As a trusted and experienced clinical counsellor for over 25 years in mental health and educational settings as well as private practice, Deborah serves as a leading international expert who provides counselling and educational services to support parents, professionals, and educators. She is also a professional speaker who has presented to the United Nations and The Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education.

Deborah specializes in the relational-developmental approach based on the work of Dr. Gordon Neufeld, empowering parents to become the expert on their children with everyday questions and practical strategies. She came to this work as a new mother herself, curious and confident that his approach could shift not only her children’s futures forever, but also her professional approach to supporting and helping others. Today, she serves on Faculty at the Neufeld Institute.

Deborah is the author of the best selling book, Rest, Play, Grow: Making Sense of Preschoolers (or anyone who acts like one) which has been translated into 14 languages and the children’s picture book, The Sorry Plane, which is available in three languages. Her new book Nourished: Connection, Food, and Caring for our Kids (and everyone else we love), was released September 19, 2023.

Joe

Hello everyone, welcome aboard. This episode this week is with Deborah McNamara. She is a trusted and experienced clinical counsellor and has been for over 25 years in mental health and educational settings as well as private practise. She serves as a leading international expert who provides counselling and educational services to support parents, professionals and educators. She is also a professional speaker who has presented to the United Nations and the Dalai Lama Centre for Peace and Education. The author of a few books, Rest Play Grow, a children's book called The Sorry Plane and her latest book, which is all what the podcast is about, called Nourished. Connection, Food and Caring for our Kids, in brackets And Everyone Else We Love. What did you think of it?

Olga

It's one of those conversations that's just bound to change the way you think about food and our everyday job of feeding our kids, which is not always the easiest.

Joe

So thank you, Deborah, welcome. Thank you for your book Nourished, one of my absolute favourite books. We were thinking about a quote I often use,  I think it's from Plato, "You can find out more about someone in an hour of play than a lifetime of conversation." And it almost feels like what you've done with this book is a similar thing but with the subject of food and relationship. How food is all about relationship, and everywhere you go, when you find books on food, it's all about nutritional value or behaviour. Or, for someone who's not read the book, could you just start by telling us more about that kind of link between the food and relationship?

Deborah

Well, thanks, Joe. That's high praise from you in terms of your delight for the book. And Olga, thank you so much for having me here. How did the book come to be? Well, the book is definitely about how food and relationships come together, how they've come apart and how we need to reclaim that relationship again. And it's something that we're quite blind to because we've just, it's just been inculcated for so many decades now. We've inherited food practises from our parents and so on and so forth that have actually torn food and relationships apart. And it's not really just about eating at a table, eating together. You can eat besides someone and there can be no togetherness. There's lots of family meals where a sense of cohesiveness is absent. And so it's not as simple as a a prescription here, which is where we usually end up, well, eat family meals together. Yeah, but that's not the story.

Deborah

There's actually a a deeper, more beautiful love story here that I've retold through developmental and relational science. But, you know, full honesty and disclosure is I actually got to this topic because I was struggling as a parent with my two to three-year olds, which is about 3. And this idea of picky eating. And you know what? What am I gonna do? And getting frustrated. And so here I was working with families and teaching about relationships and I was creating an attachment problem with my daughter through food. And I thought, what are you doing? How is this happening? One daughter ate really well and there wasn't a problem. And my other one, there was resistance, there was opposition, there was counterwill, I'm just like I'm going backwards. And so I turned to to my mentor, Gordon Neufeld, where I was doing a postdoc at a time with him. And I got to sit with him and ask him some questions,

Deborah

and that's how I open up the book. He didn't give me any answers, and I had to go and find them for myself. I said to him recently, "I bet you never thought I was going to write a book when you didn't answer my question,". He said "No. I didn't see that coming."

Joe

I love that story. In the book when you talk about the daughter was just eating cheese or bread, I think, and he said throw in some cheese and wine there and you got yourself a lovely meal.

