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This post has been on my list to write for months and I finally decided to do it this week because of a calorie counting assignment one of my kids had recently in health class. That experience of seeing just how confusing and contradictory it is when we take nutrition out of the context of any real world situation solidified a lot of what I already believed.
Combined with that, I am often asked questions like “How do you talk to your kids about soda?”. Or, “What do I do when my toddler doesn’t want any of the growing foods on her plate?”. And it seems like the way I answer those questions is not exactly what is expected for someone who cares so deeply about feeding kids.
How do I talk to my kids about nutrition? Honestly…I really don’t. And here is exactly why.
(Today I’m sharing my personal thoughts and experience with this topic. We will soon have a Part 2 with 3 of my favorite feeding and nutrition experts, so stay tuned!)
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Hi Amy, thank you for this post..I also try to be neutral and descriptive about food. However my daughter (age 5) has started to ask me if certain foods are “healthy”. They talk about “healthy” and “unhealthy” food at school and on certain days are only allowed “healthy” snacks. Any advice on how to talk about “healthy” with her
You could ask her to tell you more, or what those words mean to her. And then explain that often those words mean different things to different people and are used to convince people to eat more or less of certain foods, but there are a lot of reasons why we might eat foods. Sort of open up her curiosity a little about the words if that makes sense!
Love this! I try really hard to be neutral around food and not give food morality. What do you suggest when visiting other homes with your kids (like grandparents) who do not do the same? We visit grandparents who say things like “I am so bad for eating the cake” or “I ate really bad this weekend so I need to be good this week.”
There are options. With younger kids, I simply tried to say something positive about the food to counter the negative comment. As they get older, while we’re on our way or way home from somewhere we have more honest conversations about how different people believe different things about food, I ask them how comments made them feel and what they think of it. So at this point, my kids know which members of our famil have different relationships with food and they sort of expect it and we talk about it openly. Hope that helps!
Thank you! Very helpful!