Last week, I posed the question of
It certainly got some of this community thinking because I received a number of emails about it.
This week I want to give you something new to ponder.
Each week I do a live radio interview on ABC Radio Broken Hill. Our topic this week was building a positive relationship with food. Greta the host asked me why food is one of the biggest stressors for parents.
From almost a decade of doing this work, I shared the 3 most common reasons I believe food is a stressor for parents.
1. The fear of harming our kids.
This is often associated with our own relationship with food from when we were growing up. From when we were a teen and then into our twenties and. We carry all the baggage that we've collected around food ourselves. We often project that onto our kids without even realising it.
We have our own kind of stories around food. We then bring that to life with our kids, because what we don't want them to experience what we did. In the effort of 'saving them', we end up kind of making the relationship with food really weird. It becomes more difficult than it needs to be.
A real life example of this is a mum who grew up in a house where her mum was very strict with food. They only ever ate wholefoods. Growing up, she felt like she was missing out. When she was responsible for herself in her 20's she went crazy eating all the food she was never allowed to have. She admits she at too much of these foods, for too many years. Now in her late 30's, as a mum herself, she is trying to undo the damage to her health..
Now with her own kids, she is carrying the baggage of ill health. In her efforts to protect her kids, she has become just like her mum. Very strict around food. What do you think her kids are doing? They are fighting her every step of the way around food.
After some coaching from me, she discovered this. Together, we worked on how she could let go of this baggage and reframe her thoughts around food and her children's health.
If you see yourself in this, I do have a small number of one on one coaching spots still available in September. Grab a one on one coaching spot now.
2. Doing 'food' at the busiest times of the day.
Just think about this. In the morning when you're trying to get breakfast and pack the lunchboxes, it's also at the same time that you're trying to get the kids ready for school and probably trying to get ourselves ready for work too.
There's just this extra stress, because you're trying to prepare food at the same time as doing everything else.
Now think about the end of the afternoon. You've all had a busy day at work. The kids have had a busy day at school and everybody's tired. So again you find yourself making food at a stressful time of the day.
You can reduce some of this stress by setting yourself up for success. On the weekend, draw up a quick menu plan / road map of the meals for the week. Do some basic preparations for the lunchbox. These all give you a head start for the week ahead.
The other thing you can do when you're preparing food is to give yourself a bit of an energy reset. Stand at the kitchen bench and shake your hands vigorously to move the energy around your body. This is a real quick way to relive stress.
3. We make food a job on the to-do list.
Food! It's another thing on your super full to do. It's a chore. A nuisance.
If we change our mindset about food and make it about family connection, we can change this.
Imagine dinner time was all about bonding. You know, talking about how your day was.
We do this at our dinner table every night. We all go around and say the three things that we're grateful for today and what are we proud of ourselves for.
The conversation is never ever about food.
Sometimes we talk about the fact that my daughter and I going to see Harry styles in concert in 2023 and that someone has said that he's wearing a toupee.
Sometimes the kids share if they've had a bad day at school and been teased.
It's actually a safe place for the kids to come.
When you're mindset about food goes from one of it being a job on the to-do list to about great connection, it doesn't feel heavy anymore.
It's a beautiful way to think about food being a gift that brings you together.
Let me know if you resonated with any of these reasons. What could you do differently this week?