Deborah

Yeah, he was very cheeky. He's like, yeah, it's a perfect meal. I was very upset though. I'm like, you know, vegetables is important and nutrition is important. Don't make a mockery out of how important nutrition is. Nutrition is important. However, we were never meant to share so much nutritional information with our children and when we do, we court them into being in charge of their food and their health and their well-being. And we make food work. Food was never meant to be work. It is meant to be enjoyment,  meant to be pleasure. But as parents, we do a lot of work around food. There is no doubt about it. And we are working hard to think about it, fishing all those things. And that's wonderful. But we weren't meant to make our children responsible for such things.

Deborah

And so that's part of our undoing is our children feel far too much here. We know too much. And you know, my parents used to tell me you gonna eat your carrots, so you don't go blind. Imagine that you're six. I've got to eat carrots so I don't lose my vision, right. It's just like it's crazy. The kind of stuff that we say that's so coercive around food, you never look at a carrot the same way again.

Olga

I think we say here in England that RAF pilots used to eat carrots to see better. Now that's something to aspire to, right? If you put it like that. But that's become part of the national curriculum as well. Primary school children get lessons in what's healthy and what's not, and they're very much invited to be in charge of their food choices.

Deborah

Yeah. Yeah. And that is the case around in North America as well, in Canada, the US for sure. This practise is part and parcel of education now. And the challenge with that is that it assumes that the knowledge abuot well-being has to exist inside of the child. It makes it about work. And when you look at the research, there is actually no efficacy to it. It actually doesn't change food habits. It doesn't change the nature of what they're eating. Just informing them about what's good or bad doesn't actually make a difference. So we spend tonnes of money on something that actually doesn't make a difference. What does make a difference?

Deborah

Relationship, Having someone that you're connected to take the lead on food. There's some play, there's an element of connection. And children also involved in experiential ways of learning about their food through cooking and growing food and picking and, you know, playing with their food, tasting and getting to have some autonomy around it. Those types of things. Those experiential activities actually lead to better food choices and habits, but it's done invisibly.

Joe

You know that there's a story I have around that as well. Have you heard of Jamie Oliver?

Deborah

Yeah, I love Jamie Oliver.

Joe

Yeah, yeah, he's great, Loads of good work around school meals here. But he had, he's had lots of programmes and on one of them I always remember he got a load of kids together and showed them what went into the a chicken nugget and there was all this nasty stuff and they were looking at it and they were, you know, they're like ohh, disgusting. And then the last, his last thing, he was hoping and he said, and this is what it looks like at the end, and he showed them a perfect chicken nugget. And they all said, yay, chicken nugget and yay, exactly it. They can understand everything. But they can't. They can't make those decisions.

Deborah

No. And you also have to realise that a lot of food is formulated to taste really good and we're pleasure seekers as well. As a parent, you're trying to provide the best food that you can for your child. This is a real tension that I had to wrestle with is that I believe parents are doing the best they can with nutrition. In fact, a study came out in North America and said that when they surveyed over 1000 parents, they said 87% of them were really clear on what food they should be feeding their kids. They had a lot of information. They felt that part was actually really clear. So I believe parents are going to do the best with the resources they have, with the prices of food right now, especially in my neck of the woods. You know, a head of lettuce being $7.00, it's like, wow, families are gonna try to do what they can. But where I thought the the research was really interesting is that over 70% of parents in that same survey said what they were confused by or didn't know was how to feed their kids in terms of getting them to eat nutritious meals, getting them to try different foods and the variety being open to these experiences. That's where parents said we don't know how to do this

Deborah

and that's when you realise where the breakdown has come because the how part of eating is meant to happen in the context of caring relationships. It's relationship that makes you receptive to receive what someone is giving you to taking good care of you. Kids were meant to learn or eat or follow just about anybody. They follow the people they're attached to and so of course this also happens in feeding. But we treat food as fuel, we don't look at relationship, We think kids should just take stuff from whoever offers it because it's nutritious. It's good for you. That's what the medical community tells you. Or, you know, that's what whoever's telling you is the best food to eat. It doesn't quite work that way with kids. They learn from people and they follow people they're attached to. So we gotta, we gotta go back to attachment.

