You May Be Triggered By Your Child Eating Sweets: Here Are Some Reasons Why

As mothers, we're not just feeding our children; we're helping them build a lifelong relationship with food, their bodies, and their self-image. This journey becomes particularly challenging during candy-centered holidays like Halloween. In this episode, we delve into the tools, strategies, and proactive understanding needed to navigate these sugar-coated occasions. We'll start by focusing on understanding our children's individual needs, temperaments, and personalities to foster a positive rapport with food and their bodies.

As a parent, do you find certain situations triggering? We've been there too, and we believe that the key to mindful parenting lies in recognizing our triggers. As we discuss our children's strong emotions and our own body size and appetite, we challenge the belief that restricting our children's food access or body size will keep them safe. Discover how such triggers can surface during candy-centered holidays and how we can use them to show up as better parents.

Lastly, we'll share our experiences and tips for handling triggers and parenting challenges during these holidays. Embracing the need to be gentle with ourselves, recognizing our triggers, and addressing them proactively is crucial. Learn how to ask for support when needed and communicate your love and acceptance for your children. Join us as we emphasize the importance of repairing situations with our children, apologize when we mess up, and show them that it's okay to be human. Embark on this journey with us to raising courageous, confident, and resilient children.

Show Links:

• [Podcast Episode]: "Your Step-by-Step Halloween Candy Game Plan to Rewrite the Script on Sweets"

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.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

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 lift the shame together. Hey Mama, welcome back to the show.

Speaker 1: 0:40

We are days away from Halloween. Here at the time of this recording and also on the podcast, we've been doing a mini series all about kids and sweets, and so I am so glad that you're back for more on this topic. As we dive into another conversation. All around this, and typically around this time of year, I get a lot of questions about strategies and frameworks like what do I do? Give me the nitty gritty from start of Halloween day and the days that follow, what can I do to help support my child with sweets in a positive way? And I so appreciate just the intentional desire to really support our kids and help them learn how to self-regulate sweets, because the reality is and I know you hear me say this all the time we live in a world where all these foods exist and, yes, even though it is not the norm to have a high volume of candy, like your kids might get after trick-or-treating that is not the norm. However, we want our children to learn how to effectively self-regulate during times when there is access to a higher volume of sweets. Whether it's a candy-settered holiday or a birthday party, these occasions are part of real life and so these situations can provide valuable experiences for our children on their intuitive eating journeys. I also want to recognize that, starting from Halloween, all through it seems like Valentine's Day and beyond, really all year round there are these candy-centered holidays that come up and that can be quite triggering and bring up a lot for you, for family members, for your kids. These holidays can come with a lot of mixed emotions, a lot of different situations and nuance that can sometimes be challenging to navigate, and that is what I want to chat with you about today.

Speaker 1: 2:33

And while I do think there is significant value in learning strategies and frameworks and scripts about how to support our children in having a positive relationship with food. I do think it's also important to acknowledge that those things can only take us so far, that it still is necessary for us to do the inner work ourselves and work through a lot of our own challenges or trauma or history or experiences around food and body which are shaping how we are showing up in our feeding relationship with our children. And this is where the rubber meets the road and where it gets really challenging because, quite frankly, it's so much easier to be handed a download or a PDF file that tells you all the things that you should say in certain situations or the strategies that you should utilize. However, we want to remember that feeding our children is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and the reason for that is because all of our children are unique and have their own individual needs and temperaments and personalities that shape their relationship with food, and they're going to bring those unique things into how they navigate the world of food and eating and their bodies, and the goal is that we are able to become attuned to that in order to be responsive to what our children need, to what the child in front of you needs, and oftentimes this is where I find that strategies and scripts really do fall short because they're not necessarily prescriptive for the child in front of us, and so I wanted to dive a little bit more into this today. I do, however, have an older podcast episode with all kinds of strategies specific to Halloween and Halloween candies, so if you are looking for more of that and wanting information on that, I will link that in the show notes for you, because I know that can be helpful.

