I talked about this on Instagram recently and it seemed to resonate with a lot of you…
The vast majority of the people writing/studying/advocating about how to feed kids are operating from the premise that 1) kids don’t eat enough vegetables and we need to fix that, and 2) that we have to achieve No. 1 because it will ensure our kids stay thin.
This is what is underlying the new story on baby food in The New Yorker; it’s the message I hear over and over from folks running school gardens and trying to get chocolate milk out of cafeterias; it’s what I see all over Instagram from mom bloggers and kid food accounts showcasing their rainbow bento box lunches.
I do not operate from this premise.
Thin kids eating purple cauliflower is not my goal. I want my kids to enjoy exploring all kinds of food on their own terms. I want them to feel safe and strong in their bodies, no matter their size. I don’t want them thinking about food as a means to a goal weight both because we know this rarely works and because it sucks all the joy out of family meals.
I see Division of Responsibility and other #ResponsiveFeeding tools as a first step in this process. We lay a foundation of body trust and body autonomy with these methods, knowing that our kids inevitably will slam into diet culture and predatory food marketing and all the other confusion about eating that swirls around our world.
But this way, they’ll know something else first.
