Celebrating a year of the Lift the Shame podcast, I, Crystal, am thrilled to take another lap around the sun with you as we tackle one of parenting's most intriguing dilemmas - picky eating. Have you ever felt like you're running in circles when it comes to feeding your little one? Trust me, you're not alone. Drawing from my personal journey in feeding my two selective eaters, we'll discuss various aspects of picky eating, from its emotional tug of war to its potential triggers.
Who would've thought that making meals fun could amplify feeding difficulties? A recent study suggests so! Treading lightly on this path, we navigate the stress surrounding a picky eater's weight, nutrition, and health, offering solace and strategies to wriggle out of the anxiety. Remember, it's okay to be worried, but let's channel that concern into understanding and helping our little ones develop healthy eating habits.
But be wary, moms, as we delve into the potential pitfalls of wielding nutrition info as a feeding stick. Respect your child's autonomy, let them explore at their own pace, and avoid making meal times a battleground. The feeding relationship is a delicate one, and your trust can make all the difference. So join me, as we shed the shame, embrace our mistakes, and journey towards fostering a healthier relationship with food for our children.
Questions about today's episode or do you have topic requests for future episodes? Please send your feedback via email to hello@crystalkarges.com or connect with Crystal on Instagram.
Celebrating a year of the Lift the Shame podcast, I, Crystal, am thrilled to take another lap around the sun with you as we tackle one of parenting's most intriguing dilemmas - picky eating. Have you ever felt like you're running in circles when it comes to feeding your little one? Trust me, you're not alone. Drawing from my personal journey in feeding my two selective eaters, we'll discuss various aspects of picky eating, from its emotional tug of war to its potential triggers.
Who would've thought that making meals fun could amplify feeding difficulties? A recent study suggests so! Treading lightly on this path, we navigate the stress surrounding a picky eater's weight, nutrition, and health, offering solace and strategies to wriggle out of the anxiety. Remember, it's okay to be worried, but let's channel that concern into understanding and helping our little ones develop healthy eating habits.
But be wary, moms, as we delve into the potential pitfalls of wielding nutrition info as a feeding stick. Respect your child's autonomy, let them explore at their own pace, and avoid making meal times a battleground. The feeding relationship is a delicate one, and your trust can make all the difference. So join me, as we shed the shame, embrace our mistakes, and journey towards fostering a healthier relationship with food for our children.
Questions about today's episode or do you have topic requests for future episodes? Please send your feedback via email to hello@crystalkarges.com or connect with Crystal on Instagram.
Hey there, mama, you're listening to the Lift the Shame podcast. I'm your host, crystal, mama of Five and your family's intuitive eating dietitian, here to help you cut through the diet culture clutter so you can enjoy freedom with food as a family. I'm on a mission to help you end the generational legacy of diet culture in your home so you can experience motherhood free from food guilt and body shame. Listen in weekly for guidance on how you can ditch diet culture, heal your relationship with food in your body and confidently raise intuitive eaters. Let's dive in and live the shame together. Hey, mama, welcome back to the show. I'm so glad that you're here and we have been doing a mini series on picky eating, and so we're continuing that today. But before we get started in our episode, I just wanted to share an exciting milestone around here. Lift the Shame podcast has reached our one year anniversary, which is incredible and possible because of you. So I just wanted to say thank you for tuning in. Whether you have been listening since the very beginning or you're just getting into this community, I just want to acknowledge how much I appreciate you and your support. So thank you so much, and I'd love to hear from you. This podcast. This platform is for you, and if there are ways I can better serve you through this show, I would love to hear your feedback, and you're always welcome to connect with me via email Hello at CrystalCargiscom. And if this show has been helpful for you, I would appreciate your consideration to write and review the podcast, as this helps other parents be able to connect with this resource as well. So thank you so much in advance for your help with that.
