Dear Diet Culture Letter: Stop Targeting Parents and Caregivers

Dear Diet Culture,

It’s me, Sunday…and sometimes Monday. But me and Monday sometimes take turns, so here we are.

I often think about how much you infiltrate people’s mind and make them fearful of food and weight gain, but in particular this week I want to talk about how much you impact parents and caregivers. You see, if you haven’t already gotten a parent to diet, restrict food and practice disordered eating throughout their life and/or to have specific beliefs about food or bodies, you most likely will really dig your heels in when they have children. I see it all the time.

Pediatricians are often fraught with dieting tips (which I have seen advertised as “healthy eating tips”) that are often based in fatphobia and the assumption that weight equals health, not to mention the assumption that it is a family’s personal responsibility to “control” their child’s weight rather than looking at multitude of things that can impact a child’s body size.

You teach parents that their kids cannot be trusted and that they need to control what their kids eat with vigor. And you instill a felt sense of fear in parents that if they don’t do this that they are negligent and promoting “unhealthy habits,” or sometimes worse, that they are contributing negatively to their children’s long-term health.

But here’s the rub: seeking to control what children eat will only lead to behaviors that go in opposition to it.

For example, kids that are not given consistent access to sweets will eat lots of sweets when they have access to them (which we often blame on the sweets and not the restriction) and/or hide those foods from their caregivers. In addition to this, the foods that are restricted in the home (in this case sweets) will become associated with fear and shame that will be carried with them well into their adulthood. So common is this experience that I often hear in my work with clients that the foods that they currently binge on as adults were foods that their parents restricted in the home.

What’s most important here is that we blame parents and caregivers for a lot of things in this culture, and sometimes rightfully so. But in this case, I have a lot of compassion for the experience of someone raising kids considering your impact on them. Most of the time you have already impacted them so significantly that they cannot help but to pass those things on to their kids, not to mention the unending amounts of messaging from documentaries, practitioners and media about how what kids eat needs to be controlled.

Parents and caregivers don’t have much support around how to navigate the challenges of feeding young ones (a quick plug for Opal’s four part podcast series on how to build scaffolding on the “how” of modeling and feeding the young child) and are doing their best with you constantly in their face telling them that they are doing it wrong (which is often from a wildly privileged perspective btw).

The majority of caregivers want to protect their kids by either seeking to prevent them from experiencing what they did (ie the parent was fat and was treated poorly and therefore wants to protect their kid) OR are seeking to give them what they didn’t have (the parent didn’t have access to fresh foods growing up and then goes too far in wanting to promote eating fruits and veggies). And, even though their intention is well meaning, it impacts children negatively.

Which look, Diet Culture, I know that you benefit from all of this and you would love to see it continue by telling me, and everyone else, all the rhetoric about food and bodies. But, I am not here to appeal to you. Rather, I am here to challenge your outdated, antiquated, oppressive and fatphobic beliefs about food and bodies because I want people and caregivers to be able to free up their time, energy and headspace to embrace life and feel less anxious about their kids’ bodies and food intake.

Sincerely,

Sunday, aka your most passionate anti-diet Dietitian Katherine who wants you to know that diet culture is just as much in the health practitioner’s offices as it is in other spaces and that seeking to control kids bodies and food has long-term negative impacts on their health and wellbeing