Nurture: How to Raise Kids Who Love Food, Their Bodies and Themselves
From Guest Contributor, Heidi Schauster, MS, RD, CEDS-S, SEP
We are grateful to author Heidi Schauster for allowing us to share the introduction to her book, “Nurture: How to Raise Kids Who Love Food, Their Bodies and Themselves” with you on the Reclaiming Beauty blog. Enjoy her words of wisdom and if you resonate, we highly recommend her books.
Prevention and Compassion for Parents
I believe that most of us have the capacity to have an easeful, nourishing relationship with food, body, and self. That said, getting there in this culture, with its confusing messages about eating and bodies, is not a smooth road for many. Over the last nearly thirty years in practice as a nutrition and body-image therapist, I have witnessed countless teens and adults who feel confused about food, hateful toward their bodies, and unclear about themselves.
Then, many transform before my eyes, after doing the hard work of finding ways to practice coming back to themselves. While disordered eating and body dissatisfaction halt growth — physical and psychological — the recovery from these challenges often brings out the most authentic and strongest parts of the people who embark on the healing work. My aim is to share what I have learned in this collaborative work toward peaceful eating and true embodiment in order to support you, your families, and the young people in your care.
This book is not just for families that have been plagued by eating disorders or challenges around body shame and dissatisfaction. It’s also for those who want to keep these from occurring in the young people they care about. I have some clear ideas about how we can change the discussion around food and bodies in our families and broader communities for the better.
Still, this book alone will not prevent the children you love from developing unhealthy relationships with food or their bodies. It may not prevent them from developing eating disorders, the deadliest of all psychiatric disorders. Many forces in our world encourage disordered eating and problems relating to the self and body. While not all disordered or dysregulated eating patterns are life-threatening, most are life-altering and life-robbing. The effects of starvation, yo-yo dieting, and binge eating can be significant.
Sharing Wisdom in Supporting Your Teen with their Relationship with Food and their Body
I wish I had a foolproof recipe for preventing these devastating states of mind and body in children and teens—and eventually in grown-ups. Problematic eating and body image in young people often last far into adulthood when left untreated. After nearly three decades treating kids, teens, adults, and families—and as a parent myself, raising two now-young-adult daughters—I have some thoughts about creating an atmosphere where kids grow up to love food, their bodies, and themselves. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I’d like to share what I’ve learned.
I'm doing this because I hear over and over from parents that they want help in this area. There are so many conflicting ideas and messages bouncing around about how to eat, feed, and raise children well. I sincerely hope this book helps you take a curious look at your family and the broader culture’s attitudes around food, bodies, health, and wellness. I aim to assist you in making choices that support your children’s views of themselves as whole people and help them develop vital minds and bodies. You might combine this book with other resources in your community. It should not be used as a substitute for nutritional or psychological treatment (for you or a child in your care). But it might be a great place to start.
As parents, we have about twenty years or so of influence. Depending on our circumstances, we may have more or less. It’s a small part of most lives. Still, it’s a critical time for developing habits, values, and orientation to others and the broader world. I hope to help you sift through the confusing information available about food and health, while remembering the most important parts of caring for and feeding children. I hope this book will read like a conversation with a compassionate, knowing fellow parent who happens to have done a ton of field research on this topic. As parents, we feed our kids until they become adults who essentially make all their own choices about care and feeding. Where, oh where, is the care and feeding manual? This book is my attempt to provide one.
I have strong biases, and I’ll share them. I initially worked at a large children’s hospital in Boston and have been in private practice for the last couple of decades. I have seen hundreds of teens, families, and adults struggle with the consequences of disordered eating and shaky relationships with their bodies. As I mentioned earlier, the healing process often produces excellent insight and personal growth. We have to have a relationship with food; we can’t just abstain from eating while we find other ways to cope with life. I have learned much about what it means to fully recover from disordered eating from my clients.
I also have lived experience, as a recovered person who had an eating disorder in my teens and into my early twenties. Now, in my fifties, I have distance from that eating disorder. I’m grateful for this perspective and all I’ve learned as a human being and a clinician. I don’t use food (restriction or binge eating) to deal with life’s challenges. However, I still have challenges, like any human. I still have the same nervous system I was born with, but now, I manage it differently.
I own my privilege as a white, middle-class, heterosexual, cisgender, small-bodied woman. I do not have lived experience navigating this culture in a large body, nor do I have intimate experience of the oppression of weight stigma many of my clients tell me about. I don’t know what it feels like to not fit into restaurant seats, to not be able to find clothes that fit in a store, or to be discriminated against because of my body size, skin color, economic status, sexuality, or gender expression. I hear about this discrimination all the time, particularly stories of weight stigma, but my feelings after hearing these stories are nothing compared to what my clients in larger and more marginalized bodies experience on a regular basis.
In 2018, I published a book entitled Nourish: How to Heal Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Self, written for adults (or older teens). This book received three independent book awards, but the stories of countless readers are what touch me more deeply. I am grateful to those who took the time to reach out and tell me how the book has changed their lives. Many said they wish they’d had more information about developing a balanced relationship with food and body at a younger age. Many asked that I write a version of Nourish for parents to guide them around talking with their children about food, nutrition, dieting, health, and bodies.
Parents Are Not to Blame, And Can Keep Learning How to Support Recovery
While families are not to blame for eating disorders, we know there is a genetic component and that eating disorders and disordered eating patterns run in families. Well-meaning loved ones can say things that trigger feelings of shame, encouraging body discomfort and dysregulated eating. They can also model confusing food patterns and health practices to children. The family also often plays a significant part in successfully healing an eating disorder. I’m grateful to my own family for their assistance in my recovery journey long ago.
