Changing the children's feeding narrative

Changing the feeding narrative

We live our lives in stories. Events that happen to us in our lives have meaning. We then construct stories by stringing events together. Some stories are positive and helpful, and some are unhelpful or discouraging. We then start to believe that there is no way to change the outcome of the discouraging stories. 

In feeding our kids we have stories too. As parents we love to narrate our stories especially of our children. With social media story telling is often not as accurate as it should be or at least let us say open to misinterpretation. 

Feeding stories could range from ‘my child is such a wonderful feeder’ or ‘my child loves junk food’ or ‘my child is so picky and difficult to feed.’

These stories are created by choosing certain events assigning meaning, stringing them together and creating a story. 

So, a picky eater story could go something like this:

My child as a baby ate everything and then.

Event 1, she got a gastro bug at 2 years old and was hospitalized, when she came home, she wouldn’t eat the food she used to 

Event 2, she threw her food at me last month when I put broccoli on a plate 

Event 3, two weeks ago she would not eat at school 

Event 4, this morning she did not want breakfast 

So, mom now has sufficient events to create a story that her child is a picky eater 

What has not been noted in this story are the following events 

Event A, since the gastro her toddler wants to eat pickles and sour foods 

Event B, at crèche the other day she took food from her friend’s plate and ate that 

Event C, with the nanny yesterday she sat on her lap and ate the food the nanny was eating 

So now by helping mom see that there could be an alternative story to the one she has constructed, her child is wanting more autonomy and wanting* to explore other foods and with other people. So based on this information we can start to narrate a new story.

By changing the feeding narrative, we also remove blame, and we place the picky eating on its own with mom and child on the same team aiming to combat the picky eating. This allows us to think creatively like using nutritional supplements and feeding holidays to establish a new narrative.