Meal Time Anxiety & Insecurity
There are many ways to parent, and just as many ways to “food parent.” The amount of choice, confusion and sheer information out there around food, diets, and eating (for us and for them) can be very stressful and overwhelming! Learning how to work through your own meal time anxiety and insecurity will allow you to help your child deal with theirs.
Breaking The Cycle
Food-related stress often manifests in how we feel about our bodies, eating habits, exercise habits, and our own feelings towards food. But at the end of the day, whatever is true for us may also be true for our kids someday. It’s important that we do our best to break any negative food cycles by working through our own meal time anxiety & insecurity, before it becomes theirs. And as we discussed in this post, it’s critical that you get your meal time stress under control before you decide to take on a new feeding approach like Division of Responsibility (sDOR).
If you’re anxious when it comes to feeding your child, I hope this post will help you identify where your insecurities come from, and show you that there are so many things you can do to ensure that your kids are fed, nourished, and have good relationships with food (even if yours wasn’t always so great).
Meal Time Anxiety & Insecurity in Parents
Our beliefs around food often influence our insecurities in some way. At the very least, they become our opinions on “good” vs “bad” foods, how much to eat, and whether or not we should have to clean our plates before leaving the table. But for some of us, at some point in time, our beliefs morph into insecurities.
This is often the case if you’ve struggled all your life with your weight, disordered eating, dieting, or just a relationship with food that never felt all that good.
As outlined in the book “Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating,” insecurities and anxieties around feeding your child often stem from 5 places: nutrition concerns, judgement, relapse, behavior, or control.
Worries about nutrition often center around:
Deficiencies in things like protein, iron, calories, or vitamins and minerals in veggies
Concerns about consuming excess sugar, calories, salt, etc.
Allergies or sensitivities
Concerns about additives in foods
Worries about judgement often come from the (generally well-intentioned) things we hear from doctors, in laws, parents, teachers, and friends.
Worries about relapse often come up if there has been feeding therapy (like tube feeding) in someone’s eating or feeding history.
Worries about behavior are common when tantrums and major public fits happen anytime you try to use limits or boundaries.
Worries about control generally come up when we’re anxious about what we can control (what, when, where food is offered) vs. what we can’t (if/whether and how much our child eats)
Actually there’s one more place that our food insecurities and anxieties can stem from, and that’s our own level of eating competence.
What is “Eating Competence?”
According to the Ellyn Satter Institute, those who are eating competent “do better nutritionally [and] have healthier body weights. [T]hey are also healthier emotionally and socially. People with high eating competence feel more effective, are more self-aware and are more trusting and comfortable both with themselves and with other people.”
(These are some big reasons to want to be a competent eater yourself, and to want to pass eating competence on to your kids!)
Are you a competent eater?
You can actually take this quiz to score your own eating competence, and use your score to begin evaluating any areas may wish to work on personally.
Meal Time Anxiety & Insecurity in Kids
Children’s meal time anxiety & insecurity often comes from an unmet desire for control. Negative past experiences with feeding, sensory-based anxiety, and complicated medical histories can also trigger feeding anxiety.
These are things like:
Fear of being pressured to eat
Fear that there will be something safe to eat
Fear of new foods in general
Fear of disappointing you
In order to make sure that we aren’t passing our own meal time anxiety & insecurity on to our kids, we need to move away from using external motivation to get them to eat.
What The Research Says
The Division of Responsibility stems from the Satter Eating Competence Model (ecSatter), which is both evidence- and practice-based. The ecSatter’s foundation principle is that if properly attended to, the internal cues of hunger, appetite, and satiety are reliable, and can be depended on to inform food selection and guide energy balance and body weight. In the 2007 article Eating Competence: Definition and Evidence for the Satter Eating Competence Model, they explain that:
““From the perspective of ecSatter, to support nutritional health, it is critical to establish and maintain positive, confident, relaxed, comfortable, and flexible attitudes about eating. Such positive attitudes allow being responsively attuned to outer and inner experiences relative to eating.””
This means we can finally say goodbye to feeding styles like bribery, punishment and pressure, and instead move towards ones that lead kids to discover their own internal motivation and ability to self-regulate!
Learn more about how these feeding styles can teach kids to balance their internal and external motivations in this post.
Reflect: Questions Every Parent Should Ask Themselves About Feeding
It’s critical to hone in not only on your personal food beliefs and anxieties, but also your partner’s and how those views line up with your values as a couple. These views affect everything food-related, from our relationships with food to our bodies. They even affect the way we self-regulate our diet and exercise.
When we identify areas in our own feeding relationships that we wish were different, we can use that information to develop a feeding style that works for our families.
So take a moment to ask yourself these questions:
Is chronic dieting something you and your spouse have always struggled with? Or, are you someone who has always felt comfortable in your own body shape and size?
Do you or your spouse tend to use food as a reward or overly restrict it?
Are you able to enjoy a wide variety of foods (including occasional indulgences) without feeling guilt, shame, or a feeling of having “cheated” on your diet?
Do you or your spouse tend to overeat or allow the sign of a clean plate be your gauge for when to stop?
Are you someone mindful about what you put in your mouth and empowered to stop whenever you feel satisfied?
Growing up, were family meals erratic and unpleasant in your family?
Do you have fond memories of the time your family spent in the kitchen and around the table?
Next Steps:
After you talk through your own experiences with food, identify your innate approaches to feeding. Ask yourselves:
What is my/your/our current approach to feeding?
What’s our goal is in wanting our child(ren) to eat the food we offer?
What are our biggest frustrations in feeding our child(ren)?
What is our best next step to making progress in this priority area for improvement?
These questions, discussed further in this article, can give you a clear starting point. They can also help you map out your hopes for establishing new norms in the way you feed yourselves and your family.
Ready for stress-free family meal times?
The Love it, Like it, Learning it® Academy is an 8-week coaching program that will help you:
Feel less stress and tension at meal times
Address picky eating early on
Find an approach to feeding that clicks for you and your child (finally!)
Feel confident in helping your children become better eaters
Feed your child new and different foods without any bribery or pressure
