Giving Thanks For Small Victories
On shaping my children’s view of food — and having them actually listen.
Some time ago, I wrote this piece on wanting my daughters to grow up with a stronger, healthier body image than I did. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to having my writing go viral.
That made me happy, because of course as a writer I want people to see my work, but it was more than that. It made me happy because my words seemed to resonate with people who, like me, were raised in an environment of normalized diet culture and body shaming and believing that speaking to women like this was okay. People who realized, as I did, that we have a moral imperative to do better by the next generation.
It won’t be easy. Parents like me are scouring social media for expert advice on the right way to approach food for our kids while obsessing over scales and clothing sizes ourselves. Diet culture and body shaming have generated billions of dollars across multiple industries, and that pervasive influence won’t be dismantled in a day.
So, in order to keep from feeling completely overwhelmed by the gravity of what we’ve undertaken, this generation of parents must turn inward. We can’t control the proliferation of calorie-counting apps, but we can control what we say to our own kids. And every once in a…