How to Reduce Mealtime Tension

0:00The following podcast is a Dear Media production.

0:10Aliza Pressman:Welcome to Raising Good Humans. I'm Dr. Aliza Pressman. And today I'm just here with you alone. We're talking about body image and mealtime and making mealtime as unfraught as possible and ideally joyful. Eating is meant to be a source of connection and joy, but it can also be a source of memories from really bad experiences, body image challenges, and ways of feeling or being judged. So that's what we're going over today. So what I want to talk about first is that there's a fundamental of being a human when it comes to, you know, functioning. You need to eat. You need to sleep. You need to move.

0:59Aliza Pressman:Those fundamentals are kind of non-negotiable. And we don't talk about them that much with this podcast because apart from how to get kids and ourselves to do those things, this is typically just an expected part of the deal. But what I want to talk about isn't the, you know, what anybody's eating or how anybody's eating. I want to talk about that even though it's a basic human need, it is one of those things that ends up being super fraught. So the first thing that I want us to do is start from a place of balance. If you notice yourself getting into power struggles with your kids around food, just take the opportunity to get yourself grounded enough in what really matters so that it doesn't become a battleground.

1:54Aliza Pressman:Because you cannot control what goes into someone's mouth. But when you try to, it really, as we all know, particularly mothers, it's fraught. It's inevitably fraud. So I have this strategy in my book that uses the acronym BALANCE, and I'm going to translate it here so that we can use it for this topic. So here are the steps of balance. Breathe is the first step. You cannot skip this step. Inhale deeply through your nose. Exhale through your mouth. If you skip this step because it seems minor, you're missing so much because this is how we get ourself into a place where we can actually make choices.

2:47Aliza Pressman:Are you noticing when you breathe that you can feel where your body is, that you have access to what's going on for you? Then acknowledge. That's where the A is. Acknowledge your own baggage. So ask yourself, what does mealtime bring up for me? What was mealtime like when I was growing up? What did I feel about my body? How was food and my body connected? Did anybody make comments to me? Did one of my caregivers make comments about what I was eating, how much I was eating, how little I was eating? How did it feel? And just ask yourself, how do you feel about your body right now? Does that impact your enjoyment of mealtime?

3:32Aliza Pressman:Do you think about your children's bodies and wonder if that meal that they're having is having an impact on their body and how they feel about their body? So you're going to ask yourself those questions and you're going to answer some of them. You're not going to be able to answer all of them, but you're going to recognize it's not unfraught having a family meal. There's stuff and I need to let that go. That's the L, let it go. You can unpack the baggage later on your own timeline, but you want to try and let go of the past so that you can be present for your kids. If you've made the decision, which I hope you will, to have mealtime be a source of joy and connection and not fraught, then you want to put the past and the future on the side and just be present in the moment so you can just ground yourself in this experience.

4:31Aliza Pressman:Recognize that if you have young children, they need to grow autonomous and understand if they're full or hungry or what's going on for them, how to feed themselves, and that those actually really matter and make the experience better. When you fixate on how many bites they have, you've already lost a little bit. Now, don't be hard on yourself because that's very natural. We're parents. We want to make sure our children are nourished. But let's not fixate on those details. Let's think of the mealtime as a source of joy and connection. And the minute that you get into a power struggle, you're kind of losing that.

5:08Aliza Pressman:If you have older kids, it can be so tempting to want to control, to want to comment. It can be tempting to also be so afraid of controlling and commenting that you're not enjoying yourself. Try to just be there. Assess. So the A in this part of the word balance is for assess. take stock of this moment. Gage your own and your child's state of mind. Are they hungry? Are they asserting autonomy? Do they have a physical need that needs to be addressed? Or are you addressing things for them because you're projecting? Make an assessment of what they need. Do they want to share a laugh over a yummy bite?

5:53Aliza Pressman:Just notice. That's the N. Notice. Observe what's going on in your own body, what's going on in your child's body. What are you guys going through? What do you need? And then connect. Let your child know verbally or just with your body language that you see them, that you care about their feelings, that this is just a time for a joy and connection, and it is not a time to fixate on any of the other details of the mealtime. And then engage. So now you're in balance. This, when you get used to it, takes all of one minute, but it helps you start the meal, or maybe you have to do this kind of in the middle of a meal if it starts to get fraught.

6:40Aliza Pressman:and it allows you to choose your response. If your kids are picking up their phone during the meal or if your kids are ignoring you or if they're playing with their food or if they're throwing their food or if they're rolling their eyes, then you can be in a place where it's not fraught. You're not thinking about how much time you spent cooking or, oh my God, if I don't make sure that they eat healthy food, they're gonna grow up into really unhealthy person or any of that stuff. So you're in balance and now you have an opportunity to make a decision about whatever rules you have for your mealtime and then letting the rest go.