Speaker 1: 4:31

And I also just want to recognize that many of us are doing things or trying to do things for our children that we never had modeled to us, and so, of course, it's difficult to know what to do in some of these situations when we never saw any other caregivers doing these things, and so I definitely do think there's value in scripts and in strategies. However, I also see where they fall short, and that is where it is important to be self-reflective and do some of this inner work to understand what is influencing how we're showing up for our kids, because that will play a big role in how they feel about food and their bodies. So you might be wondering or thinking okay, well, what is the inner work that I need to do. What does that look like? This is where I believe being aware of how we respond or react to our children can be very telling of underlying things that we potentially need to work on ourselves, and when we find ourselves, in particular, being triggered by certain eating experiences with our kids, or being triggered by their body size or their appetites, or finding ourselves distressed or feeling distressed when we're engaging with our children around food, these can be very helpful clues to discover what deeper things are lying beneath that, so to say.

Speaker 1: 5:57

When you're having certain responses to your children, especially around food or bodies or meal times, these can often be indicative of something deeper, and sometimes it's related to trauma that's been unprocessed or unresolved around food or your body. Sometimes it's connected to a deep rooted belief that you may have or that you had growing up that was shaped by your experiences around your caregivers and how they interacted around food and bodies. It can be related to different things, and today I just wanted to talk about maybe some of the potential triggers that might come up for you, especially during Halloween or really any candy-centered holiday, because, as you know, these experiences are not typical, they're not things that are happening frequently, and so we can actually gain a lot of valuable data and information for ourselves when we are engaging with our children around these unique or special experiences. I also just want to normalize being triggered, as a parent, by our children. It happens all the time and being triggered itself is not inherently a bad thing, and I think it's important to distinguish that, because the goal is to not ever be triggered as we navigate our parenting journey. I think a better goal to look at and think about is how can we examine or recognize our triggers and start taking these steps to identify our triggers in order to uncover any roots of past emotional wounds that are affecting us or our relationship with our children, because if you can understand those triggering points, you will be better able to create a safe and nurturing environment for your child. And this is certainly the case in how we approach food, how we approach eating and mealtime experiences. So I'm focusing specifically on these aspects of parenting.

Speaker 1: 7:53

On this episode, however, I just want to acknowledge that feeding our kids doesn't happen in a vacuum, and many of the interactions that we're having with our children throughout the day can often be triggering for many different reasons. So, first, it can be helpful to just define what is a trigger? And really a trigger can be anything that you experience in a present moment that is activating feelings from the past. So you might find that a trigger may cause you to act in ways that, as a parent, you may not value or believe. And oftentimes a triggering situation may cause a reaction that feels disproportionate to the situation at hand. So, for example, if your child spills a glass of milk and you find yourself reacting in a certain way that feels disproportionate to that situation, like okay, we can, we can clean this up, no big deal. But you might find yourself raging or angry or you might find yourself again reacting in a way that doesn't align with what you believe or value as a parent. And more often than not that is because a trigger is activating an old wound from your childhood. And really triggers are more about us as parents and our difficulties in processing these past emotions, rather than your child's behavior or what your child is actually engaging in in those moments.

Speaker 1: 9:17

Trigger reactions can often bring up an emotional, psychological, physiological response in your body, where you find yourself responding automatically to the situation at hand. Sometimes it might feel like you don't have any control over what's happening and again it might feel out of proportion to the situation, and these are often related to experiences that are happening or have happened I'm sorry in our childhood or our upbringing or various experiences that we've had growing up, and essentially those things are coming back to the surface in a similar situation that's being acted out with our own child. I also want to recognize that we all have different triggers as parents and caregivers, and what might be triggering for me may not be triggering for you, and vice versa. However, one commonality or one common theme that I often see is feeling triggered by our children experiencing strong emotions. This is often a major trigger for many of us and typically this is related to us being raised in an environment or with caregivers who did not allow us to freely express our emotions in a safe space. Or if we did, if we showed fear or if we showed anger or sadness or frustration, it may have led to reactions that cause us to feel unsafe. So maybe we're punished for exhibiting certain emotions, or shamed or invalidated or ignored. These are experiences that can cause us to internalize the belief that our emotions are not safe or that what we're feeling is not okay, and sometimes that belief can carry through with us throughout our lives, especially if it's not something that we address proactively, and so this can absolutely be activated with our own kids when we see them exhibiting strong emotional states that we ourselves were never modeled how to navigate.

