Raising Healthy Eaters: Building a Positive Feeding Relationship

As a young social worker, newly licensed and fresh out of graduate school, I found myself working as a case manager on a women's unit specializing in the treatment of eating disorders at a local psychiatric hospital. I say I found myself there, but truth be told, I didn't arrive there by accident. Acutely aware of my own history of food and body image issues, I understood the responsibility I had to model emotional and physical health. And amazingly, I remained relatively calm about food and my body.

Twenty-seven years old and halfway through my first pregnancy, I learned I was having a daughter. The calm I had experienced vanished into thin air! Holy s#*t! What if she struggles with food, weight and body image? What if she's too thin? What if she grows up a fat kid like me? What if she has an eating disorder? How will I teach her to love and accept her body, accept herself and develop a healthy relationship with food?

Those questions swirled around and around my head.

My questions were answered six weeks into my maternity leave when a colleague from the unit came to visit me. Part of her baby gift was a copy of Ellyn Satter's Child of Mine, a book focused on childhood feeding and the feeding dynamic between parents or caregivers and their children. Receiving that gift changed the trajectory of my life and my career!

I devoured the information (pun accidental but fitting). Finally, I had a roadmap for how to feed my daughter, and it made so much sense! And I would practice, and practice, and practice.

The journey provided infinite opportunities to confront my own values and beliefs about food, my body and my children's capacity to learn and grow normally. I began to understand that raising healthy eaters wasn't about controlling every bite, getting them to eat more vegetables or making sure they finished everything on their plates. It was about creating an environment where they could develop trust in themselves and their ability to eat.

It's about the relationship, not just the food

Satter's Feeding Dynamics Model, anchored by the Division of Responsibility in Feeding (sDOR), is profoundly simple and full of nuance at the same time.

In essence, parents are responsible for what food is offered, when it is offered and where eating takes place. Children are responsible for deciding whether to eat and how much to eat from what is provided.

This doesn't mean abandoning structure or allowing children to eat whatever they want, whenever they want. It means providing dependable structure while respecting a child's developing ability to recognize and respond to their own appetite.

And this is where things can get interesting for parents!

How comfortable are we when our child doesn't eat the meal we've prepared? Can we resist the urge to bargain, bribe, pressure or insist they take just one more bite? What happens inside us when our child wants more food than we think they should have, or refuses something we believe is good for them?

These moments often reveal much more about our own relationship with food than we realize.

What are we teaching our children about food?

Satter has a model for adult eating as well, the Eating Competence Model. Eating competence is about more than knowing which foods contain what micronutrients or understanding what constitutes a balanced meal. It is also about developing positive attitudes towards eating, enjoying a variety of foods, trusting internal signals and having the skills and routines to make eating a satisfying part of everyday life.

We can know a great deal about nutrition and still struggle to eat comfortably- to trust ourselves. We might wrestle with internalized judgement about foods we have labeled bad, so that even if we allow ourselves to eat them, we feel sufficiently negative about them that it ruins our ability to enjoy them. We may still ignore hunger because it doesn't fit our schedule or believe we need to compensate for something we ate earlier.

And if we have children, they are most certainly watching, listening, studying... learning.

They hear us talk about needing to lose weight, being good because we've avoided dessert, or having to exercise to burn off what we've eaten. They notice when we criticize our bodies or treat certain foods as something to feel guilty about. The wonder why we are eating something different from the rest of the family.

We don't have to have a perfect relationship with food to be trustworthy eating role models. But becoming aware of our own beliefs and behaviors gives us an opportunity to consider what we might be passing on.

Food is so much more than nutrition. It is pleasure, connection, culture, celebration, comfort and belonging. It is our first experience with bonding. What a shame it would be if our children grew up knowing the nutritional value of everything they ate but didn't trust themselves with food, to relax while eating and to enjoy the experience.

Trust is something we practice

Practicing Satter's Division of Responsibility is not about perfection. It's about developing trust, healthy boundaries, and emotional regulation skills, for adults and children alike.

The feeding relationship is also a metaphor for parenting more broadly. We provide structure, guidance and boundaries while allowing our children the space to develop independence and confidence within those boundaries. It's enough support for them to feel secure and enough autonomy to develop competence and esteem... a solid sense of self.

And the research supports what we observe in clinical practice, that eating competence is a protective factor for children's health. A positive feeding relationship is most definitely an important part of the broader conversation around prevention of disordered eating.

This philosophy shaped my professional clinical practice with people healing from disordered eating and those on their own mission to guide their families towards more fulfilling and healthier relationships with food and with one another.

The years that followed resulted in hundreds of confident, competent and joyful eaters, two of whom are now 21 and 24 years old!

As a Faculty Member of The Ellyn Satter Institute (ESI) since 2014, I have the privilege of participating in sharing this growing body of work, supported by research, in an even broader way.

Perhaps one of the most important things I've learned along the way is that we don't need to teach our children to be healthy eaters. We need to give them the opportunity to becomecompetent, confident and joyful ones.

And it starts with the relationship we create around the proverbial table.