Strict Moral Labels Can Affect our Children’s Relationships to Food: How to Help Them Through It
TW: mental health talk, EDs
Almost everyone was raised with the categories “good food” and “junk food.” We were also raised with food guides that strongly discouraged eating things like chips, cake, pop/soda, and candy. However, while these things are proven to be harmful to your physical health after a lot of time consuming them and only them, I want to talk about the more immediate effects on our mental health that are arguably more harmful in the long run that are caused by the moral labeling of different foods.
When we label things as “good” or “bad”, our goal is to either encourage the repetition of that behavior or discourage that behavior from happening at all. These binary attitudes toward human behaviors bind us to a certain course of action depending on the situations we find ourselves in. Unfortunately, we often learn as children that good behavior is good all the time, such as being polite, using our manners, and saying nice things. This then follows that the opposite is also true; bad behavior is reprimanded all the time, such as hitting, raising one’s voice in anger or frustration, or calling someone names. This labeling of behaviors in simple terms is good for the first steps of learning that a child takes, but can be harmful later on if they are not taught how to expand this labeling to be more complicated and shifting.
When parents teach young kids that hitting is bad, they usually understand after a while of being told not to do it that they just shouldn’t do it. This immediate effect is good; after all, we don’t want a person to grow up thinking that fighting random people for mild inconveniences is okay. But when we raise our kids to understand that “bad” things are those that you should never do, they begin to be affected later in life by what other people label as positive or negative.
It is a well-known fact that school age adolescents are extremely affected by the actions and opinions of their closest peers. Starting out, children often echo the opinions of their parents. Different parents have different opinions. This causes discrepancies between what behaviors children deem appropriate at what times, meaning that children will either be influenced by the other kids who they like most or they will fall into groups that believe similar things as they do. Unfortunately, due to the dynamics of popularity in schools and children’s wish to be accepted by their peers, they usually start with the former and may continue changing in order to fulfill this goal.
Influence and interactions between people is how we learn how to carry out our roles in society. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself. However, when we combine this fact with the tendency of children to learn things in extremes, we get the unfortunate result of potentially negative mental health impacts.
By teaching kids indirectly that bad things are always bad, often for the convenience of not having to tell them every situation in which certain “bad” things are okay, they learn to sort information into only two categories. Adults may get frustrated with children who see things as black or white, or truth or lie because we have been able to develop more than two categories to sort information into. Children may get upset with their parents because they have difficulty understanding what “maybe” means after years of only yes or no. As a result, when they get into school and the important people in life shift from family to friends, they are still too young to understand the “maybe” underlying what their friends are talking about.
Fast-forward to young teen years. They are now exposed to media, often only containing one perspective (read my previous article on how algorithms divide society), which they tend to cling onto for a long time and use to sort things into one of the “good” or “bad” categories. Children are taught about food, body image, and trends through the media more than they learn from teachers in school.
Friends see a new trend – good category. Friends or role models (including parents) go on a diet – pizza and chips are now in the bad category instead of the fun category. They don’t yet have the tools to understand that sometimes trends are bad or unkind, such as the lucid dreams trend, and don’t understand that things full-grown adults are doing to look like full-grown adults may not be good for kids. When we apply this to food and body image, this knowledge of how we learn puts mental health issues into perspective.
Eating disorders, self-esteem issues, and bullying stem from what we all teach our kids as a group of older role models. Children mimic behaviors that they see, and rarely have an easy time listening to what we say unless we also show them through our actions. This is how drugs, dieting, and general behaviors are learned and taken up by kids. While kids learn faster from actions instead of words, repeated words have just as much of an effect on them because of how our minds are wired. When we apply this to food and body image, we can see how spoken words, even when directed at other people, can have an effect on the eating habits and image children have of themselves. Bullying works this way. You get a bunch of little kids calling one kid fat or ugly, every day. The kid begins to sort “fat” into the bad category because so many other kids are projecting their view of it being bad, even when their image of obesity is a lie. If they are called fat, then they are bad, and must become “good”, which is often where the issue starts. They don’t understand that good foods aren’t good to have all the time, nor do they make one pure, and they don’t understand that “bad” foods aren’t always bad.
From the point our kids are born, we want them to grow up happy, strong, and accepted by their peers. We help them fit into society by teaching them the basics of behaviors that society likes and doesn’t like. When they grow up to go to school, their close ties to parents tend to grow a bit further away and their friends make up for that closeness. Unfortunately, this is where the problems start for the majority of kids. Their friends start preaching what their parents have told them, and the most dominant child usually projects this standard and these ideas onto the other kids in order for them all to “fit in.” When they combine moral teachings from parents with the information absorbed from the media, they begin to think that different things are either good or bad at a new level. They still have a difficult time figuring out different situations that make behaviors acceptable or not on their own, and begin to think in the same extremes about new things. These new things often include their bodies and food.
So, it isn’t the parents’ fault that their kid may have confidence issues, nor is it the fault of the child. It is simply a result of our relationships with our children and our kids’ relationships with other children. However, we can make sure that our relationship with our kids remains strong. Children cannot learn things that aren’t concrete on their own. They need help. So, I think that one way we can help prevent some negative impacts of life on our children’s mental health is to maintain that close relationship with your kids. Yes, your kids are still going to grow up a little and want to do different things, and they are going to get closer to their friends. You can still build that loving, caring, mutually-respecting relationship with them early on and keep it alive. Adapt to your child’s interests and support their natural curiosity. If they ask you a question, don’t put it off or say that they will learn when they are older because this shifts the responsibility for getting the answer onto them when you could just give it to them and ease their minds, thus lengthening the relationship ties between you. If you see them developing new habits, make sure that they are positive and don’t lead to unhealthy practices later on. Let them know and prove to them that they can depend on you when they want to instead of only when they’ve lost everything else, and be as good of a role model as you can. It may take some time and you may need to change how you deal with things, but it will help their mental health in the moment and build a brighter future for them. Who knows, maybe it will help your mental health as well. Relationships are about interdependence, so make sure that your relationship with your children is strong but still breathable so you can both flourish.
Strength comes from multiple muscles working together and supporting each other. Relationships are designed to be similar. Love your kids and they’ll love you back. Most importantly, even if things do turn out less than perfect, it isn’t too late to rebuild or patch up relationships to help them. Encouragement and support are key, and in return your child will begin to behave similarly as well so they may help you.
Until next time, keep thinking outside the box, and keep reading in between!