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Take the Fight Out of Food: How to Prevent and Solve Your Child's Eating Problems - Softcover

Fish, MS Donna

 
9780743477796: Take the Fight Out of Food: How to Prevent and Solve Your Child's Eating Problems
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0743477790 ISBN 13: 9780743477796
Verlag: Atria, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

All foods are good. That is the message of this commonsense book that helps parents speak to their kids about food and nutrition. It is a message that is long overdue, especially when you consider that 81 percent of ten-year-olds are afraid of being fat -- half are already dieting -- and twelve million American children are obese. There is a disease gripping our nation's children and it strikes early. Take the Fight Out of Food offers a cure.
This practical guide is filled with hands-on tools and in-depth advice for putting a stop to unhealthy eating habits before they begin. In Take the Fight Out of Food parents will learn how to:
• Understand their own "food legacy" and how it affects their children
• Keep their children connected to food in a positive way
• Talk to their kids about food and nutrition
• Recognize and deal with the six types of eaters --
including the Picky Eater, the Grazer, and the Beige Food Eater
With guidance, inspiration, and encouragement, this invaluable book helps parents to teach their children to eat for life in a positive and healthy family environment.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Donna Fish, M.S., L.C.S.W., is a licensed social worker specializing in eating disorders. An adjunct faculty member at the Columbia University School of Social Work and an affiliate therapist at the Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia, she is also a consultant to many schools and hospitals in New York City. Donna Fish lives with her husband and three daughters in New York City, where she runs a private practice.

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Chapter One: Separating Our Own Food Attitudes from Our Children's Eating Behaviors

As soon as my daughter could walk, my mother started to comment on her chunky legs. "You better watch her, Carly, you don't want her to get fat." For goodness sake, my daughter is only two!

Carly, mother of two

My mother raised me to eat when I was hungry and stop eating when I was full. I am convinced that what she taught me has saved my life. As a professional actress I have watched both men and women in my field literally starve to death to maintain the body they think the entertainment world is looking for.

Samantha, actress and mother of one

Hundreds of parents, who are struggling with or worried about how their children are eating, have told me poignant stories about how critical they are of their own eating habits. And often, once I prompt them to examine the attitudes with which they were raised, they report that they have always felt they were either failing themselves by eating too much or making bad choices, or failing their parents because they didn't eat enough of the "food of love" they were offered.

If there's one thing I've learned from listening to these stories, it's that there is a direct connection between parents' food attitudes and how they deal with their kids' eating behaviors. As one mother told me, "I have an easier time talking about sex with my kids than food. My mother was so controlling and involved with my food that I always felt I was failing and ended up with a real weight problem. I still struggle with weight and my relationship to food, and because of that, I am terrified to interfere with how my kids eat. I feel paralyzed when it comes to saying anything at all about nutrition." Acknowledging and understanding this connection between our own food attitudes and our children's eating behaviors is the first step toward teaching our kids how to eat for life. And yet it's also one of the most challenging steps because it requires that we look at our own food history and eating experiences.

In this chapter, you will revisit your family food legacy and the tape loops (or food attitudes) this early experience created. As you become more familiar with your own food attitudes, you will automatically become better able to separate your own experience from what is going on with your children. Indeed, you may discover that what you perceive as your children's eating problems are really not problems at all, but rather styles of eating that are simply different from your own.

Taking the Fight Out of Food: Whose Problem Is It?

One of the most common complaints I hear from parents is that mealtime is one long power struggle. "My two-and-a-half-year-old won't sit in his high chair!" "My four-year-old incessantly demands dessert!" "My three-year-old throws a fit if I don't give her a cookie!" Parents come into my office completely at their wits' end.

In one such case, a mother came to see me because she could not understand her three-year-old son's picky eating behavior. Jennifer is thirty-six, with an engaging wit and the ability to turn even the most mundane incident into a stand-up comedy routine. She always has a twinkle in her eye and has a lot of great ideas about feeding children. Indeed, she knows that when she "lets go and relaxes" around food, her kids relax and eat better. Her first son (she has two) was a "foodie" like her. He loved exploring new foods and ate almost anything she offered, which is why Jennifer was surprised by her younger son's food issues. From day one, he was a very picky eater and often simply refused to eat at all. When she consulted her pediatrician, however, he assured her that her son was perfectly healthy and right where he should be in terms of growth. His advice was simply to "back off" and "let him be."

But even though knowing her son was in good health helped to allay Jennifer's fear that he would end up with scurvy, she still could not ignore everything she'd heard about encouraging him to eat. It was very difficult for her to sit by and watch her son refuse food.

Jennifer's reaction is not very different from that of many parents whose feelings of competence come from nurturing and feeding their children. When our children eat, we have concrete evidence that we are doing a good job, helping them make their way in the world with strong, healthy bodies. And when they don't eat well, or we think they are not eating well, we assume we must be doing a bad job. But we still need to ask, What was really going on between Jennifer and her son? What was the problem? Was it hers or her son's?

The first thing Jennifer and I did was to look at her own food legacy, and when we did that, we soon discovered that Jennifer had been raised as a dieter from the time she was very young. (Her joke is that her formative experience with religion was Weight Watchers, since she was sent by her mother at the age of nine to meetings that were held at the temple!) After years of diet camps and therapy to help resolve her food issues, she had come to terms with a way of eating that felt comfortable, and she was thrilled to be a mother who could let her sons enjoy their food. She was not going to repeat her own mother's mistakes by restricting what they ate.

So when Todd began refusing to eat, Jennifer found herself trying to fight back, almost force-feeding him, and frequently becoming angry at his resistance to her carefully prepared meals. She wanted him to eat and enjoy his food, but she was unwittingly contributing to the fight: the more she encouraged Todd to eat, the more he resisted.

Despite thinking that she handled food differently from her restricting mother, Jennifer gradually began to realize that, in her own way, and despite having the opposite goal, she was being just as controlling as her mother had been. At first, all she could see was her son's resistance to her efforts to help him. When he would "simply not listen," Jennifer reacted -- sometimes in anger, sometimes out of anxiety and frustration. It took a while for her to see that her reaction was actually fueling the power struggle with her son.

Once she realized that, we were able to address her need to give up trying to control the situation, so that she would be better able to let go of the outcome. Meanwhile, at a deeper level, she also began to separate her own fear of being restricted (a holdover from her mother's attempts to restrict her own food intake) from her son's seemingly self-restricting behavior. Only then could she see that Todd was, in fact, reacting to the pressure she was putting on him to eat. When Jennifer backed off, Todd began to eat more regularly -- though never with the same adventurousness as his older brother.

Children -- at any age -- seem to be masters at detecting our agendas: they know exactly what we want them to do and then often do just the opposite. What is our agenda when it comes to food? We simply want our children to eat well -- that is, eat the food we have lovingly and painstakingly put before them. And know this: even if you think you're being discreet, cheerful, or absolutely blasé as you serve breakfast, lunch, or dinner, even a ten-month-old in his high chair can detect your concern, worry, and anxiety that he get that broccoli down the hatch.

I met Carolyn when she attended one of my workshops because she was concerned about her nine-year-old son, who had become quite overweight. She herself had struggled with a weight problem in the past and resolved it by sticking to a diet that was totally free of sugar and junk food. She herself ate plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, and every meal she prepared for her two sons was made up of a variety of nutritious, organic foods.

Although her younger son seemed to enjoy whatever she put in front of him,...

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Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0743477790
ISBN 13 
9780743477796
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
274
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland