Are You Serving Shame at Your Family’s Dinner Table?
Sitting down as a family and eating dinner together each night is often touted as one of the most effective ways to increase communication and build strong relationships with our children. Unfortunately for some children, the dinner table is also a place where they learn to moralize foods, feel shame around certain food choices, and deny their own hunger. For some kids, the family dinner table can be the entryway to a lifetime of eating disorder, body betrayal and body dissatisfaction. Of course, these are not experiences we want for our children and yet well-meaning parents who have not examined and dealt with their own body dissatisfaction, tendency toward disordered eating, and anti-fat bias push their children closer and closer to these experiences with every family dinner.
It all starts with one family member’s seemingly harmless comments about their own body. Whether it’s an older sibling, a grandparent, an aunt or uncle, or a parent – when children hear us openly criticize our bodies, they are much more likely to criticize their own. Yet, these critical comments about our bodies are so commonplace in diet culture that they are normalized as part of polite conversation. And we are so used to criticizing our bodies as part of polite conversation that unless we have this behavior pointed out to us, we may not even realize we are doing it.
Building an awareness of when and how often we are criticizing our bodies can help us begin the process of learning to stop doing so in front of the children in our families. Many of us have been playing the dieting game for so long that, in polite conversation, body dissatisfaction itself serves as both a passion and a pastime. But many people are starting to believe that our children deserve freedom from this sad fate. Author and podcaster, Virginia Sole Smith’s excellent book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture is a wonderful resource to parents who are hoping to give their children more meaningful topics to bond over than pining for that perfect thigh gap.
And how do we become dissatisfied with our bodies in the first place? Comparison. Another topic of conversation to leave off the dinner table are other people’s bodies. Just as damaging as hearing a family member criticize their own bodies, a family member disparaging someone else’s body in the presence of a child will, again, lead to the child being much more likely to wonder whether their body is okay or not. This practice of talking about other people’s bodies – whether positively or negatively – may even cause a child to become anxious or increase anxiety in an already anxious child. If dad, sister, cousin, uncle, or grandma is pointing out how satisfactory or unsatisfactory another person’s body is, it’s only a matter of time before the child’s body is placed on the proverbial chopping block for judgement as well.
Despite what many routine doctor’s visits teach us, it is never okay to shame a child for the size of their body. For most children, the impact of a mention of their body size in a judgmental way will be shaming – even if the adult intention was simply to notice or inform. To say or even insinuate at the dinner table that a child should restrict their food intake because of how large their body is or increase their food intake because of how small their body is to instill shame in a child about their body. This does not mean that there is not a time and place for education around the topics of nutrition and adequately nourishing one’s body. However, when a child is hungry (presumably they are hungry at dinner time) and has been invited to the dinner table to engage in a loving, enjoyable meal with their family, it is a kind of cruel bait and switch to turn that family time into a lecture about how unacceptable their body is or how they need to manipulate food intake and deny the hunger or fullness cues they are receiving from their body.
The dinner table can be a healthy, happy place for families to build relationships and communication skills but if shame around body, food choices, hunger or fullness is the main course, the negatives of that experience are outweighing the positives. To get the shame off the table, it is our job as parents to deeply examine and revise our own relationships with our bodies and nourishment. Only when we can come to the table secure in our own bodies can we help our children be secure in theirs.
