What does your food legacy look like?

Maybe you have your dad’s eyes… maybe you have your maternal grandma’s amazing way with words… I know there are lots of my traits I can trace back to my parents and even my grandparents. But it’s not just our genetic inheritance that is bestowed upon us, wanted or unwanted, it’s also the environment we grew up in and how we were parented.

These things shape us, for better or worse. Whether we reject certain aspects of how we were raised and make a decision to do things differently when it comes to our kids, or whether we (consciously or unconsciously) emulate how we were brought up, our childhood has a huge impact on who we are as parents.

This is extremely important in relation to food and feeding, especially if your child finds eating hard. Having genuine insight into how YOU feel about your child’s eating (and how their history, your history and your relationship with food play into this) is an essential part of helping them move forward. It is so important, I dedicate an entire module of my online course to it!

I call the sum of the influences on how we relate to food (and on how we parent in relation to food) our food legacy. These influences can be cultural, religious, economic, medical…you name it. Food is such an integral part of life, how we feel about it is coloured by many, many different factors.

 

The food legacy in action

 

The following stories illustrate how our food legacy can influence how we feed our children. To protect anonymity, they are amalgams of real people and real stories, and are not based on specific individuals.

 

Casey

Casey grew up in Chicago in an area where poverty levels were very high. Her teenage single mother did an awesome job and was very loving, but they lived with extreme deprivation and relied on food stamps to get by. As an adult, Casey has a good job and appreciates the financial security she is able to give her family.

When Casey’s little boy says he’s hungry, she can’t help but give him food. She pretty much lets him graze continually when he is at home with her, because she knows what true hunger is like and never wants him to experience that. Painful feelings about her past make it hard for Casey to distinguish between positive, natural hunger which is just part of the rhythm of the day, and dysfunctional hunger born of deprivation.

When Casey’s son asks her for a cookie at bedtime, she gives it to him because the memory of going to bed hungry is so much more powerful than her rational thoughts and beliefs about nutrition.

 

Lara

Lara’s mother was very preoccupied with her weight and was constantly on diets. She frequently talked about her body in a negative way, often asking for Lara’s opinion on whether she looked slim. There was much talk of being ‘naughty’ or ‘good’ in relation to food. When Lara was a young teenager, she struggled with the natural changes happening in her body and thought she was ‘fat’.

She fell into a cycle of binge eating when she was feeling low, then going through a few weeks of obsessively counting calories and skipping meals. When she ‘failed at the diet’, as she saw it, she would be overwhelmed with guilt and shame and would eat to cope with these emotions. As an adult, she has freed herself from this destructive cycle but still struggles with negative thoughts about her body.

Lara’s mother restricted how much food Lara ate when she was little, often saying, “we don’t want you to get fat!”. As a mother, Lara doesn’t say things like that to her young daughter but she does unconsciously restrict her eating. She often tells her she’s ‘had enough’ and doesn’t allow the kinds of foods she used to binge on, like ice cream, into the house. This is her way of trying to protect her daughter from the patterns of emotional eating she herself experienced as a teen.

Lara’s daughter – now six –  is very preoccupied with sweet foods, eating them uncontrollably at parties, for example. Lara panics in response to this, as all of those negative emotions from her own childhood come flooding back. Lara feels that her daughter is fixated on food, especially foods Lara considers ‘unhealthy’. This is a huge source of concern for her.

 

Your Food Legacy

 

There are as many different  manifestations of food legacy as there are variations in who we are and how we were raised. For some people, thinking about their food legacy is painful and difficult. If this is true for you, consider processing it with the support of a therapist.

For others, chatting about their food legacy with a friend or partner or just reflecting on it alone, can pay huge dividends. It will really help you understand what may drive some of your responses to your child’s eating.

 

Here are five questions to ask yourself as a jumping off point:

 

1. How would you describe your relationship with food?
2. What is your happiest food-related memory from childhood?
3. What is your worst food-related memory from childhood?
4. What key beliefs about food did your parents have?
5. Do you want to raise your child (in relation to food) in the same way as you were raised, or differently? If differently, what are those differences?

You cannot change your past – if you’re lucky, you wouldn’t want to change it. We can change how we let it affect us though, and we can choose to change how we parent. What we can’t do, is alter behaviour which is influenced by our childhood, without spending time and energy honestly acknowledging and reflecting on how our past has shaped us.