Dr. Sarah (00:02):
Ever wonder what psychologists moms talk about when we get together, whether we’re consulting one another about a challenging case or one of our own kids, or just leaning on each other when parenting feels hard, because trust me, even when we do this for a living, it’s still hard. Joining me each week in these special Thursday shows are two of my closest friends, both moms, both psychologists, they’re the people I call when I need a sounding board. These are our unfiltered answers to your parenting questions. We’re letting you in on the conversations the three of us usually have behind closed doors. This is Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions.
(00:43):
Hello. Welcome. I have Dr. Rebecca Hershberg here.
Dr. Rebecca (00:47):
Hi.
Dr. Sarah (00:47):
Hello. The lovely, the one and only. So today we’re going to be answering a listener question, and this is an email that I got and she writes, I know that experts say that kids are supposed to be able to determine how much they eat, but my 2-year-old daughter would never stop eating if I didn’t restrict her. The pediatrician says she’s healthy, so I’m not concerned that way. But while I’ve heard so much talk about picky eating, I can’t seem to find suggestions for what to do if you have the opposite issue. Do you have any advice for how I can get my daughter to listen to her own body cues if she seems not to know when she’s full? So this is a 2-year-old, this is the mother of a 2-year-old writing this in. I have so many thoughts about this email and this question. I think it’s a really, really good and very reasonable question, and I think there is so much more information and talk about what to do for picky eating and this other kind of end of the pendulum doesn’t get as much explicit guidance. But I feel like, and Rebecca, tell me what you think, but I almost wish she was here because I have so many questions about her question.
Dr. Rebecca (02:07):
Totally. My first one is, sorry, my first question is, I forget how you read the sentence. It was something like, my child would never stop eating if I didn’t restrict her. And my question with no judgment is how do you know? I don’t know if she’s never stop eating is strong words and I’m sure that it’s hyperbolic. My understanding from just working with a few clients who we’ve explored this issue, and I agree it’s so complicated and important and I’m really glad she wrote in, but I just want to say off the bat my understanding that an actual issue with satiety cues like an actual eating until you throw up every single time and not realizing can happen and is very, very, very rare. And so my gut, just based on the numbers of hearing this question, is like this is some combination of a child who perhaps loves eating and let’s talk about how we deal with that and a mom’s anxiety also totally understandable.
(03:13):
What if they get sick? What if they gain weight? I think part of the really key information in that question is that the pediatrician has said that they’re healthy and pediatricians are very on top of nutrients at age two and what you need and what. So I think there’s a bunch of things to consider, but I would question whether there actually is an issue with satiety cues and think a little bit more about how can we help mom potentially feel a little less anxiety around this because I’m sure mealtimes are starting to be quite charged and that’s going to impact a lot of this and also just slow the whole thing down. So help mom’s anxiety and help mom help kid to just slow down such that we can help child build a sense of tuning into her belly as opposed to just the taste, which certainly is something that can happen with kids.
(04:25):
My kids now, and it’s after years, but my son will get up from the table after breakfast and say, leave my plate on the table. I just need to pause. He doesn’t say pause, I’m going to go brush my teeth or whatever, and he’ll say, and check in with my belly and see if I want more. So it’s not much. It’s so cute. It’s not so much teaching him that I know when he’s full based on the amount he’s eaten, but allowing him to learn to pause and feel into his body, which at two is quite a tall order, but two might look like, let’s feel our belly is our belly making a little song or just pausing or doing something. Let’s pause and do something else for a minute and see if we still want more goldfish teaching, how to slow it down rather than just eat, eat, eat. It tastes so delicious.
Dr. Sarah (05:26):
Well, right, because the part that I was kind of where I honed in that I wanted more information was same sentence but a different thought, which was when she says, but my 2-year-old daughter would never stop eating if I didn’t restrict her. My thought went to, well, what does restriction mean to you in this context, mom, if restriction looks like you just said, oh, you know what? We’ve had a lot of goldfish. Let’s play a little bit over here and if we’re still hungry, we can come back and have some more goldfish. That’s a form of restricting in the sense that we are restricting the amount of goldfish we are having in this moment at this designated snack time. But not necessarily. That’s qualitatively different than saying if your kid asks for more goldfish saying like, Nope, you’ve had enough goldfish. We’re done. All done. And again, I don’t think that it’s bad to do either of those two things for it to be clear. I think it’s totally okay to say to your kid, Nope, we’ve had enough goldfish, we’re done. But I don’t know that that is proof that you are stopping them from overeating until that had you not done that, she would’ve never stopped. I also think that the food that is being restricted or being modulated is relevant. Right?