Speaker 1:So let's dive into today's topic. We're continuing the subject of picky eating, and this can be a really challenging area for a lot of parents. Regardless of what your history has been, what your background has been, picky eating can be tough. There's a lot of layers involved, and so I'm hoping that we can talk more through this to empower you with some tools to better support the kiddos in your life who may be more selective eaters, and the past couple of weeks we looked at some common myths surrounding picky eating, and today I just want to share, from personal experience, some of the mistakes that I have made as a parent of selective eaters, so that you might be able to learn from and avoid my own mistakes and I'm all about learning and growing, especially on this show, and when I talk about mistakes, it's not coming from a place of shaming whatsoever.
Speaker 1:I think it's valuable to be able to learn from our lives and from our experiences and knowing that we've been doing the best that we can with the information and resources that we have. And when we learn differently, we can do differently, and this is a huge part in terms of shifting out of negative cycles around food and body image in our families. When we take the time to learn about our histories, our food stories, our legacies, it allows us to be able to pivot and rewrite those legacies. And so I just wanted to preface with that, because I know the word mistake can have a lot of negative connotations to it, and I just want to remind you that this is a safe place to just learn and explore, and a lot of this again is coming from my own lived experience of having two kiddos who are selective eaters. So let's dive in.
Speaker 1:I wanted to just remind you that there's a lot of emotion and often triggers wrapped up in picky eating, and in fact we're going to be looking at why picky eating can be so triggering in upcoming episodes. We really can feel like salt in the wound, so to say. There are so many things around picky eating that can be painful reminders of maybe your own food story or any surrounding trauma that may have been around food or your body, either for yourself or for your child. And in my case, my second daughter, who is now 11 years old, was born as a late preterm and we had so many feeding difficulties in the onset of our journey and our relationship together and that really made it difficult for me to trust her body and for me to be able to relax when it came to how she ate or how much she ate, and I really found this escalating over the course of her early childhood.
Speaker 1:And so a lot of these things that I'm sharing today are coming from those early years with my daughter and things I experienced with her, and I just want to remind you that if you find yourself feeling anxious or worried around your child and how they're eating, there's likely really good reasons behind it, and at the end of the day, you just care about your child. You want them to be able to be healthy and happy and being able to engage in their lives in a meaningful way, and oftentimes, when it comes to selective eating and we see that our kids aren't eating, or maybe not eating the variety of foods that we think they should be eating, or eating very limited quantities, or we're hearing things from providers questioning or worrying about their weight or nutrition status, or we're just getting bombarded with all these ideas about how our kids should be eating. These things can make it really challenging to trust our kids, and this is definitely a picture of what I experienced with my daughter and having a preterm baby, where we went through a period of her having to have frequent weight checks and weigh how much milk she was transferring. It felt like I had to measure every single ounce of milk that she was getting into her body and being told that I had to wake her up because I couldn't trust her to wake herself up to eat. All those things really haunted me for years of her life and it made it really challenging for me to relinquish that sense of control or urgency, like I have to be responsible for caring for her when it came to how she ate, and it made it really hard for me to extend trust to her and our feeding relationship. And she did grow up to have more sensory sensitivities and be very selective with food, and so when she started eating solids, this is where I found myself in this power struggle with her and trying different things and engaging in strategies that had good intention behind them but ultimately were creating more harm than good.
Speaker 1:And at the same time, I was also in my training to become a dietitian and just delving into the world of child feeding, and so there was a lot of things I didn't know yet that I do now, and it was really a hard learning experience for me to try some of these things and recognize, hey, this isn't working, it's actually making it harder or mealtimes feel so stressful, and I don't think that that is how this is supposed to go in order to support my daughter towards the longterm goal of having a positive relationship with food, and really those are the big overarching things that we want to be working towards. And when we get stuck in the minutiae of what our kids are eating or how much they're eating, or did they get enough bites of veggies in them, it can be really hard to do that and it can be really hard to trust that. But what I want you to see is if you have done any of these things that I'm about to share or find yourself in that same boat where you're anxious or worried or feel nervous about how your child is eating, or maybe feel like you can't trust them to eat what they need. I just want to remind you that you're not alone and there's a lot of reasons that are likely influencing the way you feel, and none of which are bad. You're an amazing parent because you care so deeply about your child and you want to best support them, and it's possible to help.
