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By Abigail Natenshon
Author of When Your Child Has an Eating Disorder
As a parent, you must first become an astute observer of your child...unbiased, open and knowledgeable about what you are looking for and what you are seeing. In addition, you are your child's best teacher and most significant role model and influence in creating a healthy body image. To become the most effective observer, teacher and model for your child, it is critical that you become aware of your own eating patterns and responses, your own attitudes towards weight and size. By becoming more highly sensitive to yourself, your personal biases, issues, and own bodily care, you become better able to clarify and refine the messages you wish to communicate to your child about how to love his or her body.
In addition, should there be a need to affect change in your child's attitudes about weight, size, body image, or eating patterns and habits, beginning this process with changes in one's own self is always the most effective and productive strategy. More effective than confrontation, control, or power plays is setting a good example, thereby inspiring the child to do what you do, and to want what you want for him or her. When it comes to parents and kids, actions consistently speak louder than words.
As you consider the following questions, remember that there are no right or wrong answers, no clear and definitive "best" ways to be, or "best" things to do. There is only the attempt to continue learning and deepening your understanding of who you are so you can be the best parent you can be to your child.
Defining your own relationship with food.
What Does Your Child See?
- Do you consistently skip breakfast or grab a cup of coffee and call it a meal?
- Do you substitute diet drinks, or other supplements for meals? Do you drink Slim fast? Eat Power Bars in the place of a "real" meal?
- Do you make it a point to eat only lite or fat free items?
- Do you unequivocally refuse to bring junk food into you house, even if not on a regular basis?
- Do you consistently try on numerous items in your closet before finding anything "that looks decent on you?"
- Are you extreme about how often or how long you exercise?
What Does Your Child Hear?
Do you complain about how fat you look all the time?
- Do you talk about your guilt for eating fattening foods?
- Do you criticize others for their appearance? Do you criticize your child?
- Are you intolerant of individual differences?
- Do you make running pejorative commentary about actors and actresses on television, in the media, because of the way they look?
- Do you encourage your child to lose weight by restricting food, rather than by eating differently?
- Do you order fish ("Hold the butter.") and salad ("Hold the dressing.")?
For the most part, we eat to satiate hunger, to nourish and "grow" our bodies, and to enjoy a sense of community and celebration. None of us are perfect. Most of us, at different times and with different motivations, eat for emotional reasons. We under eat; we overeat; at times we eat to diminish anxiety, ward off depression, or to fill time. There is nothing precise about our bodily needs, nor what we need to feed it...as long as, for the most part, we are eating nutritionally dense or healthy foods, in the form of at least three meals per day, and making varied food choices.
In the end, there are no bad foods. Healthy eating is the capacity to eat everything, anywhere, at any time, as long as we eat in moderation and with a sense of balance, and as long as physical activity becomes an enjoyable and regular part of our lives. This is the critical message that we must convey to our children, through our words and through our actions.
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