Food is love, food is fuel
Christmas time and kids who don't eat
Content warning: This post talks about eating - ‘disordered’ eating and sensory reactions to food. Please take care while reading if you have a difficult relationship with food or you have a child with a difficult relationship with food.
Christmas for me is all about being with family and enjoying yummy food. I am someone who has always enjoyed eating - my only ‘issue’ has been that I often forget to eat. I realise now that that makes me immensely lucky.
I write this, with love, as the mum of a child who has eating challenges. You can read about his love of McDonald’s chips here. I didn’t know a lot about pediatric feeding or eating disorders before I had him.
We’ve been through feeding therapy publicly and privately and have learned a great deal over the last seven years about eating.
I was once a parent who believed kids just eat. I have had a steep learning curve and I now know that there’s a lot we don’t know when we become parents. And that’s OK!
Luckily we live in a world where we have so much information at our fingertips and so it’s easy to learn. And I truly believe most people want to learn and don’t want to hurt feelings (of kids or their parents) especially at a time like Christmas!
So here’s a not-exhaustive list of things that may be helpful to know about eating. I’m no expert and I can’t cover everything, my hope is folks will share their experiences too. I’ve tried to keep it simple as we are all time poor at this time of year! Thank you for reading.
Some children won’t just eat when they’re hungry
I’ve been told by many people that if you just leave a child alone they’ll just eat when they’re hungry. But guess what? Lots of kids don’t know what ‘hungry’ is. They don’t receive the same hunger signals you do. Or they confuse these hunger signals. Many might be hungry but their sensory aversion to food is stronger than their hunger. So, telling parents to just ‘leave them hungry’ isn’t very helpful. It’s also not kind to the child or parent.
No, just putting the food in front of them won’t help
For some kids, just the sight of food is distressing. It can make them feel a visceral, full-body sensory reaction. Some children can feel like their throat is closing up if they see a certain type of food. They can vomit from looking at food. Often a parent has a whole routine for introducing food and it doesn’t happen at a busy dinner table. Please don’t push for a child to sit at the table if it will be distressing for them.
Providing safe foods for children is really important
A “safe food” or “same food” is a food that a child feels comfortable eating. ND kids and adults sometimes like to eat the same foods every day, sometimes at the same time of day.
It’s because it literally feels safe when eating doesn’t always feel safe. Safe foods can make someone feel respected and cared for - just as you’d cater to a vegetarian, it’s right and kind to extend the same offer to tamariki or adults with food sensitivities or challenges. Friends who have my son’s safe foods in their pantry fill my heart with gratitude. It’s a lovely thing to do to show you respect that safe foods are crucial for some children.
A type of food a child loved can become a food they hate and it’s nobody’s fault
So, you have a child’s safe food and then suddenly, after eating it every day for years (sometimes called a food hyperfixation), they hate it! WHAT!? A child might have loved a type of food - let’s say: pretzels, because the taste was always the same, the texture was always the same, it was easy to eat and prepare, and it made a nice noise when you ate it. But suddenly, because the child might have a headache, the crunch sound hurts. So, the pain of the headache is linked to the pretzels. Which means pretzels are now bad. It’s nobody’s fault. And somebody else will eat the pretzels. But it can be really really gutting to lose a safe food if your child only has a few, so keep that in mind!
Eating can be really stressful
Lots of kids hate hate hate sitting at the table. They can be sensitive to the sounds of everyone eating. There’s lots of different smells. The food can look weird. People’s arms might be touching them, feet might bump into them under the table, the chair might be too hard or too soft, music is playing and people are talking at the same time, the placemats don’t match, the sauce bottle is dripping onto the table, the gravy is sticking to the serviette, there’s no water left in the water bottle, someone is yelling to grab the sausages off the BBQ, the plate is made of paper….Try to think of everything happening at a dinner table - it’s a lot. So recognise that if someone is already finding it hard to eat, a busy table is just going to add to the stress. Christmas Day is not a good day to try new things and add to that stress. It doesn’t matter if the new thing is ‘trying custard’ or ‘trying to sit at the table’ or ‘trying to use a knife and fork’. It’s better to just let the people who enjoy eating at the table to eat at the table and let the ones who don’t eat somewhere else.
