Raising Body Positive Kids

Written By: Dana Baker

January 12, 2024

Parents, of course, intend to protect their kids from harm. But when it comes to food, health, weight and body image, fostering an uncomplicated, positive outlook can be a giant challenge. This is because of the diet culture we live in. Diet culture is the pervasive messages we get from ads, social media, celebrities/influencers and sometimes even medical and nutrition professionals. The main message being that being thin or in a smaller body is both a sign of and a path to health, happiness and social success and acceptance. Even if a parent doesn’t consciously believe this, these harmful messages seep into our thinking. You are not alone if you feel a need to help control your child’s weight to shield them from weight stigma and spare them body judgment. As parents, it is in our nature to want to protect our kids from anything that could bring them harm.

Parenting is hard enough, especially when it comes to raising body confident kids. As a parent, you deserve to know how to create a safer place for your child right at home and set themntoward a path of body confidence and a sense of worthiness- no matter what size their body is. Even when they are hit with the inevitable diet culture messages that can make kids feel insecure or further self-loathing, parents have the power to show their kids that they can thrive despite them.

Diet culture is rough on children.

Our culture is not just unfair, but in many cases dehumanizing, to people living in larger bodies. That’s the actual problem, not people’s bodies themselves. But in trying to spare our children’s pain and stigma by directing them to eat a certain way, especially amidst the forceful and persistent cultural focus on childhood weight, we unknowingly point kids toward a risky and unproductive path for their health and relationship with food and their bodies. It is a lot- so much of parenting is. But even though you can’t change what your kids will be exposed to (since diet culture is everywhere) you can change what’s happening in the home.

Raising kids from an anti-diet philosophy is about two main objectives:

1. Help kids develop a core belief that their worth as a human does not rest on their appearance, their weight, or how they eat.

2. Support your child in finding a way of eating that is pleasant, nourishing, and as much as possible, internally driven.

How does diet culture get into children’s heads?

Diet culture is everywhere. Parents are under a lot of pressure to be perfect, and part of that is feeding our littles “right”- raising “good” eaters and “healthy” people. With the best of intentions, we do things like withholding dessert until the veggies are eaten, limiting certain foods like bread, snack foods and sweets, or overanalyzing every ingredient on a food label, which shows kids there is a lot to fear.

You might think these things are common sense. Recommendations like these are often affirmed by “experts.” But one critical thing to know is that mainstream healthy eating advice (also mostly well-intentioned) is heavily influenced by diet culture. Doctors, dietitians and policy makers live in diet culture too. Diet culture is even taught in schools as “nutrition education” with the intent to keep kids from gaining too much weight — as if all bodies are designed to be the same relative size and shape.

The result is that, often without meaning to, many experts fuel diet culture, which isn’t helping our children. One of the most toxic aspects about the way weight concerns and health concerns are treated as one and the same (they’re not) is that the risks and known outcomes of dieting are rarely disclosed. This is dangerous and unethical, because what weight science shows us when you read the literature critically is that attempting intentional weight loss (a.k.a. dieting) is likely to be harmful to your long-term health, predicts future weight cycling and increases the risk for developing an eating disorder – all which are also applicable to kids. We don’t mean to, but parents and care givers contribute, too.

It would be a miracle if we adults didn’t have our own harmful diet culture beliefs we’ve absorbed over the years. One survey found that 75% of women have disordered eating, and a previous study found that 90% of parents of 5-year-olds in the United States reported recent dieting. The fact is, we were all raised in this same diet culture, and so were our parents and probably our grandparents, which makes it hard to not unwittingly pass on these dangerous messages.

Even if you were not raised in a dieting household or don’t identify as someone who diets, you may talk about “eating cleaner,” how “good” you were for eating a “healthy” salad, or how proud you are that you can fit into your smaller jeans. This leaves kids with the idea that these are good examples of how to take care of their health. That’s exactly what diet culture wants your children to believe and to never question — and can contribute to disordered eating.

The result is that we are winding up with the exact opposite of what we, as parents, want to see in our kids the highest rates of eating disorders ever in kids and teens — and among mental illnesses, the rate of death from eating disorders is second only to opioid addiction. Studies show that at least one out of four “normal dieters” will progress to a clinical eating disorder and 35% progress to pathological dieting. This can decrease one’s quality of life, overall happiness, self-confidence and long-term physical and mental health.

We have forgotten the very basic nature of feeding – that it is about nourishment, not weight. But raising a kid who is satisfied with their body is not only possible, but so worthwhile. It won’t always be easy — you’re going against a pervasive cultural force — but then, you’re a parent, so you’re used to challenges for the sake of your kids.

Resources:

https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/

https://sph.unc.edu/cphm/carolina-public-health-magazine-accelerate-fall-2008/survey-finds-

disordered-eating-behaviors-among-three-out-of-four-american-women-fall-2008/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2530935/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8556017/

https://www.mhanational.org/blog/how-teach-your-child-body-positivity

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