Speaker 1: 11:17

Another big trigger that I see often showing up in this space of feeding our children and engaging with them around food and mealtimes is feeling triggered because of their appetites or their body sizes, and often this is connected to experiences that we had growing up around our appetites or body sizes, where maybe you were shamed or bullied for how you ate or how much you ate, or the size of your body or how you moved through life, and rightly so. You may feel protective or even fearful that your child may experience the same things if you observe those parallel situations. This is something that I see especially true for children in larger bodies, where maybe, as a child, you experienced bullying around your body size or were shamed or belittled or made to feel inadequate because of the size of your body, and those things stay with us and as we grow up and start parenting our own children and seeing our children's bodies change or perhaps you have a child who's also in a larger body that can bring you right back to the past experiences that you had growing up and certainly bring up a lot of fear or distress as you watch your child go through or navigate similar situations that you experienced and I'm going on a slight tangent here and I feel like I could have a whole episode dedicated just to this topic alone. There's often this inherent belief that if we prevent our children in larger bodies from eating certain foods or get them to eat less or somehow get them to shrink their bodies or get into a body size that diet culture deems as more acceptable, that that will somehow keep them safe from the fat phobia and the harsh world that we live in. That is very cruel to people in larger bodies, and I just want to lovingly and gently point out that that is fallacy, because what that is teaching our children in larger bodies that they are only accepted or loved if they conform to certain standards. And what we want them to know is that they are loved and accepted wholeheartedly and unconditionally for who they are, that they don't have to change who they are in order to be accepted. And this is something that so many of us experience growing up with our caregivers, with our parents, who maybe put you on a diet at a certain age because they felt like your body was not okay, and we internalize those messages as kids. Or perhaps someone made a comment to you that man, if you just lost some weight, you would have such an easier time navigating the world.

Speaker 1: 14:01

And again, as children, we internalize this message that who we are is inherently wrong and that is connected to shame. And it becomes very hard to trust or appreciate or respect yourself or your body when you are constantly navigating life with this predominant narrative about yourself. And I see this surfacing a lot around candy centered holidays, where, especially for children in larger bodies, we may feel uncomfortable with them having access to sweets or higher volume of sweets, or feel like allowing them to eat a certain amount of candy is just not okay. And this is where I think it's really important to again examine what is coming up for us. What are the core beliefs that we may have and where do those stem from?

Speaker 1: 14:50

And a question that I often pose to mothers and families that I work with is would you feel differently about how or what your child was eating if they were in a different body size? And if the answer is yes, which I know that can be a really difficult question to reflect on. But if the answer is yes, that may be indicative of some inner work that can be done in order to support your child in a way that allows them to feel that they are unconditionally loved and accepted and trusted to eat, no matter the size of their body. And those are the things that we want our children to internalize, rather than these generational narratives of shame and guilt that, again, predominantly surface during special occasions or candy centered holidays. These are common themes that we see coming up and these are the things that I just want you to be aware of as you go into the holiday season with your children.

Speaker 1: 15:44

So staying on the lookout for your reactions, for triggers during these situations can bring a lot of insight and awareness into what is coming up for you. Where's that stemming from? And it can be a really powerful exercise for us, as parents and caregivers, to do that inner work, to show up for our children in a more powerful, positive and meaningful way and to align with the things that we value and desire for our children. And as you're thinking about this, something to reflect on is what is happening for me when I'm feeling triggered. Maybe you're aware of certain feelings or emotional states that tend to surface or come up for you, such as anger that is a big one frustration. Maybe you find yourself anxious and you find your body physiologically responding to that anxiety. Maybe you find your heart racing, you find yourself pacing or engaging in certain behaviors, that or displaying that anxiety that's sitting there in your body. These are things to be aware of, because when we can have that awareness of what is coming up for us, it opens up a window for us to do more work ourselves. The goal is not to change our child's behavior per se, but more to understand what's coming up for us. How are we reacting and how are our reactions potentially being projected onto our children. And this is where I go back to understanding that as parents, you can do and say all the right things and do and say all the right frameworks and execute all these different strategies, but remembering that our children are very attuned to our emotional state, so they're going to pick up on that anxiety or that anger. They may be aware of how we're reacting to them in certain situations in which we are being triggered. So having that awareness ourselves can be so helpful.