Speaker 1:Even our pickiest eaters still have a great relationship with food. So all that to say, I wanted to share again, just from my firsthand lived experience, mistakes that I have made when it came to my daughter, and my hope is that this might be things that you can take away and learn from yourself, because they're very common things that I think we engage in. They're oftentimes more subtle than some of the other methods that we hear when it comes to feeding pick eaters, and I think that's one of the tricky things about it is that these are often things that we're hearing is being promoted that should help your picky eater, get your picky eater to try new foods, and we all want that for our kids because diet culture again has created this idea of what our kids need in order to be healthy. That often entails a lot of strategies that don't support their innate intuitive eating ability, so we want to be careful with that. But the first one I wanted to share here is around the mistake I made in terms of trying to make meals fun and interactive for my picky eater, in hopes that she would actually eat more or more of the foods that I thought she needed to eat, or try new things.
Speaker 1:We definitely went through a stage where the few foods she would eat were primarily starchy carbohydrates, and I remember just feeling a lot of anxiety and stress around her weight, around her nutrition, around her health status, and it was really challenging to grapple with all those things. And so I remember reading and seeing a lot of things about if you make your child's food more playful, more fun, more interactive and engaging, you can get them to actually try or want to eat some of the foods that you're introducing. And these are things that I also hear promoted on various social media accounts, and, again, I think there's a really good intention behind it. But what's interesting is that, as I tried some of these things with my own daughter, I found that it made her more fearful of coming to the table or she would see some of these foods in that sense of like forcing something that felt scary to her to be playful or interactive was definitely not jiving with her. In fact, I found that it made her more adverse to engaging with food in general, and that period didn't last very long. Thankfully. It took me a hot minute to realize that this strategy is not working, at least for my kiddo, and so I really backed off of that one really quick.
Speaker 1:But the reason I wanted to bring this up is there has actually been a recent study that looked at this and I will link the study for you in the show notes if you're interested in reading this further. But what was interesting and I'm going to read a quote from the actual study but researchers noted that encouraging a child with a story slash game unexpectedly increase the likelihood of feeding difficulties in school age. Making the meal a fun and interactive activity is often advised. So basically what they're saying is parents of picky eaters are often told or encouraged to make the meal fun, make it interactive, make it engaging, create dips, create fun shapes, make a fun story out of it. But what researchers actually found is that that advice unexpectedly increased the likelihood of feeding difficulties in school age kids. And why might that be? Well, I have a few ideas myself, but something that's interesting to know is that our children are very attuned to our emotional state as parents this is something that we've talked about a lot on this podcast and they can sense our hidden agendas, or they can sense our underlying anxiety or stress or worry, and oftentimes, when we feel like, as parents, that we should be doing certain things when it comes to feeding our kids, there's that hidden agenda attached to it, and we're hoping that it will lead to a certain outcome.
Speaker 1:I was trying to think of a practical example that could help illustrate this, and something that came to mind was as an adult, have you ever felt obligated to go to a certain event or function, but everything in you didn't want to go? You just wanted to stay at home, stay on the couch, stay in your comfy pants, watch some Netflix, veg out, but you had to go to this event or social function or dinner meeting or whatever it was, and it's that contrasting nature of wanting to do something but forcing yourself to do something else, and inevitably, especially for those of us that wear our emotions on our sleeves. It's like you can tell when someone is somewhere but doesn't want to be there, at least for most of us, and this can definitely play out when it comes to feeding interactions with our kids. If you are, let's say, worried or stressed or feeling like I have to make this feeding interaction pleasant and fun and exciting and interactive in order to get my kid to eat, but everything in you is feeling stressed or anxious or worried or wanting to do anything else but sit across from your child at that table and trying to force this playful interaction that isn't coming naturally or desirably. Your child is going to pick up on that, and so that is something to remember.