Olga

So what? What is the vision? What would a family where a healthy happy eater is growing look like? And what would it look like at a school, for example?

Deborah

Well, the key principle always is to have an adult assume responsibility for the caretaking to take responsibility for the food, how it's delivered, where it's delivered. A child, if you follow, know Ellyn Satter's division of responsibility, which is a wonderful script for eating, is that, you know, so the adult takes the lead on such matters. The child is responsible for what they want to eat and how much. Trusting that there's an autonomous being here who can pay attention to their cues for hunger. That isn't always the case, of course. If a child's very emotionally stirred up, they can't always feel their cues for hunger, which is part of the challenge. But generally speaking, we want food to be delivered by someone who's taking responsibility for that. I will take care of you. And this is what it looks like. The second part would be, do we have a relational context? Do we have a gathering place? Do we have some sort of symbol that we're going into a place of rest where we're going to eat?

Deborah

It's not about work, It's about connection and it's about food, so that we're pairing food and relationship together. Nutrition isn't just fuel here. Food isn't just something that you need to get your body busy so it can focus and learn or keep your body strong. It's about connection. It's about a gift. It's about something that's shared with us. It's an invitation to say, you know, we're just going to be together for a bit, take a break and we're going to be together and eat. And so the context is really important as someone taking the lead on the food is really important. Those two are cornerstones. And then doing it repeatedly, having some ritual and routine to it so that someone can, you know, anticipate that your body and your, you know, your body starts to know when it's hungry. If you get into that routine, you know kids will start to say is it, you know, lunchtime yet you can, you can look up and you're like you're almost on the money cause your your tummy starts to anticipate this time of rest and being together. So those would be the key things,

Deborah

responsibility, the relational context and having some ritual and routine to it.

Joe

And you know, the responsibility. That's something I noticed about in me. I don't know where this came from really. I always catch myself saying no, OK, what do you want? Or offer a choice. And sometimes I stop myself. I'll make sure it's I've played for like half an hour. I'll be conscious so I know what I'm doing and I'll just go and get something and just go give it to them without saying anything and just put it and they just, it just goes in without. They just take it very naturally. But when I'm in that place, OK, what do you want? And then as soon as I've done it, I realise ohh, I've set myself up here for trouble. But it just happens so naturally. I don't know.

Joe

I wonder where that's come from?

Deborah

Well, I actually would see it differently. I think what's most natural is how you caught yourself. I think what you were replaying is something that wasn't natural. I think it was your instincts that stopped you there. And that's what I'm curious about, is what were the instincts and emotions that caught you there that said, no, I'm not gonna ask them what was that about? Because that's the natural place from which we're meant to feed.

Joe

Reading the book and learning what we've done as well, that's helped. But I wonder if I hadn't been aware of some of the stuff that I've learned, whether I would be catching myself, I would just be getting into the frustrations or the battles, but I would just be going almost blind.

Deborah

I think that's the cultural piece, right? That's the cultural piece. We're looking around and saying what's out there. This is the practises we've inherited from our own upbringing and probably our parents' own experiences as well. So this is generational?

Joe

Yeah, we go to the supermarket and there's just choice everywhere. It's just passing that on, whereas I'll invite people to play with this as well, just to go and just produce something without saying anything and just see the difference because it's so huge.

Deborah

Yeah. But I love the shift and I would say the shift in you is the natural position. Hold on a second. I'm gonna be responsible here. I'm the adult, look at what I can provide. I'm stepping into my beautiful provider role. That is the natural position. It's the fact that that has gotten so buried under practises that have become normalised, which we don't question. We're not critical about. You know, it's interesting. I'm going to New Zealand in a bit for some speaking in Australia, New Zealand and one of my friends in New Zealand, or colleagues, she said are you OK with seafood for dinner? Because my husband's gonna go out diving and get sometimes he finds this or this or this. Would you be OK with whatever?