Speaker 1: 17:32

I often say that it's like when your check engine light comes on on your car dashboard. I know for me, when it comes to cars, I'm so literate and I wish I knew more about them, but I do know that when that check engine light comes on, that there's something going on in the car that needs some attention, and for me that's really helpful, like, okay, what can I do to help my car in this situation or to prevent a larger problem from forming right? And there's a lot of parallels there with triggers. I think triggers can be our check engine light for ourselves in parenting, where we recognize something's coming up and this is important. This is something that needs attention and a little more TLC in order to show up for my child in a way that again aligns with what I value as a caregiver, that's raising a human in this world. So I know I've been speaking more broadly about triggers. However, I do want to just share up some potential experiences around Halloween or again any canary-centered holiday that may come up for you or that can bring up triggers for you, and I'm just gonna share a few.

Speaker 1: 18:44

This list is by no means exhaustive. I know there's plenty of different situations out there that can be triggering and I won't be able to cover them all by any means. And again, what might be triggering for you may not be triggering for me and vice versa. So it's definitely a very individual situation. However, these are just some common things that I've observed anecdotally and also my own experience as a mother raising five kids who is in eating disorder recovery. So one big thing that I see often around Halloween is feeling triggered by watching your child eat candy, specifically a larger quantity of candy, and sometimes it can be the pace at which your child is eating, where they're just quickly getting through as much candy as they can. There's trash all over the floor. I mean there's definitely a lot of different things happening that can be triggering, but one thing, for example, is having past experiences come up for you that are parallel to the situation that you may see your child in.

Speaker 1: 19:42

So I know for me as a kid growing up that sweets were often prohibited or tightly controlled and regulated and there was never really a situation where we were allowed to have a large volume of sweets, and I know my parents did the absolute best they could with the information and knowledge that they had at the time, and this is by no means about blaming. However, I do know that I never really had an opportunity to learn how to self-regulate a higher quantity of sweets, and whenever sweets were accessible it always felt chaotic. It was like a feast or famine. I have to get as much as I can because I don't know the next time I'm going to have sweets. And it did become a large part or piece of my eating disorder in my late teens and early 20s, and so there's a lot of things all those past experiences for me that I know can resurface when I see similar situations happening with my kids, and so seeing my kids eat large quantity of sweets uninhibited can feel distressing and uncomfortable, and it certainly has.

Speaker 1: 20:48

I have come a long way through my own healing work around this and through addressing those different pieces of my food story, but certainly in my early parenting years that was something that was really hard for me to navigate and something that made me feel anxious watching my kids eat that high volume of sweets. And as I piece that apart, I began to realize and learn that as a child, a common message that I had internalized was that I couldn't be trusted to eat sweets. That is something that shaped my narrative as a child, and that was something that I was starting to project on my own kids, and that is not something that was aligned with how I wanted to parent, especially around food and their bodies. I wanted them to feel like they could trust themselves. However, there was that connection to my past experiences, the narrative that I was still holding and bringing into, how I parented and approached food with them. All that to say, those past experiences greatly influenced how I felt in parallel situations with my children and why I felt triggered in those situations.

Speaker 1: 21:54

And that is a common one that I see for a lot of other parents and caregivers too that watching your child eat high volumes of candy can bring up a lot for you emotionally, especially if this is not something that you were permitted to do as a kid, or maybe you were punished for doing that as a child. So if you were ever meant to feel like you were wrong or you were doing something wrong for enjoying a high volume of sweets, it can feel very triggering to watch your child do the same thing and not have similar thoughts or those past emotions come up for you. So just something to be aware of and just as a reflective assignment for you per se is maybe just examining what were some of your past experiences around Halloween or other candy-centered holidays that influence maybe how you're coming into these experiences with your children. Were you ever punished or ridiculed or shamed for certain things that you engaged in around the holidays? If so, that is something to just be aware of, as those feelings and emotions around that can certainly resurface as you watch your child experience the holidays too.