Dr. Rebecca (07:04):
That’s what I was going to say, yeah.
Dr. Sarah (07:04):
Goldfish versus even goldfish. It’s hard to eat a whole bag goldfish, but if you’re talking about like…
Dr. Rebecca (07:11):
I could easily eat a whole bag of goldfish, I just want to put that on the podcast.
Dr. Sarah (07:16):
I could as a grownup, but I don’t know if maybe a two-year-old could fine. They are really good. But my point is even goldfish is a highly processed food and it kind of borders on that super flavor food. But if we’re talking about Doritos, good luck. Those foods are literally designed to make it almost impossible to register satiety and be done because they’re not just, the reason you reach for more Doritos isn’t because you’re hungry or full. The reason you reach for more Doritos is it is rocking the dopamine center in your brain and keeps saying more, more. I think old fish for a 2-year-old may also kind of hit that dopamine center, depends on the range of super flavors they’re exposed to.
Dr. Rebecca (08:08):
But even taking the processed piece out, all of the eating literature, and I’m thinking about Ellyn Satter, who you can link in the show notes, who’s kind of the person when it comes to helping kids develop a healthy relationship with food, which is what I think we all are striving for in this day and age. You are in charge of how much of a particular food you are making available to your child. So you might have a very different rule for how much cucumber sticks there are allowed. She could say more, more, more, more, more. And she can have as many cucumber sticks as she wants, let’s say. And you have kind of a rule in your house that you have a bowl of goldfish available to you for the day. So it’s okay. Again, it gets to the definition of restriction, which you mentioned very aptly.
(09:09):
I think it’s having an understanding that to the best that I understand the literature and kind of what’s out there, not restricting kids doesn’t mean here’s our pantry. Have at it whenever you want and however you want. Not restricting kids means letting them learn cues in their body as you provide generally healthy hopefully options, perhaps with, I mean we can get into kind of what’s healthy, what’s not healthy, and I guess I’m pausing because I don’t necessarily want to get in the weeds about that, but I think it just goes to your point of what food you are restricting works in both directions. Is it Doritos where they’re not going to have their satiety cues kick in or is it a vegetable? I mean, I remember once telling my son he couldn’t have any more baby carrots because we were about to have dinner. And then I remember thinking to myself, wait, dinner is pizza. Why do I care if he’s having more baby carrot? It’s just pausing again, and we talk about this all the time, being intentional and thoughtful about your kid, your family health, nutrition, and not just sort of blindly following these things. I don’t know if that makes sense.
Dr. Sarah (10:32):
Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. And I think even if people aren’t familiar with Ellyn Satter’s work, I think one of her core fundamental pillars of what she teaches is the division of responsibility, and that basically says that there’s a division of responsibility when it comes to food and the family, and it is the parent’s job to decide what gets served, what is on the plate when the plate is served and is responsible for the general environment around mealtimes. And it is the child’s job or it’s the child’s responsibility to own deciding what they eat, how much of it they eat, and when they’re full, when they’re done eating. And so if we’re going to follow that protocol with this example, the mom in this case would be responsible for deciding when it’s time to eat and also when mealtime is over, and also deciding what foods she’s going to serve during those times, but that if her child wants more, that you would provide more. And again, I’m sure there’s a lot of nuance that you’re going to get into even there.
(12:02):
If you were go work with a nutritionist, I would hope that there would be even more nuance that they would help you kind of hone into the unique story of line of this particular child or this particular family. But if the question is do you have any advice for how I can get my daughter to listen to her own body cues? If she seems not to know when she’s full, I would say you should offer food. And to your point, Rebecca, if you’re not sure if she’s going to eat beyond the point of fullness limiting the foods you’re offering that might make it harder to notice fullness, right? Foods that are highly enhanced, let’s say, to make the flavor so rewarding that you’re not, the hunger full cues get kind of distorted. They get drowned out by the dopamine cues.
(12:59):
But other than that, I would say the more your daughter has the experience of truly reaching maybe even an uncomfortable level of satiety or fullness is probably how she will learn that it doesn’t feel good when I get that full. And she’ll probably get there on her own and that’s how she’s probably going to learn the hunger fullness cues. But I do think that the slowing things down, the being willing to say, we’re going to eat, we just finished mealtime, but we will eat again. Let’s go do something else, change intent, change the environment, change the focus of attention, stretch that feeling out a little bit because we know sometimes it can take 20 minutes for the brain to register fullness, and so go do something for a little bit and if the child’s still hungry, they’ll let you know and you can go back and re-offer some food. I don’t know. What are your thoughts on that, Rebecca?