Deborah

I'm like why does this feel unusual? Because it's like it's whatever the ocean is going to offer us today. Whatever is going to be taken from this beautiful place to offer up themselves for our well-being. And so it's like, yeah, I will generously accept this beautiful gift whatever that might look like. It's not gonna be just about the food it's the invitation. It's from where it came from. I'm eating off the land. I'm part of the land. As she talks this way. I feel so connected. I already feel quite full from that whole invitation. "My husband's going to go diving to take from the ocean something for our celebration and our trip." And I'm like,

Deborah

Can you imagine getting your food or being taken care of this way? Like, how does that shift, food as a gift? How does it shift that sense that someone's providing for me and Mother Nature is providing for me? It's profound. You realise how much we've lost in seeing food as fuel. Food is about relationship, your history, your place, your people. It's about so much more. It's so rich.

Olga

Ohh, that is so profound. So the parents look after the children, hosts look after guests, and in a larger picture the land and the ocean look after us humans who probably don't deserve it anymore, but they still do. This is a connection that is so important to bring to children as opposed to the supermarkets looking after us because they aren't.

Deborah

It's depersonalised. That's the key issue, is that when food is personal, it creates a whole set of emotions inside of you. What is the emotion that you feel? As I go through that story, the emotion that I already feel and why I feel full is because I feel gratitude like I haven't eaten anything. And yet I feel tremendous gratitude that nature is taking care of me, that my host is taking care of me, That you know I'll be there with my sister and we'll be enjoying a meal together with friends. Like I already feel nourished because I'm being taken care of. It's that personalised sense of caretaking that creates gratitude in the person who is receiving. And it makes it reciprocal. You want to give back not only to that person, but you want to give back to somebody else. You want to take care of somebody else too. And that's how nature wired us up together

Deborah

in this beautiful, cascading care. When we feel taken care of, we want to take care of others. There's reciprocity. So that's how children fall in love with nature. That's how they come to know her beautiful gifts. That's what makes them want to give back and protect it. It's what keeps our kids close to us. You stay close to the one who feeds you. Right. That saying, don't bite the hand that feeds you. No, never. Not when they feed you so generously. So does it matter what the food is? Yes. We're going to pay attention to that.

Deborah

But don't forget the love story that's underneath here. This is all about relationship and what it does to us inside and to our emotions and our sense of connection to others. The generosity, the warmth, the invitation we feel. Ohh, that's the stuff that's truly fulfilling and lasting. Your your stomach will empty. But those things do not. Those things stay with you all the way to the grave and beyond. And that's what that's to me. What true longevity looks like is you're always held in somebody's heart for the long term.

Joe

Makes me think of my my mother-in-law. My wife's from Colombia. One of the first times I met her mother, and she's a big food provider. . She won't even let you in the kitchen kind of thing, you know, this is her place. And one of the first things she said was we've only just met. She said something like, I'll be waiting for you in the kitchen. It was a strange thing to hear because I've not heard it before, but it's just what you say. That invitation, "I'm gonna provide for you whenever you're ready." And it was strange at first for me. You could take that in a different context, out of context as well. And it could sound completely different. It's easy to forget the love story in that.

Deborah

Well, who wouldn't want to eat in someone's kitchen? Who said, you know if you're at someone's house as a guest, I'll wait for you in the kitchen like you're playing out relationship, but through the safest way, through food oftentimes. Well, it's not always safe for everybody, but in their own heads, yeah, in their hearts. But this sense of I'm gonna be waiting for you. When you're hungry, when you need something, when you're ready, I'm here. It's an invitation. You can't. We're not meant to force feed each other. We're not meant to force ourselves into relationship. We need a bit of a medium to get us going. And one of the beautiful mediums besides play is food. Tea, soup, these universal foods that wherever you go around the world, I would say most cuisines probably have tea or soup. And it's these hot, warm things that bring us together that are

Deborah

part of cuisines. It's not a mistake. It's the most universal. You don't need teeth to eat them. You could be any age. You can have tea and soup usually. And this brings together. There is warmth in the food and the warmth that gets connected to the relationship. And it's a beautiful invitation. That's what it is at. The essence is an invitation.