Speaker 1:Is that our kids are experiencing any negative emotions rather than the intended playfulness behind your interactions with the games or the activity or whatever it is that you're hoping will support them in getting them to eat? And even if we're not directly saying I want you to eat this, they can feel it in our interactions with them. They can feel it when we're trying to get them to engage with food in a certain way or telling them a story about a kid who ate this or tried a bite of this and it was so yummy. Even though we may not be verbally saying those things, our interactions are displaying a different message, and so this is something that I know I'm not alone in doing or have done as a parent, where we feel so desperate in so many ways to just get our kids to eat or to ensure they're getting enough or getting enough variety, and it brings up so much conflict within us and it often forces us to engage with our kids in a way around food that may not come naturally, and not only is it not coming naturally, but our kids are picking up on the unspoken messages, the hidden agendas and the underlying anxiety or stress that we are feeling in those situations.
Speaker 1:And I remember with my daughter trying to do subtle things to just get her to interact with food, like touching things or putting things on her tray and hopes that she would touch them, or, as she got a little bit older, asking her to scoop things out on my plate or her plate, and because of that forced interaction, it actually made it more tense and upsetting to her, and this is something that we see coinciding with the findings of this research study, which really does suggest that forcing children to play with or touch foods that they're fearful of may actually intensify their negative feelings and resistance towards trying those foods. So, again, because of the intentions that are behind it, it can be really hard and complicated, but this really is important to think about. What are our hidden agendas attached to any feeding interactions that we are having with our children? So, really, a takeaway from this is that you don't have to make your meal times into a game or story or interactive, especially if you are doing that in hopes of helping your picky eater. Really, the intention behind it should not be to get your child to eat, but rather to engage with your child in a way that facilitates connection and natural connection, not forced connection. So that is the takeaway. The other thing to remember, too, is that gradual exposure to new foods, without pressure, can be more effective. So we want to respect our kids autonomy and allow them to explore foods, whether they're new, or things they're learning to eat, at their own pace, rather than forced interactions, as again, that forced interaction can make them more adverse to those foods.
Speaker 1:A second mistake I made with my daughter and I'm going to share a couple things in this. One point is attempting to use health and nutrition information as leverage to get her to eat. This is very dangerous territory and something that I often see promoted on mainstream media and health curriculum is this idea where, if we can use health information to incentivize our kids to eat, they'll be more likely to try different things if they understand that this is benefiting their body in some way. But unfortunately that's not the case. And then we're also seeing studies that show that using or weaponizing health or nutrition curriculum to get kids to eat or try to get them to eat in a certain way, can actually lead to negative outcomes and potential anxiety or concerns about food, which could be a trigger for disordered eating. This was something I definitely did with well intention with my young daughter, who didn't want to touch vegetables, ate very few fruits and, again, was mostly eating starchy carbohydrates, and in my mind that just did not equate to good health or overall nutrition. And this was also subtle and looked like saying things like oh, let's try by to these crunchy carrots. They are so good for our eyes, they help our eyes see. Or this food is making us strong, or this food is helping our bodies grow big and strong, and trying to use that as incentive or, again, leveraging nutrition information to try to get her to eat or try different foods.
Speaker 1:I actually did a whole episode about this in terms of if we want our children to have a positive relationship with food, we really need to stop using the word healthy and, in a broader perspective, stop weaponizing nutrition or health information in order to try to influence their eating behaviors. There's a lot of negative consequences around this and I will link that episode for you in the show notes. But in general, our children, especially younger children, are literal thinkers and this means that they don't have the cognitive capacity to understand all the nuances and complexities around nutrition information. And I also just want to distinguish here that there's a difference between nutrition information and food education. Those are two separate categories and we are going to be talking more about this because I hear this come up a lot like we should be talking to kids about food or we should be talking to them about their health and their bodies. There's nothing wrong with talking to our kids about food and talking about characteristics of food or where food comes from or where it grows, or how food grows or how we get food in our homes or what happens to food when it goes in our body.
