the time it's very much a last minute rush or it's choosing between working or socialising and, you know, meal prep, meal planning.
So that was definitely not exactly how I expected. And also I think because...I mean, one of my motivations for becoming a dietitian when I was a teenager was thinking that I really want to know how to feed my like future imagined family.
Laura: So cute.
Maeve: So I think I probably did like as a teenager have this like, you know, fantasy of like, Oh, I'd be this amazing mam who would, um, you know, make these home cooked meals that would make everyone really happy.
So, yeah, I was a cool teenager.
Laura: I know, this…these are the hopes and dreams we have for ourselves.
Maeve: The patriarchy, what? I think there's definitely like an underlying element of like self worth and identity kind of wrapped up in feeding my son as a nutrition professional and probably just as a mam. So that's something that I do try and keep tabs on.
But I think then also with, um, my interest in relationship with food and intuitive eating, like there was definitely some intuitive eating perfectionism as well or like expectations that I had.
Laura: Tell me about that. What do you mean by that?
Maeve: Yeah. So I kind of mean like being a bit black and white thinking about intuitive eating and raising intuitive eaters.
So thinking that I'm never going to use food to distract or to comfort him, which I think is interesting now because actually for adults, I think it's…It's very normal to use food as a source of comfort and obviously babies, you know, use milk and food as a source of comfort. But for some reason, like I just, I think I thought about that a bit simplistically like, Oh, you know, like that's something that you should try not to do too much.
And that another one around hunger and fullness, like something I used to say when I’d describe intuitive eating was that sort of metaphor, like, you know, babies know when they're hungry or when they're full. And that was not my experience of my son, like he did not show very clear fullness signs in particular.
So, and he still doesn't, you know, he'll kind of, he'll stop eating and I think he's full and I'll start cleaning him up and then he'll just keep eating. So it's just a lot more kind of like nuanced and chaotic, I guess, than I expected.
Laura: Yeah. That's really interesting. I remember I had a conversation on the podcast with Christy Harrison, which I'll link back to where we had a similar conversation of like how I think going into this, not so much on the hunger and fullness side, but definitely I have said like, Oh, we're born as intuitive eaters.
We're like, we're born to eat. And like how that really kind of, you know, in some senses is true. I think like, you know, we have like a really embodied sense of like, you know, when we're hungry, or you know, what brings us pleasure, what brings us joy in terms of food, but at the same time, it kind of like, overlooks this whole learning curve of like learning how to eat like just not just the mechanics of it but also just like navigating different foods from a sensory perspective or yeah like so there's…
I think, sometimes we kind of, yeah, oversimplify intuitive eating for kids because it's a lot of times, especially if there's like a disability, sensory sensitivities, feeding differences, like it can be really not intuitive a lot of the time.
Maeve: Yeah, no, I think that's it. I think you're right. It's that oversimplifying because also it's like…there's just so many things that could be happening in that moment when they're eating.
It could be, you know, they're distracted or they're enjoying playing with the food or. they suddenly have a wet nappy or they forget this food in front of them. Just stuff like that, where it's like, yeah, I guess you're, while they're learning to eat, you're also kind of learning how to support them with eating as well.
Laura: 100%. It's a learning curve for you too. I was just, we were talking off mic before we started recording that it's Avery's fourth birthday this week, the week that we're recording. I'm just noticing the ways that the excitement around his birthday has completely thrown his appetite off entirely. Like he's just kind of completely disinterested in food, like getting down from the table more often to just like flee around the house, you know, just like bouncing off the walls.
And so there are all these, yeah, kind of, I don't know, like curve balls I suppose.
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