Many families I’ve worked with experience shame that keeps them from getting the help and support they deserve. I designed this book to assist families in the challenging work of supporting their children and teens. Parents can use these influential years to steer their children toward body acceptance, balance, and habits that support connection and care of the body. That said, there are a myriad of forces pushing our children and teens in the opposite direction. Struggles with eating in young people are often a very real expression of pain, insecurity, and anxiety.
I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s—without the internet—and developed an eating disorder. I see the pressures on young people today around image when cameras are in everyone’s pockets. The way to say hello to each other is to “snap” a photo of oneself. Visual impressions mean even more in today’s world. That alone is a lot to navigate when developing your sense of self as a young adult. It’s tough to have a body in this world, particularly one that does not conform to the ideal standard. And it’s also tough to have a body that is so “on display” and vulnerable to different kinds of trauma.
So how do we attempt to raise embodied, balanced children who become embodied, balanced adults who are comfortable in their skin and have plenty of energy for truly meaningful life pursuits? I don’t have all the answers, but I hope you will feel supported and curious about my thoughts. I hope you will bring your questions to fellow parents and discuss these issues in your communities. We change our culture and the forces around our children by staying conscious and taking our role as parents seriously—not in a helicopter way, but in a way that supports and values our children as individuals and as parts of a greater collective.
I feel so much compassion for all parents trying to navigate the world today. I aim to reflect that compassion and solidarity in my words in this book. Please let me know how I’m doing on this. The last thing I want to be is a know-it-all kind of parent. Life is too short for us parents not to acknowledge both our victories and struggles as we seek to find the best way to love and care for our kids.
My twin daughters, Ava and Kyla, are now dancing through their young adulthood. I’ve done my best in parenting them thus far, and I’ve definitely made mistakes along the way. I’ve stumbled through parenting like any other. I’ve learned that the stumbling is actually part of it all. I start most chapters of this book with my daughters’ wisdom in quotations (with permission), because we’ve had many talks about food, bodies, and growing up in this culture. I think their insights are wise, located near that time of life when the sense of self develops. They have had their bodies change, felt shame, and had them on display by social media much more recently than I have. I hope you find their wisdom as inspiring as I did (I’m biased) and appreciate the vulnerability they displayed in sharing their words.
I’m sure it wasn’t easy to grow up with a mom constantly asking them to listen to their bodies or pointing out subtle forms of fatphobia and body oppression everywhere. I’m confident that, even if I did overdo it at times, they got some armor against developing a complicated relationship with food. Because of my own eating-disorder history, I have had a particular interest in doing whatever I can to prevent disordered eating in my daughters, knowing full well that many factors that I have no control over encourage disordered eating and negative body image. Some of those factors are genetics, our diet- and weight-obsessed culture, mental-health challenges, traumatic events, social-media influence, and peer influence, among others.
In addition, I have told many stories throughout this book about the struggles and victories of my clients. I’ve changed the names and identifying information to protect their privacy. I also use the pronoun “she” a fair amount and sprinkle in a “he” and “they” here and there to mirror the demographics of my practice. I am aware that gender is not a binary construct, and my aim is not to exclude you if you do not see pronouns that you use to identify yourself. I often use “she” and “he” for ease of reading, and I apologize in advance for any challenge that my choice of wording brings up for you. Challenges with food, body, and self know no boundaries and affect all of us.
I don’t mean the following ten chapters or steps to be linear, just like the ten steps in my first book Nourish. I’ve put the steps in a particular order because it’s a progression that made sense to me and which seems to play out in my work with families and clients. They are meant to be fluid, liquid steps—not fixed or rigid. They are concepts that kept coming up in my work with families and my journey as a parent.
How Your Relationship with Food and Body Can Look
I hope these steps will help guide you on your parenting journey and encourage balance and whole-self wellness in your family. I desire that all people, young and old, learn to identify their deepest needs, wants, and hungers and to feed themselves in such a way that they feel nurtured, loved, freed up, and ready to take on the world. Your family does not have to spend so much time agonizing about what to eat or not to eat.
Again, this book is not a substitute for the incredible healing power of therapeutic relationships and professional help. Eating disorders in your children require a team approach: psychotherapy, nutrition therapy, medical monitoring, etc. I encourage you to share concerns with trusted care providers and bring this reading into any personal health and wellness work you are already doing. Even subclinical challenges with food and body image resolve more readily with the support of professionals trained to work with disordered eating.
Lastly, please read this book with a grain of sea salt. As with any advice from a health professional—or other assorted wisdom-imparting human beings—I invite you to take the information and recommendations that resonate for you as a parent and leave the rest. You are in charge of your own journey and your journey as a parent. If the chapters bring up concerns about your relationship with food and body, consider checking out my first book, Nourish, to assist you in your healing, or seek professional help. Your own personal work may be an essential strategy for raising children who eat and regard themselves well. That said, no one knows more about what you need than you do. Trust your wisdom and intuition as an individual and as a parent. I hope this book helps you get in touch with how to nourish yourself and your family on many levels.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR
Heidi Schauster, MS, RD, CEDS-S, SEP is a nutrition and body image therapist, Somatic Experiencing (SE)TM practitioner, clinical supervisor, and Embodiment Warrior who writes about whole-self wellness. She has practiced in the Boston area for nearly 30 years and is author of the award-winning book Nourish: How to Heal Your Relationship with Food, Body and Self and new book Nurture: How to Raise Kids Who Love Food, Their Bodies, and Themselves. Heidi is a lifelong dancer, a plant lady, and the proud mama of two outrageous young women. Join the Nourishing Words mailing list on her website or Substack, or follow her on Instagram @nourishingwords.
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