Speaker 1:These are things that many children are naturally curious about and want to learn about. That is very different from health or nutrition information, and, again, nutrition is very complex. There's many different topics, many nuances and the same with health. Health concepts are highly individual and highly contextual, and this is an example that I've given my older children who have asked me those questions like is this bad for you? I heard my friend saying that these are that sugar is bad for you or are apples good for you? And one thing I've told them is well, if you were allergic to apples, would apples be good for you? Would apples be healthy for you? And you know it's interesting to see how they react with their answers or seeing their brains work like oh no, that wouldn't be good for you. And so what we want our kids to know is that these health concepts are not reasons why they have to eat, and that food is not something that they have to worry about or have anxiety about because they're not eating carrots or they're not eating broccoli, or they're not eating enough of the foods that their parents think they should be eating in order to grow big and strong.
Speaker 1:All of these things can actually create more anxiety, especially for a child who may be more highly sensitive or already having an anxious disposition or a temperament that is more anxious or nervous. These are things that can make food harder for them, and I actually have seen this with my own daughter, where I remember we were using the carrot thing where it's like, oh, carrots have nutrients that can make your eyes see good, and she just wasn't into carrots. And you know, again, I was a young mom, I was a new mom, newish mom and also training in the nutrition world, and just thought that that's what we did. We used nutrition information to help our kids try new things and to get them to eat foods that are supposedly good for their bodies. And in reality, I remember I terrified my daughter because she didn't like eating carrots at that time. Now she does, but at the time she didn't, and I remember her actually telling me like I'm scared, my eyes are going to be bad because I don't eat carrots, and that was the moment where I told myself this has to stop, like this is not working. I don't want to create unnecessary fear or anxiety for my child because she doesn't naturally want to eat these foods. That's not fair to her.
Speaker 1:And the other thing that happened this was the other point that I wanted to kind of add in here is comparing our picky eaters to their siblings. So my picky eater, the oldest, the older one, is my second child, so I had two kiddos at that time and I remember saying things like oh, look at your sister, she's eating her carrots or she's eating X, y and Z and she's doing such a good job. You know and we do that with good intention. I hope you know that and I hope you hear that that these are not things that we do out of spite for our children. Again, there's a lot of anxiety that's fueling the way that we engage around food with our kids, and so that was coming out in those interactions and in those things I was saying to my daughter and I just remember almost the shame that I could see on her face that she was not able to do what her sister was able to do when it came to food and that just made me so sad and I didn't want her to internalize that message that how she ate was a reflection of our approval of her or praise of her. You know, I just wanted her to know that she was loved and accepted, regardless of how she ate.
Speaker 1:And the reality is that all of our kids have different abilities, different temperaments, different sensory needs and just because one child can eat something that another child can't doesn't mean there's something inherently wrong with that child, and we never want to compare them that way, and that was something I learned in feeding my kids very early on. That that had to stop and thankfully that wasn't a strategy that I use for much longer either. But I want to share because I think it's valuable to learn from this mistake that I engaged in. It didn't help my daughter eat better. It only created more fear and more shame around food, and we don't want to create those negative associations around food in any way. And what the research is actually showing us now is that when we try to weaponize nutrition information and again, nutrition information is different from food education, nutrition information trying to infuse health concepts or you should eat this for that, those things can actually create more anxiety and worry around food for kids, which can be a trigger for disordered eating down the road. So it's something we really want to avoid, especially as a strategy for trying to get our kids to eat. Okay, I'm going to try to run through these last three a little quicker here. I always feel like there's so much to talk about these things, but hopefully you're finding this helpful.