Speaker 1: 23:02

There can also be things about ourselves that we see or observe in our children that we have not yet accepted within ourselves. So, as an example, if you find yourself as someone that has a love for food and you enjoy food and you have a great appetite, you love eating. You love eating a variety of different things, but maybe you have come to loathe this part of yourself for various reasons. Maybe you were shamed for that, maybe you were bullied or put down for loving food or wanting to eat, and so you learn to dislike or separate yourself from that part of yourself. And when we see similar behaviors in our kids that are reflective of those parts of ourselves that we have not yet accepted, that can also feel very triggering as well, while our past experiences can be a big contributing factor to how we're reacting when we're triggered.

Speaker 1: 23:55

There are other things at play as well, and I want to make sure to briefly touch on these, and the first is sensory overload or overstimulation. Especially as a parent or caregiver, this is something that we are frequently encountering, with all the different sensory input that we're getting throughout the day being touched all the noise, all the auditory input that we're receiving. There's a lot happening, and especially around holidays like Halloween, where the energy is just more intense, there's a lot happening, a lot more things that need to be done. It can be really difficult to manage this as a parent or caregiver, and this can also be a contributor for reactions that may feel disproportionate to the situation at hand. But especially around Halloween, where there's a lot going on, there might be a lot more noise running around, excitement, there may be all good things happening, but if it's overloading to your sensory system or more information that your brain can process, that can also trigger various reactions in you as well, especially if we're already stressed navigating our days with our kids Over stimulation can be what just drives us over the edge and puts us into that fight or flight mode where we're now engaging with our kids from our stress responses.

Speaker 1: 25:17

So this is something that is also happening and another huge topic that I hope to explore more, because this is very pertinent to parenting. It comes up all the time and I definitely don't think we talk about it enough. But sensory overload or overstimulation can also be very triggering as a parent, and just something to be aware of. If you notice yourself being more prone to overstimulation, where can you find some pockets of relief or what can you do to help yourself mitigate some of that sensory input that's coming in, in order to prevent yourself from being pushed into a dysregulated state? Because once we're in that dysregulated state, it becomes very challenging to connect with our kids in a positive way.

Speaker 1: 26:03

One last point I wanted to touch on briefly here as well is just having unmet needs as a parent, especially as moms. This is something that I see all the time and I know it can be so challenging, but oftentimes, as mothers, it's very easy to push our needs, even basic needs, to the back burner, especially around holidays. I find that as parents, we over exert ourselves or are working beyond the capacity that we may have, and this can make it very challenging to stay present and engage with our kids in a positive way when we're already burnt out. This can also certainly be connected to early childhood trauma as well, where you may have grown up believing that your needs didn't matter, or you were forced to push your needs to the back burner in order to essentially care for your parents or care for younger siblings. This is something that's also connected to how we feel about tending to ourselves and our own individual needs, and if we have an internalized belief that our needs don't matter, it's going to be really difficult to learn how to care for ourselves in an effective way.

Speaker 1: 27:13

This can definitely surface during holidays, too, where you're going the extra mile to make it special for your kids and create memorable experiences and doing all the things, and if, throughout that process, you are feeling unseen or unappreciated or that you don't matter, that can feel very triggering and that can be bubbling beneath the surface as you're moving through these experiences with your family. So this is something to consider as well, and I know that's a huge topic in itself, perhaps for another podcast episode, but I just want you to see the different things that are happening, especially around the holiday season, especially around holidays like Halloween, many different things that sometimes come together to create this perfect storm and you might find yourself reacting to your child in a way that you don't want to be reacting. And I just want to encourage you to go gently with yourself and, as you're having more awareness around some of your triggers, just consider reflecting, and sometimes it can help to keep a little note, a little running note maybe in your phone, about things that you're aware of. When you notice yourself reacting, when you notice a certain situation coming up, when we can materialize that and kind of get it out of our head, it allows us to examine it more objectively and to understand or just at least get curious about what's coming up for us. And this is where I also just want to encourage you to be compassionate with yourself, that we are doing the best that we can as parents, and just the fact that you're tuning into this and you're wanting to learn about this shows how much you care for your children, the children in your life, and that's a huge thing. So please go gently with yourself, be compassionate with yourself, because we can't get curious about what's coming up for us or learn how to address it if we're coming at it from a place of shame. It can also be helpful for you to start to learn or identify what are your triggers as you learn these things. It can help you just create almost like a mental map or connect the dots to things that you may not have known about yourself previously, and this is why I'm a huge fan of writing it down or putting it out in some shape or form. This can also help you preventatively.