7:20Aliza Pressman:This is the place you want to be, the balanced place you want to be when you have a meal with your kids to alleviate all of the nonsense and just focus. And now for a quick break. I am very much into hydrating because I am perpetually dehydrated. It's my fault, but there is a very intriguing deep hydration protocol from Peak that I want to tell you about. So Peak's deep hydration protocol is a day to night combo. It's a powerful two-part system that hydrates, energizes, and guarantees deep restoration. So you can ditch the quick fixes and figure out a routine that actually delivers. So Peak is where spirit meets science.

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12:22Aliza Pressman:First of all, mealtime should be diverse nutrition without the drama. Are any of these voices in your brain? That mother doesn't feed her children enough. That's a lot of carbs. Have some more, but not too much. You don't want to get too big. Many of us have generational baggage around eating. We have generational baggage around scarcity. We have generational baggage around body image. It is completely understandable that we sometimes bring a lot of extra stress to the table. Okay, I'm going to give you an example in one of my groups where one of the moms, let's call her Juliet, wants to make sure her kids eat full meals.

13:00Aliza Pressman:So she ends up making four different menus. She has a menu for the adults, and then she has a menu for each one of her kids. And then each one gets to eat one of those meals all watching TV from her bed because she's so tired and frazzled she gives up. And then let's call this other mom in my mom group Ella. So she follows all the guidelines she got from her pediatrician. She's counting how many bites her kids have. She feels like real frustration when the numbers are off. She feels really bummed out when they're not getting all the different colors of foods that they're supposed to have. For both of these moms, there is a path back to the middle of the road.

13:44Aliza Pressman:and in the absence of a medical situation, we don't need to count bites and we don't need to make special meals. We really just need to pay attention to ourselves. And if we're paying attention to that level of minutia, that's just a little tiny flag to give ourselves an intervention. This is all we need to focus on when it comes to feeding our kids. And of course, I'm not saying this as a nutritionist. I'm saying this as a developmental psychologist. So you do you with nutrition, but we just need to provide them with nutritious and diverse food options. Of course, you want to prioritize available organic fruits and vegetables and deprioritize sugar and processed foods.

14:30Aliza Pressman:You want to establish some limits to protect your domestic labor. And you don't need to worry about what other people eat. From my perspective as a developmental psychologist, what matters is that we focus on positive experiences during mealtime. So many of our issues with food and nutrition can be shed if we just focus on the experience of eating in the moment. Okay, so now you've decided that you're going to prioritize the experience of mealtime instead of the minutia of what's part of the meal. I also want to encourage you to think of food as fuel, a little bit of delight, but it's not a reward.

15:14Aliza Pressman:It's not a punishment. It's not a source of guilt. It's not a source of shame. And it's not even, and this one's hard, an expression of love. Having said that, I feel tremendous personal guilt that I am not able to make like the kind of delicious, incredible homemade meals that are a great expression of love. But I think there's a difference between cooking to express, you know, that might be your love language, but it's not about feeding. Those are two different things. So I don't want to knock the pleasure of cooking and being able to give yummy things to your family. But just don't think of it as the feeding part of it is the love.

15:58Aliza Pressman:It's our job to provide healthy food options when we're able to, but it is not our job to force kids to eat them, and it's certainly not our job to override their feelings of hunger or fullness because we know better. We want them to know that they know better about their own bodies. By the way, this is going to be true whether you have a 2-year-old or a 22-year-old. Just like you can't tell somebody how to feel, you cannot tell somebody whether they're hungry or not hungry. You could ask them a question, or you might say, do you think you can hold off for 10 minutes when we start dinner? But you just don't want to get into that.

16:35Aliza Pressman:If food becomes a power struggle, it's just an easy way for kids to push back, and you don't need that. Also, consider leaving healthy snacks out on the counter before dinner so that you don't get into any of those arguments. The snacks will probably get eaten and you can always save them and put them away for later. But I just, I can't express enough that a power struggle is so much easier to end by not engaging in it than proving you're right. This is also true when dealing with picky eaters. Just let them be picky. Doesn't mean you have to be a short order cook. It can mean sometimes they're not eating when you want them to.

17:18Aliza Pressman:Caveat, of course, is if your doctor is concerned about their growth. And that's a whole other conversation that I have another episode about. Very briefly, you always want to offer at least one thing that any of your kids will eat. That way, even if it's not ideal and they're not getting multiple colors of foods and all of that jazz, at least they're getting some food. Okay. Now I want to get a little bit more into body image baggage because the thing is, I think of how many more mothers than other caregivers, but all of us have had baggage with food, whether or not there were eating disorders involved.

17:58Aliza Pressman:How many of us have at some point in our lives struggled with how we feel about our body and how we feel about food in relation to our body? it's so pervasive that it's not even considered disordered unless it has you know like certain features so as with virtually every parenting dilemma you got to start with that breath and ask yourself if you are noticing something about your child's body what is it that you're worried about is it that you're worried about their health or is it that you're worried about about how they'll feel about their body if they eat too much or they don't eat enough. And what is happening for you in those moments?