Speaker 1:But another mistake that I found myself making is limiting options of things I would serve to my daughter, make available to her based on my preferences or what I thought was better for her, and I shared a little bit about this on a previous podcast. But, as an example, my daughter had a lot of difficulties with eating fresh produce, including fruits and vegetables, and as a family we generally lean towards fresh produce in our home. And when I started to learn more about the different factors that were influencing how my daughter ate, I realized that she had some sensory sensitivities to fresh produce, that in particular, the inconsistencies with flavors and textures were too unpredictable for her. And this happens a lot, especially with produce like sometimes you grab a pint of strawberries and they're all delicious and sweet and plump and juicy, and sometimes you grab a pint of strawberries that are underripe or mushy or moldy and for us as adults or at least for myself I was like, oh, that's not a big deal, but for my daughter I realized that that was too unpredictable for her and because of our own preferences or just how we generally ate in our home, I was limiting the options that I would give her. But once I realized that, I started making other forms of fruit available to her that were more consistent and easier in terms of texture and flavor. So canned fruit really worked well for her. She loved eating different kinds of canned fruit because that texture and flavor is definitely more consistent than fresh fruit.
Speaker 1:But there are other things too, and as a dietitian in training who had no knowledge that I do now, I remember being influenced by so many things that I had heard about feeding kids, much of which is sneakily guided and perpetuated by diet culture, and often as parents we fear giving our kids certain foods because those foods are demonized by diet culture. So we might limit processed foods, we might limit sweets, we might limit certain things that we feel like our child should not be eating, when in reality you may be limiting the variety of foods in which your child does feel capable or safe with eating because of your own fears or maybe ideas around those foods. And that was a mistake that I learned for myself, that I was limiting the things that she was actually comfortable and enjoyed eating because of my own ideas or my own preferences that were guiding what I bought or the things that I brought into the home. And this is where I would caution, especially if you are a parent in eating disorder recovery or if you are healing from a difficult relationship with food. I want to just encourage you to examine any hidden food rules that are still present for you, because what I see is that those hidden food rules can often play a role in how we feed our kids. One of the most amazing and beautiful gifts that we can give to our children is having that self-awareness around those embedded food rules that are still very much guiding how we eat or what we eat and to decipher. Are those things also influencing what we introduce or allow our own children to eat? And being able to challenge those embedded food rules that can stay with you for years. I get that, but being able to challenge those in effort to allow your child options to try and eat more things can be an incredible gift to give your child, especially if you have a selective eater who may already have a narrow window of what feels safe and accepted to them. This is something that I learned myself with my own daughter.
Speaker 1:Another mistake I found myself making with my picky eater, especially when she was younger, was projecting my own opinions or fears on her, and this often happened very unintentionally again, as it often does. But I found myself limiting what I would feed her based on what I thought she would or wouldn't eat, and in a lot of ways that also prevented me from offering or exposing or just allowing her to learn about foods at a pace and timing that felt right and safe for her. But I found myself not putting certain things out because I already felt or thought, oh, she's not gonna eat that or she's not gonna try that, or she's so picky or she's so sensitive she's not going to eat those things. And the truth is that she was likely internalizing my own fears or anxieties or opinions and I know that that was also starting to impact her attitude toward those foods. And sometimes we have these discussions with other caregivers or when our kids are in earshot, maybe saying things like, oh, they're not gonna eat that or they'll never try that, they'll never go for that. And I think it's important to just be careful and mindful of our own attitudes and how those are being projected onto our child Because, again, our kids are more likely to internalize these messages about themselves and maybe develop similar concerns based on the messaging that they're hearing and picking up around them, and so that was something I learned and started to become really intentional about, and it really just helped me also develop more acceptance towards my daughter, especially at mealtimes where there wasn't this hyper focus on her or she had something special than everyone else. It was like all these things are available to everybody, and when I learned to relax my own attitude towards her, it really changed so many things for us in our feeding interaction. So that was a big one for me too.
Speaker 1:The last mistake I found myself making that I wanted to share with you today when it comes to feeding picky eaters, is this idea of exposure. This is something that is promoted on many media channels. You'll often hear it in any type of picky eating resource book or guide or platform, social media posts, whatever it is. Is this idea that you should constantly be exposing your kids. Just keep exposing them to food without pressuring them to eat, and they will eventually try whatever food that is. And I remember being so sold on that idea where I literally thought if I just keep exposing my daughter to these foods vegetables, fruits, whatever it is that she will eventually eat these things and like them and enjoy them. And that is the message that is being promoted when it comes to this exposure approach. And you may even hear people quoting research and saying research shows that if you expose your child multiple times, that takes 10, 15, 20 times and eventually they'll try something. And I actually came across a study that showed that, while there can be effectiveness to repeated exposures, there is also variation in how children might respond to this strategy. So some children may actually develop a liking for a food that was previously disliked after multiple exposures, while others might remain resistant despite repeated attempts.