Some children don’t know what food is
Pica, pronounced Pie-kah, is an eating disorder where a child or adult eats things not usually considered food - grass, dirt, paper…There are lots of reasons for a child doing this - they might have anxiety and it’s comforting, they might have an iron deficiency - or they might literally not know what is food and what isn’t. Just understanding that this is a thing and it’s deeply distressing for both child and parent is really important. If a child at Christmas eats some wrapping paper, gently and quietly let their parent know and ask them how you can assist. Chances are they will know exactly how to handle it in a way that fits their family kaupapa. The worst thing to do is to loudly call attention to it and alarm the child.
Food isn’t always love and that’s OK
In so many cultures, kai is incredibly important. It’s how you show love, how you care for the people you love, it brings you together and it connects you. We can believe that very strongly (and I do) while also recognising that for some tamariki and adults food is just fuel.
In our home, we know we can still practice whanaungatanga without making our tamariki feel like kai needs to be more important to him than it is. We can respect that for him, eating is just something he has to do. As we can’t share a meal, we find other ways to whakawhanaungatanga - we might sing a song together, do a quiz together, spend some time outside together weeding the garden after a meal. It’s all about saying - what makes you feel like you belong? How can we show you we love and care for you in other ways that don’t involve kai?
Compassion goes a long way
I’d like to end this piece with this comment from an anonymous autistic woman first shared on the National Autistic Society’s page, because I think it really sums up everything we need to remember on this topic:
“Connecting over food may predominantly sit outside of what is comfortable and manageable for me. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t recognise its importance to others, and appreciate the misinterpretation and conflict that can arise if my motives and limits are not recognised.
We cannot ever fully understand another person’s life experience and how they perceive the world. What we can do is open our awareness to others’ experience and listen to what it means to them. This may be quite easy with people that we have similar thoughts, feelings and experiences to, but it can be a lot harder when someone seems very different. Fundamental to this is the acceptance and recognition of the person as a unique individual, and embracing all that they are.”
Finally, I just want to give my love to all the parents out there who are worried about judgement around the Christmas dinner table. It’s really hard when your child doesn’t eat. It just is. I used to think ‘if I can’t even get my child to eat, what kind of mother am I?’. I’ve cried many tears and it has taken me a long time to get to a place of peace around eating. If you’re just starting this journey, know you’re not alone. There are many of us walking beside you - we’re here. And it’s going to be OK even if it’s not. x
Thanks for reading and as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I hope you have a lovely Christmas - paid subscribers will have Friday Night Chats as normal on Friday! Meri Kirihimete!
I really love when you write pieces like this. I remember the silent and sometimes not-silent judgment my mum used to receive over the foods my sister would eat as a child and teenager. Her food aversions were so strong, and my mum had promised herself she would never force her to eat something she didn't want to. So no matter where we were or who was there, she ate the same few things every day. But that meant a lot of criticism from people who didn't get it. I appreciate so much you drawing attention to these types of issues so that people will hopefully be less critical when they meet a child who simply cannot eat from every food group, and for whom 5+ a day is just not even in the realm of something they could cope with!
Food is a topic people feel very free to sermonise about, very much like children's sleeping habits 😬 And we live in a world where ideas of diet and lifestyle are fetishized. So people take their ideas about diet, which they hold very dearly, and bestow that wisdom on others, whether it has been asked for or not. And some are almost religious about the topic at times, and some will have a lot of supporters.
However, I would venture to say 99.999% of parents are not remotely interested in what other people think their children should eat. We all feed our children in whatever way we can manage!!
Thank you. I have a young family member with severe eating restrictions, and yes, it's difficult, for everyone. One of the best things I found recently was a statement that despite the apparently hopelessly inadequate diet, most kids like this do grow and do survive - no-one seems quite sure how, but they do. There is the hope that things will improve with age, but there are no guidelines because every kid is different. Providing what goes down, when it's wanted, seems to be the only practical approach, no matter how much we might wish it was different!