When I was nine - the age my daughter is now - there was no such things as good food or bad food. As far as my mother was concerned there was only food and she let me know (frequently) we were lucky to have it at all.
“Do you know what I’ve had to do to get this on the table?” she said.
She would fume if I thumbed my nose at anything. I didn’t dare answer back.
The problem was that a lot of the time, much of the food we ate – when it wasn’t Turkish home cooking – wasn’t particularly healthy.
I’m still not sure how much of it had to do with my parents’ then-limited understanding of the English language, and what portion of the blame we could assign to the fact it was the 1980s, but often we would drink tall glasses of Coke with our dinner, pour bottles of tomato sauce over our spaghetti and eat bagfuls of lollies as dessert.
I now know it to be junk food, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me back them to ever ask my mother whether she was making informed dietary decisions for her young family.
Nope. In our house there was only one question that was ever asked regarding food: “Are you hungry?” (It was a trick question: Telling a Turk brandishing a saucepan you’re full is not dissimilar to showing a dog a card trick – confusing for everyone involved).
Fast forward 30 years and a ridiculous amount of visits to the dentist later and it’s a very different landscape where food is concerned – particularly when it comes to our young girls.
Body image experts and child psychologists are reporting our obsession with eating healthy/paleo/clean/some new trend we’re only just hearing about, and it’s rubbing off on our children who in turn are becoming anxious about what they’re putting into their own bodies.
Disordered eating in children has risen significantly with The Children’s Hospital at Westmead’s Eating Disorder Service reporting a in hospital admissions over the past 15 years and a tenfold increase in outpatient services.
The service admits approximately 120 children a year – some as young as six – and says it works with roughly 400 kids at any one time.
Disordered eating in children has risen significantly with The Children’s Hospital at Westmead’s Eating Disorder Service reporting a fourfold increase in hospital admissions over the past 15 years.
So how do you give your kids an education on what’s good and what’s bad without sending them off down the disordered-eating rabbit hole?
“Mum, Jane at school says sugar is bad for you and makes you fat so should we really be eating this?” my nine year old asked recently as I served a rice pudding.
Her question made me pause like a deer in headlights.
For years, I had simply taken my mother’s approach when it came to food, health and body image. I had refused to so much as discuss it, hoping that if we continued to eat predominantly healthy meals (we follow the rule of healthy food 80 per cent of the time, treats 20 per cent of the time, without openly labelling it as such) and didn’t acknowledge such things as diets, good foods, bad foods, hot bodies, fat bodies, it would never become a problem under our roof.
What I couldn’t have predicted is that my daughter would get information from schoolmates and their parents and then bring home the big questions.
“Mum, is this a superfood?”
“How much sugar can you eat before you start getting fat?”
“Is salt as bad for you as they say? How much salt is in this?”
Most days I just want to scream, “Just be thankful you’re eating anything at all so zip it!” and plop the food on their plates prison kitchen style. But I can’t because it’s no longer the 1980s, and mostly because the recent statistics show parents need a solid strategy to tackle this food anxiety head-on.
Many experts, such as Susan Paxton, a professor in the School of Psychology and Public Health at La Trobe University and author of evidence-based resource, , believe role modelling is an essential tool.
Experts recommend creating happy, shared eating experiences with your family to encourage healthy eating habits. Source: AAP
Professor Paxtons' guide, which helps parents adopt behaviours that can help promote healthy eating in children, recommends acquiring a healthy relationship with food yourself, and taking time to explain the difference between “everyday” foods and “sometimes” foods, without making any mention of the words 'good/bad', 'junk'/'healthy' or 'toxic/clean'.
Paxton also encourages making meal times happy occasions so your children – over time – form positive associations with eating and food in general.
That’s the kind of research I can get behind.
So, for the time being, while I continue to invite my daughter’s questions, positive role modelling for us is our focus.
Serving up mostly healthy meals throughout the week, we’ll keep grabbing our Friday night pizza and ice-cream without uttering a word.
And should things start to get too loaded, I’ve got my secret weapon handy in my back pocket: a weekend visit to my mother.
Fingers crossed!