Dr. Rebecca (13:59):
Yeah, I think that makes perfect sense. I’m definitely in alignment with that. The other thing I would mention just when it comes to two year olds, although I think it holds for kids in general, or I should say just people who are growing is that it’s not a linear curve. There’s times that your kids are about to have a growth spurt or their brain is about to have some sort of developmental leap and they are really craving calories and they’ll eat because I was thinking when you read the question again about whatever, there’s an implication that her daughter is eating beyond when her daughter is full. And I think it may be as is often the case that this listener is judging that based on the amount of food. It’s kind of like, oh my gosh, I look at the size of my 2-year-old and then I look at the amount of food they just ate.
(14:47):
There’s no way she’s not full. And yet my own personal experience, let alone professional experience, would suggest that there are times where it really would blow your mind how much a child can put away when they are again, maybe running around all day or on the verge of some sort of growth spurt physically or mentally and behaviorally. There are other times they will eat very little and you go in the other direction, how could this possibly sustain my child? They ate five peas and said they were full. And just to remember that actually the variability is pretty typical and pediatricians will say that, but it’s very different from adults who generally give or take eat roughly the same and need roughly the same caloric intake per day.
Dr. Sarah (15:42):
Yeah, because really, unless you’re training for something or engaging in some really strenuous physical activity every once in a while, not consistently, what you need is pretty fixed at this point in adulthood. But with kids, to your exact point, it’s just like what they need from one day to the next can be wildly different. I often will tell parents who are having anxiety around mealtimes, whether it’s because they’re not eating enough or they think they’re eating too much, is if you could give yourself permission as the parent to zoom out and look at the meals of the day in the aggregate. Even better if you could look at the meals of the week in the aggregate, that can sometimes help us actually realize, oh, wait, hold on. When I kind of average it all out, either over the course of the day or maybe over even the course of the week, there’s actually a really consistent amount of food coming into my child.
(16:43):
And it might be that one day they ate four bowls of spaghetti and the next day they ate a slice of cheese. But when you average it all out, it doesn’t feel as stark anymore. And I think that can be helpful when you as the parent are feeling a lot of anxiety because to your point at the very beginning of this episode, Rebecca, when we are anxious about what our child is or isn’t eating, we invariably start to put a lot of attention on meal times, and then our child may feel that pressure, and that can kind of also be a noise that gets in the way of their hunger, fullness cues. And so if you want your child to really be building that capacity to go inward and notice their hunger fullness cues, you don’t want to be adding noise to that process by being kind of a really intense presence at mealtimes either.
Dr. Rebecca (17:45):
And looking at what your anxiety is and being honest with yourself, am I nervous that my child’s going to feel uncomfortable if they’re too full? In which case, to your point, Sarah before, that’s some pretty great information for your child to have that will help them learn so they feel uncomfortable. I remember very clearly the Thanksgiving, probably roughly 1985 when I ate way too much and it was awful, and I did it. It was delicious. So I think that’s good information, and again, I think we all get ashamed to say this, but we live in a very specific culture. Are you worried your child’s going to get fat? Is your child a girl? And I would suggest looking at someone, let’s say like Virginia Soul Smith, who we can also link to who’s written a lot about the culture around fat for kids and developing kids and all of our biases and our unconscious biases and our best of intention biases that again, I think there’s a reason that mealtime, whether we’re looking at picky eating or overeating, there’s a reason it breeds so much anxiety in parents that you and I keep talking about the patients that we’ve talked about this with, and it’s loaded.
(19:03):
And as with everything we talk about on these beyond the session podcasts, the best thing we can do for our kids is pause, reflect on our own stuff, possibly do a little bit of a deeper dive into our own stuff, to just, as you said, separate out what’s happening, what’s noise? What’s my noise? What’s my kid’s noise? And that’s what I would advise to this mom, for sure.
Dr. Sarah (19:29):
Yeah. Yeah. When you said is this, obviously we read the question, we know it’s a girl, but your point being like, is this a daughter that hit me? I was like, Ooh. Yeah, because even, and I watch myself do this and I watch myself with the full awareness that of all the stuff I’ve read and know and teach other people, I know what I’m doing. I watch myself do it, and I can’t not do it. I have to really check myself, but I have a son and a daughter and they will be sitting at the table with the exact same meal, and I’m paying far more attention to what she’s eating than I am to what he’s eating. And it’s really hard when they’re out and they want something really junky. And I’m like, yeah, I think about what she’s getting and I don’t really think about what he’s getting.