18:41Aliza Pressman:Because for body image, for kids to grow up with a positive body image, there are three components to think about. First of all, we need to figure out our own, but also perception, ideals, and sense of self. Perception includes how we see ourselves, whether we see ourselves as others do, and how much we focus on one feature of our appearance as opposed to the whole. So fixating is always just a flag to pay attention to. Ideals refer to our notions of beauty, our ideas around how closely reality should match fantasy, and whether we like the way we look. And our sense of self is built on both, our perception and our ideals and on what we value about ourselves outside of our physical appearance.

19:30Aliza Pressman:And so as parents, it starts with us. So one of the things that I talk about in my book is the reflection. That's one of the five principles because that is where it is on us to be honest with ourselves about how we feel about our own bodies and to observe with as little judgment as possible. I want to say without judgment, but I know that's a hard ask. How do we move through the world? Are we moving through the world self-conscious and ashamed? Are we staring at other people's bodies feeling envious or judgmental? Are we feeling disgusted? Is there anything that objectifies bodies rather than viewing them as instruments?

20:14Aliza Pressman:Is that happening in the conversation? Is that happening inside of our minds? It is totally understandable. It's culture. It's not a judgment call, but it is something so important to pay attention to if you have the expectation that your kids or adolescents are going to have a healthy body image. It's so understandable to have negative feelings about our bodies. We have been raised this way. It is just a constant reinforcement of perfectionism, not to mention the added impact of social media that we did not experience growing up. So our job as parents is to create a sanctuary from that unhealthy world for our kids, not to pile on that negativity.

20:59Aliza Pressman:We must be vigilant about quieting that noise in our own heads because you could say all the right things to your kids or not comment at all because you're like, I don't even want to go there because I don't want to treat their bodies like objects. And I'm going to keep my mouth shut and I'm not going to fixate on food and I'm just going to enjoy the meal and we're just going to connect. But you still have to do the work on yourself and just notice when you walk through the world how you're viewing your body and other people's bodies. And if you have these struggles, that's okay. I would be very surprised if anybody listening to this is like, no, I've never thought about it.

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25:35Aliza Pressman:Eating together as a family is associated with so many positive outcomes, and it's associated with lower instances of things like depression, anxiety. It's associated with better academic performance, higher self-esteem. It's partly because it's about time spent together. So if you have those meals together and it's really about connecting, you are building resilience because you are building relationship. Pick any meal. You want to get five meals together a week, ideally. More is great, but at least five. But that doesn't mean it has to be five dinners. It can be three breakfasts and two dinners.

26:17Aliza Pressman:It can be any combination. and sometimes when you have younger kids, it does end up being easier to have breakfast with them more than dinner. And with older kids, it's a really great time to talk to them about what works best for their schedule, but that you definitely are committing to these times. Second, try not to get caught up in where these meals are. Here's the ideal. You're sitting at a table. It's a memory. It's a ritual. But I also recognize that we are people who have busy lives. And I would rather you find a way to share a meal anywhere than feel like, well, I missed it. Forget it because we didn't get to sit down at the table.

27:00Aliza Pressman:Even if it has to be a snack at a baseball game, work with what you've got. Three, try not to drive yourself crazy about menus. Making healthy choices is of course important, but you don't need to make a fancy farm to table meal or take individual orders. You can keep it simple. You can have it ready made. You can have some things that are freshly cooked. You can make it cereal. It's much more important that you have the meal together than the content of the meal. So if you drive yourself crazy about menus and everything, we all do this. We find that so much of our week has to do with the domestic labor of figuring out the meal and prepping the meal and delivering the meal.

27:42Aliza Pressman:So we don't even enjoy the meal itself. So try not to add unnecessary pressure. Add, you know, something new once a week. Don't add unnecessary, you know, they have to have such nuanced taste in food that you're fixated on that. And maybe you cook a new recipe once a week with your children, unless it's your thing and you like cooking all the time and then you should enjoy it and there are many benefits. Four, create new rituals. So tell, you know, I love rosebud and thorn and feather. That's, you know, a ritual where you can go around the table and talk about the rose of the day. That was something positive that happened.

28:22Aliza Pressman:Talk about the bud, which is something you're looking forward to. And the thorn is something that was crummy. And that's always important because you don't want to just only talk about the good stuff. It sort of undermines the feelings. And then a feather is just something that made you laugh. Any ritual will do. If that one's cheesy, you can ask a silly question. You can also like have a funny ritual where once a week you do dessert before dinner or, you know, the Family Dinner Project is a cool program that has conversation starters on their website if you definitely are just stuck and at a loss.

28:59Aliza Pressman:And you just ask a question like, if you had a superpower, what would it be and how would you like to help people. And you just have this ritual of, okay, every Sunday we do one of our family ritual questions. Again, always remember that even when things are a little hokey and you've got teenagers, so they're like not that into it and they used to love it when they were five, that's okay. They'll still be, it's like they're going to remember even through those eye rolls. Five, use family meals to share stories about yourself. It's actually really cool to get to know your kids and have them get to know you and your family history by sharing stories.