Speaker 1:And that is what I think is so important to take away from this is that, again, if we have a hidden agenda attached to any strategy that we are engaging with or using with our kids when it comes to feeding them, that can backfire for us hugely. And what's important to remember is that our kids' food preferences are influenced by a combination of many different factors, including genetic, environment, sensory and some children. I definitely saw this with my own daughter, who had heightened sensitivity to textures and flavors, so kids that do have sensory sensitivities, may be less likely to warm up to certain foods, even after repeated exposures, and that can feel so defeating to a parent who is sold on this idea that if I just keep offering, if I just keep exposing, they'll eventually eat it. Well, I can tell you that after 11 years of my daughter being exposed to many different foods, that there are still a whole ton of foods that she will not eat. And that's okay. That's totally okay and she's doing great and has a great relationship with food, thankfully.
Speaker 1:But it really made me realize that just because I expose her to something doesn't mean that she's going to like something, and just because she doesn't like something doesn't mean that she's going to be inherently unhealthy or have a negative relationship with food. Again, we want our kids to be able to explore food at a pace that feels right for them. We want to honor their autonomy and we want to give them the choice and the ability to decide whether or not they want to try to eat something. And this is where we have to examine do we have attached outcomes to how or what our kids are eating? Am I continuing to offer this in the hopes that eventually they eat it and when we can come to terms with the fact that our kids may not like the things that we like or may never eat the things that they see multiple times over the course of their lifetime while they're in our home, the easier we can lay down those expectations, the easier things will be around food in our home.
Speaker 1:And I certainly remember that for myself, that when I let go of that attached outcome that I had that she'll eventually eat this or she'll eventually like it, when I let go and just said you know what, if she likes it, she likes it. If she wants to try it, she'll try it. If she doesn't, she doesn't, it's okay. There's no morality attached to how my daughter eats or what she doesn't eat. It freed everything for me. It literally changed everything for me and from that point on I decided that I was going to learn to accept her for who she was and not try to make her conform into my idea of who I thought she should be, not just with her temperament and her personality but how she ate.
Speaker 1:I realized that I had so much attached to how she ate and I know a big part of that is because how our kids eat can feel like such a reflection of us as parents and I just want to encourage you to move towards that acceptance factor of your child that it's more about. Can we accept them, can they feel our acceptance, even if they're just eating bread and they're cookie at dinner and nothing else? That's where it gets tough and that is where the work is, my friend, where we are doing the work on accepting our kids, on working through our own triggers of how our kids eat or their body sizes these are all things that fall into our realm, our territory, and are not the burden of our children to have to carry or have to bear. And ultimately, when they can feel our unconditional acceptance, even if they are a picky eater, even if they are very selective and eat a limited handful of foods, that will give them the support they need to learn how to eat food in a manner that feels best for their bodies and knowing that that's going to look different for every child. So that wraps up for today's episode.
Speaker 1:There are many mistakes that I made over the course of my parenting journey that I'm sure I could fill up many more episodes with, but I just wanted to share that for today and hope that encourages you and reminds you that you're not alone, that we're always doing the best that we can, and your children are so lucky to have such a caring mother in their life. Next week, we'll look more at this idea about why picky eating can be so triggering and the distress that it can bring up within us, why that is why that shows up and what we can do about it. So I hope you can join me next week and I cannot wait to see you then. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Lift the Shame podcast. For more tips and guidance on your motherhood journey, come connect with me on Instagram at CrystalCarGaze. Until next week, mama, I'll be cheering you on. Bye for now.