A psychologist says parents of healthy kids have these 10 things in common
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Parents want their children to develop healthy eating habits, but figuring out how to do that can be a challenge — especially when excessively policing food can lead to dangerous, unhealthy eating.
Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair is a family and children's clinical psychologist and author of books like "The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age."
She recently sat down with Allison Benedikt and Dan Kois, hosts of the excellent, endlessly listenable (even for those of us who don't have kids) parenting podcast "Mom and Dad Are Fighting" to discuss how parents can help their kids, and especially their daughters, develop food habits that are both mentally and physically healthy.
Based on that discussion, here are the key things parents of kids with a healthy approach to eating have in common:
1. They understand how important a role they play in their kids' health.
Daddy-David/FlickrSteiner-Adair says parents — together with educators and doctors — have a huge impact on how kids think about and treat their bodies.
"My earliest research was first on treating eating disorders," she told Benedikt and Kois. "But then since they were so difficult to treat I moved into the area of primary prevention, which is really what parents and schools can do to help girls in particular but boys as well develop a sense of body acceptance, a body-positive self-image in our media and image-based saturated culture."
2. They don't put down their own bodies in front of their kids.
Katsuhito Nojiri/Flickr"Never put your own body down in front of your kids," Steiner-Adair says.
She gives several examples: "'Oh I hate my butt. Oh darling I hope your eyes don't look like mine as you get older. Oh my thighs.'"
The message that kind of talk sends to kids (and particularly girls), she says, is that their value centers in how they look, which can lead to unhealthy habits around eating and self-care
"If you think those thoughts just keep 'em to yourself."
3. They don't make nasty comments about other people's bodies.
The Internet Movie Database"Never make a nasty comment about somebody else's body," Steiner-Adair told the hosts.
"It's really tricky because that's one of the few kinds of social unkindness as well as comparisons that are really condoned in our culture," she says. But like self-shaming, critiquing others' bodies reinforces bad ideas about what matters in health and eating.
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