Speaker 1: 29:25

So when you know okay, I reacted like this in this situation or there's a pattern with how you react in certain situations, that can help you examine what's happening and how can I help support myself in future situations when similar experiences are happening. So like with the over stimulation factor, if you know that auditory stimulation is what's driving you over the edge, there are things that you can do to help yourself. In those situations where there may be auditory overstimulation happening or knowing that when you're tired or running on lack of sleep or haven't eaten a decent meal during the day, that that is going to leave you with less capacity for your child's big emotions during that day. This can help you better care for yourself and understand how or why you're showing up for your child in certain situations. This can also be helpful, just being able to ask for support if you have that in your life.

Speaker 1: 30:25

So if you find yourself being very reactive to your child's appetite or how they're eating or, let's say, during Halloween, when they're eating their candy, and you just aren't able to manage the anxiety that's coming up for you, this is where it can be helpful to bring in other people that are safe for your children, that may not have the same reaction that you are having, and this doesn't mean that you're failing as a parent or that you're doing something wrong. It shows so much strength and courage to be able to recognize I can't really support my child in the way they need me to in this situation. However, there are maybe other loving people in your life or in your family who do have the capacity to do that, and that's where having those awareness of our triggers can allow us to support our children and support ourselves in meaningful ways. Ultimately, I just want to encourage you to come back to this piece of connection and understanding that making this effort to connect with our children can be so helpful and take us so far, especially as we're working through our own inner work as parents and exploring the different triggers or reactions that are coming up for us. Don't forget that connecting with your child is one of the most powerful things that you can do and one of the most meaningful ways to communicate your acceptance, your love and your trust in them.

Speaker 1: 31:46

And if you find yourself in a situation where you've reacted in ways that you didn't want to, or perhaps something has come up and now you're feeling guilty about yelling at your child or scolding them or possibly causing them to feel bad about themselves for something that they did, this is where I just want to encourage you to remember that there's so much power in repair, in making the effort to repair any situation with our child and to be able to apologize to our children Again. These are things that many of us did not experience from our caregivers growing up, and to be able to model that to our children can speak volumes. And there's so much power in being able to say I'm sorry, I did this and this is not how I wanted to react. This is not how I want to make you feel, will you please forgive me? Huge, huge, huge, huge for our kids to be able to hear that from us, and I think it's important to remember that, because all of this work is not about getting it right all the time. That's just not feasible, that's just not realistic and you don't want to put that burden on your shoulders. Remind yourself that you're human and you're not going to get it right. You're going to make mistakes at times and that's okay. We want our children to see that it's okay to be human. It's not about achieving this unrealistic standard of perfectionism that does not belong in parenting whatsoever, but to allow your child to see that I make mistakes, I can apologize and I can make the effort to repair my relationship with my child, because I love them and I want them to feel and know and trust that that love will always be there. That is always something that you can fall back to.

Speaker 1: 33:19

So, wow, I know we went quite around the gamut here in this episode, but I hope you were able to take away some things that are helpful for you on your parenting journey, especially as you're working on shifting away from cycles of food guilt and body shame and working so hard to raise an intuitive eater. You are doing amazing things, my friend. I couldn't be more proud of you and I am just wishing you and your family a most memorable Halloween experience. I'd love to hear from you and just hear how things went. How did the whole candy experience go?

Speaker 1: 33:52

You can always send me an email over at hello at crystalcargiscom, or feel free to reply to any of the emails that come your way. If you're on my newsletter, I'd love to just get an update and hear how things are going. I'm sending you so much love from one mama to another and I cannot wait to connect with you again next week. 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 crystalcargis. Until next week, mama, I'll be cheering you on. Bye for now.