(20:22):
And it’s my own stuff. As a human female who grew up in the eighties and nineties around diet culture and around, I think I’ve even talked about some of the podcast a couple times, but eating disorders were just rampant when we were growing up. I had one, and I spent a of years working through rebuilding my own relationship to food, and I still catch myself having anxiety around what my daughter eats. And then I can fortunately, when I catch myself, do the work of saying, sit back, embrace it and relax. Because the more I can notice my anxiety around food and notice what I might be projecting onto my kids, the more I can just let it stay with me and not seep into them. And it’s right.
Dr. Rebecca (21:23):
It’s the noticing. It’s the noticing. And then that leading to a potential pause. The other thing I would just say about that is the pendulum has swung in some ways where we look at diet culture of the eighties, nineties, and then now to say that you might be afraid that your child is going to get fat, feels like a very not okay thing to say in certain parenting groups. I’m aware that we live in a little bit of a bubble, but that somehow, if I acknowledge that I’m afraid that life might be harder for my daughter if she is fat, that somehow I can’t say that I’m not a progressive enough parent. I’m not. And again…
Dr. Sarah (22:10):
You’re kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Right?
Dr. Rebecca (22:13):
And we just do so much better as parents, and I’m going to say as moms, if we just say the thing, just say the thing. I’ve had such incredibly meaningful conversations with parents who can come in to our sessions and just say, look, I’m terrified my kid’s going to get fat. I’m just going to say it. And I’m not like, oh my gosh, you are. How primitive are you? It’s like, yeah, because many of us as parents did grow up during that time, and the data on health and obesity is frankly confusing. Let’s just name the things and then we can be in a position where at least we’ve said it out loud and we can talk to other people and have community around it, which we also talk about on this podcast. That’s in some ways half the challenge.
Dr. Sarah (23:02):
But critically is to talk about it with other grownups and other community and not let it play out with you and your child or have it be something that your child has to hold or feel undigested, no pun intended. But yeah, these are grown. My feelings about my, and frankly my daughter, I have really, no, I’m in a unique lucky position in terms of I have a very healthy child that I can really easily say all of the things that I have, the anxieties that I have about anything she’s eating, I can very clearly identify as my own thing. It’s coming from inside the house.
(23:49):
There aren’t environmental cues that are activating that anxiety, for example, with this mom who’s writing in saying, I am worried about this behavior I’m observing in my child, and I don’t know what to make of it all the time. And yes, I might. Yes, it’s possible she’s projecting some of her own fears or biases or anxieties onto what it could mean if her daughter keeps eating past full, but she’s seeing a behavior and she’s trying to make sense of it. Whereas I’m not necessarily seeing that particular behavior in my family, and I still have anxiety. So my point is to separate out those things of, sometimes it’s hard to know what’s your stuff and what’s your kid’s stuff, because it’s confusing and sometimes it’s a little easier because you can identify like, Hey, there’s really no cues here but my own.
Dr. Rebecca (24:38):
Yeah, I agree with all of that.
Dr. Sarah (24:42):
Well, I hope that we answered this mother’s question, and I really hope that she heard our pulling apart her question as a really genuine way of wanting to truly understand the nuance and not at all picking apart her attempts to make sense of this, because I really think this is a really valuable question, and I’m glad she’s thinking about it, and I’m grateful she’s sending in the question to us. And if you listen to this podcast, can’t just never going to give you a straightforward, easy answer, we’re the worst.
Dr. Rebecca (25:20):
By which you mean the best.
Dr. Sarah (25:22):
Yes, the best. I hope. I mean, I assume people seem to love this show, which I’m so grateful for. You guys write the most awesome reviews and you write me awesome emails, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am to have an opportunity to talk to you all every single week and get a good excuse to hang out with my good friends like Rebecca and Emily. So yeah, I’m grateful. This is awesome.
Dr. Rebecca (25:50):
Absolutely here to all of that.
Dr. Sarah (25:53):
Awesome. All right, well, let us know all your thoughts, send us emails, write a review, and we’ll see you guys soon.
Dr. Rebecca (26:03):
Bye.

Dr. Sarah (26:05):Thank you so much for listening. As you can hear, parenting is not one size fits all. It’s nuanced and it’s complicated. So I really hope that this series where we’re answering your questions really helps you to cut through some of the noise and find out what works best for you and your unique child. If you have a burning parenting question, something you’re struggling to navigate or a topic you really want us to shed light on or share research about, we want to know, go to drsarahbren.com/question to send in anything that you want, Rebecca, Emily, and me to answer in Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions. That’s drsarahbren.com/question. And check back for a brand new securely attached next Tuesday. And until then, don’t be a stranger.