How to end power struggles at the family dinner table, according to a parenting coach

Author of Body-Confident and parenting coach Emma Wright at her Arrowtown home. Photo / Mayjonesphotography

Parenting coach Emma Wright tells Joanna Wane why keeping kids a healthy weight while making sure they love their bodies can be an impossible task.

How did it come to this, that it almost feels worse to “let” your kids get fat than it would be to get them hooked on crack cocaine?

This isn’t exactly how Arrowtown-based parenting coach Emma Wright puts it in her new book Body-Confident, an empathetic and research-based guide that looks at how our obsession with “healthy food” can cause more problems than it solves. But the mother of two knows exactly what I’m talking about.

A high BMI is equated with a lifetime of suffering, from the emotional abuse afflicted by our weight-obsessed world to the spectre of disastrous health consequences and early death. As the child of weight-conscious parents herself, Wright was so repulsed by her body that she spiralled into an eating disorder and later became fixated on controlling what her own children ate. Choosing to take a step back from those power struggles at mealtimes was a relief for everyone, but it did take a leap of faith.

“Parents feel like they’re being thought of as criminals if their child is bigger,” she says. “The feelings around it really do run that deep. We’re supposed to help our kids love their bodies, and we’re supposed to turn them into healthy eaters and they’re supposed to remain a healthy size. What I have come to understand is that those three things are often in huge conflict with each other.

“How do we step back for a minute and go, ‘What is our goal here?’ Is our goal to make sure the kids eat the peas on their plates tonight? Or is our goal to turn them into competent eaters? That requires a very different set of rules and a very different perspective to give them the power to tune into what their body needs.”

Wright advises parents to drop a binary view of what's "good" and "bad" to eat and look at all foods as being part of a balanced diet.

There’s a lot to unpack in her book, which suggests family food fights at the dinner table — “not the fun ones” — are doomed to be a losing battle. Putting tight restrictions in place may elicit short-term compliance, but research shows those children are likely to eat a less nutritious diet when they’re older. Wright also looks at the flawed measures used to define obesity and the damage caused by society’s anti-fat bias.

We already know the only winner to come out of the multibillion-dollar diet industry is … the diet industry. Studies on weight-loss methods collated over the past 100 years show the rate of sustainable “shrinkage” is less than 5 per cent, and weight cycling caused by yo-yo dieting is so strongly associated with health risks, it may be more dangerous than fatness itself.

Wright also references the work of Dr Cynthia Bulik, the founding director of the University of North Carolina’s Centre of Excellence for Eating Disorders. She’s exploring the biological origins of conditions such as anorexia and bulimia, and how an underlying genetic predisposition can be activated by an environmental trigger — such as dieting. Yes, the ironies abound.

While dysfunctional eating has traditionally been more prevalent in girls, some researchers in the field reckon it’s now close to an even gender split. Wright works with just as many parents who are concerned about their sons as those who are worried about their daughters. A Harvard University study found that while the stigma relating to skin colour and sexual orientation has reduced, prejudice against body size has significantly worsened.

“In my family, there was a real contempt for big people,” says Wright. “I was a skinny little kid and I picked up the messages very clearly that I had a desirable body. Then when I went through puberty, it was like someone put a bicycle pump in my mouth and blew me up overnight. I remember understanding that not only was my body now disgusting, but that it was my responsibility to fix it.”

One of the book’s key messages is that it’s hard for anyone to feel good about their body without challenging some of society’s deeply entrenched and harmful beliefs. When Wright’s children were young, meal times filled her with dread. Now she encourages parents to shed that binary view of what’s “good” and “bad” to eat, loosen the reins (without dropping them altogether) and think about all foods fitting into a healthy diet.

These days, she and her two teenagers have a much more relaxed and harmonious experience when they sit down at the table together. “We don’t really talk about food,” she says, “other than, ‘Do you like that?’ and ‘Would you like some more?’”

In her new book Body-Confident: A Guide to Raising Happy Eaters, Arrowtown-based parenting coach Emma Wright uses current research to put an end to fights at the dinner table.

Wright’s 10 top tips for raising competent eaters

1. Create an eating routine. Think about your children needing three meals plus two snacks a day. This isn’t a hard and fast rule; your family might work better with three meals and three snacks. The point is to create a routine that remains reasonably consistent and helps your child understand that they are safe to feel hungry because a meal is always coming soon.
2. Give as much autonomy as you can to your child. Put the dishes in the middle of the table and allow your child to serve themselves. Tell them they are allowed as much or as little as they like of each dish, with the caveat that they only take their allocated portion of a limited dish; one steak each, for example. Give each child a turn to choose where everyone sits, or to say the prayer (if your family does that), or choose which plates get used. If it means that every so often you eat dinner out of a bowl when a plate would be better, allow it to happen. Take a minute now to jot down ideas about how you can offer your child more control at mealtimes.
3. Encourage them by talking about who they are, not what they are eating. Refrain from commenting on the food choices your child makes and instead ask them about their day or talk about an idea or an upcoming event. Here are some ways you can encourage your child during meals: “It’s so lovely to eat with you. What do you think about the table setting? What was the best part of your day?”
4. Drop rewards. Making dessert conditional on a child eating vegetables or rewarding healthy eating using a star chart sends the message that you don’t think your child is capable of eating vegetables without an incentive. It also distracts your child from their own internal hunger, fullness and enjoyment cues, and makes them focus on an external reward.
5. Avoid binary labels. Dividing food into good and bad, healthy and unhealthy, fattening and slimming can be confusing and make kids anxious about what they eat.
6. Avoid connecting food or eating to body size. There is no scientific evidence that any one food can change someone’s body weight in the long run. There are no foods that only bigger-bodied people eat and no foods that only smaller-bodied people eat. Linking foods to body size adds to weight stigma and anxiety around food.
7. Go slowly. If your child has a limited palate and you want to expand it, introduce new dishes slowly.
8. Keep the dishes separate. If possible, keep the pasta separate from the sauce. Giving your child the opportunity to assemble their own dish is another way to get their power needs met. It also helps kids who struggle with foods that are touching each other or mixed together.
9. Insist on manners and table etiquette. Teaching your child to behave appropriately at the dinner table is a great way for them to boost their sense of importance. It shows that you believe they can do it, and your expectations of them will boost their sense of internal value.
10. Close the kitchen between meals. This can be a great way to shut down begging for snacks and grazing. However, if your child has been sneaking food, you should allow plenty of instances to satisfy their hunger for previously off-limit foods, otherwise closing the kitchen will only make the sneaking worse.

• Body-Confident: A Guide to Raising Happy Eaters by Emma Wright (HarperCollins, $37.99) is out now.

Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.