I want parents to pause before saying these common mealtime phrases

Sitting in our local park cafe, sipping a coffee, I watched as a mother struggled with her children.

She was simultaneously trying to feed her baby while supervising her toddler’s meal. The little girl wanted to be back outside playing but her stressed-out mum wasn’t ready to leave.

In the midst of her (understandable) frustration, the mother wielded a phrase I’ve heard so many times, a phrase that is so commonplace that it has been normalised – but it’s one that I know has had a profound effect on many of the life-long dieters I work with.

‘Just be a good girl and clear your plate,’ she said.

I winced. As a mother who also sometimes struggled to get my son to eat any foods that weren’t chicken nuggets and pesto pasta, I had complete empathy.

However, in my work as a hypnotherapist, I encounter people every day who have been so conditioned by the expectations, demands and beliefs around meals that they were given as children that they now have a completely unhealthy relationship with food.

As children, we are constantly learning and creating our model of life around the messages we are given. These messages can become so ingrained that we believe them to be truth, rather than a ploy to get us to do as we are told.

One client I worked with recently was terrified at the thought of leaving food on her plate. She had been taught that food waste was evil and so would constantly wade through enormous portions of food, never giving up until the plate was clean.

As an adult, she was now morbidly obese and feared for her health. She knew that she was overeating and wanted to stop, but this became a dilemma for her, particularly when she ate out or when someone else had cooked and was in control of portion size. The thought of wasting food stopped her every time she tried to lose weight. 

After hearing the mother in the café, I became curious as to which other ‘dinner-time’ phrases said to my clients as children had become hang ups about food in adulthood. 

Some of the most popular answers were: ‘Eat your dinner, there are children starving in Africa’; ‘I’ve spent hours cooking that, you’re going to eat it’ and the old classic, ‘If you don’t eat all your greens, you can’t have any pudding.’ Unfortunately, food as a reward is extremely common in my practice in those who are desperate as adults to lose weight. 

Phrases like these can cause huge difficulties in later life. Like many of the clients I see, lots of people have been conditioned to eat everything on their plates, whether they like the food or not, whether they are hungry or not. 

Being told to eat foods you don’t like (usually healthy options), so that you can be rewarded with (usually unhealthy) foods, which are given the status of treats, can create emotional eaters. Being told that you’re ‘good’ because you’ve cleared your plate (as the mother in the café said, no doubt with good intentions) or that you can’t leave the table until you’ve done so, only teaches children that leaving food on the plate might cause offence. 

This leads to overeating (and then weight gain) and mindless eating (a way of eating foods we don’t enjoy by distracting ourselves). People overeat to keep the peace or to be accepted and loved, and, as a result, stop being aware of their own hunger levels. 

One client I work with took months to be able to get insight into her eating. Her whole identity of being a good person had become tied up in her finishing her food. 

A research study by Dr. Linda Gilmore at Queensland University of Technology even draws a link between parents who force their children to clear their plates and the likelihood of growing up and suffering from anorexia, bulimia or obesity. In my practice, I work mainly with clients who are overweight but practically all of them attribute their issues with food to being taught they had to finish whatever amount they were given, and that leaving food was not an option. 

There’s no doubt being a parent is hard and when you’re at the end of your tether, wanting to make sure your child is nourished, it’s easy for the old, ingrained phrases you heard as a child to come tumbling out. 

As a parent who has suffered from an unhealthy relationship with food myself, I wanted to allow my child to eat whatever he wanted, when he wanted and how much he wanted so that he didn’t end up with the same hang ups I did. However, in moments of extreme frustration I would open my mouth and hear myself say words from generations before me before I held myself in check. 

It is important that our children are nourished – but not that they are given false and unhelpful guidance.    

So what can parents do instead? 

Firstly, become aware of the phrases you use around children to get them to eat and choose to discard them. The adults I work with start with mindful eating: we learn to recognise our hunger levels, eating only when we are hungry and stopping when we are full – most children can do this naturally, so encourage them to do so. It may be challenging to start with but children will eat when they are hungry. 

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Then take time to try out lots of foods with your children, encouraging a curious scientist approach and asking if they really like the taste or not. 

Don’t give food labels of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but instead have no food off the table and make a list together of the foods that make your child feel good and filled with energy.  

Fostering a healthy relationship with food at an early age is a great gift. Apart from being able to build a healthy body image and self-esteem, children who are taught to listen to their bodies and eat mindfully are more likely to carry these habits into adulthood.

This promotes long-term health and well-being as well as an array of other physical and cognitive benefits. 

Wouldn’t that be wonderful for our children?  

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing [email protected]. 

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