Olga

What was hugely validating for me in your book was the idea that we don't necessarily eat when we're hungry. That is a misconception. We can be starving and a child can be starving and still not receptive to the food.

Deborah

Yeah, when you get that, you understand it's not so simple as OK, you're hungry, here you go. Well, first of all, you don't always feel your hunger. Well why is that? Because the body has a capacity to press down on the sensorium. So from your physical senses, which would include your satiation and and how full you are, empty you are, when there are emotional things that need to be taken care of. Emotional threats, threats to safety, security, the connection. The brain jumps into gear and says, I need to protect that. Most of all, I need to focus my attention there. You'll see a lot of the blood flow goes to the emotional centre of the brain. The brain already consumes about 25% of the body's energy. But as soon as you have an emotional problem on the doorstep, it needs more energy. So it borrows from digestion. You don't feel hungry anymore because the brain is invested in solving this emotional problem of disconnection.

Deborah

And so it's hungry, it's hungry to solve that. And so we don't feel our hunger. Because hunger is secondary to that. And that's the piece we don't get, which I tackled in the book, was that Maslow, Abraham Maslow got this absolutely wrong. Abraham Maslow said food came first. No, it didn't! He put love third. What we didn't understand is that Maslow created a hierarchy out of his own psychology. He was a traumatised child. He had incredible abuse from both parents, and harboured it still to the day he died. And he created a psychology around it which he put food first. Well, that's not true. Everything happens in the context of

Deborah

relationship. The brain is organised around attachment, the instincts and emotions to keep us close. And so it's a misnomer to think that the brain is going to be able to process and focus on our physical needs when there is something more important at the doorstep, which is our emotion and our attachment needs. There isn't a neuroscientist who studies this area who doesn't say it comes first, absolutely first connection.

Olga

And this is so huge and this also was so huge in generation that that was our parents. "Well, if they aren't eating, then they can't be hungry." No, that's not how it works. And we'll just give them the dinner for breakfast because it's food, it's valid food. It's got to be eaten.

Deborah

Yeah, there is. You know how many of us have lost our appetites when we're under high stress or there's a threat to our loved one? How many kids are forced to eat food at school and yet say they have tummy aches by 2:00 because the tummies aren't digesting it because they're alarmed and they're not in connection. We can even eat, but the body doesn't even process it. You know, you can get kids who vomit out of anxiety. The body says, no, this is not the time for me. I've got another agenda here and that's about human connection and fixing what is broken. Now that can get stuck and it can be ongoing and you see all sorts of food problems come out of that. When you really trace the roots of tonnes of food problems, you see that relational problems can quickly become food problems and food problems can quickly become relationship ones. And it's not all about what happens in the home. It's about the stress, the culture we live in, kids going to school, things happening outside the home. But as parents are responsible for taking the lead on feeding and providing, they can come home. Being bullied at school, we've got a child who's lost their hunger then doesn't feel safe. What are we gonna do with that? That becomes our responsibility, right?

Joe

And how dangerous is it when you couple that with OK, you're responsible for your nutrition? How dangerous is that.

Deborah

It's really dangerous. If you look at what's happening in social media for many of our teenagers, they're following each other. You can find lots of people if you're a teen or young adult or even, you know, in the middle years. You can find lots of people on the Internet who are not much older than you, telling you what they eat in a day, what you should eat, what you shouldn't eat, what's good for you, what's bad for you, why they don't have this entire food group. The kids follow these people on the Internet, they don't know they have no vested interest in them, that they have disordered views around food and possible disordered eating themselves. And so there's this depersonalization, not just to food itself, but to who feeds you. And so if you put matters of food into a child's hand, then that's gonna go in any direction it goes. They're gonna find substitutes for information, they're gonna become less receptive to being taken care of. And not just in food, but in other areas too. That's the thing that we don't realise.

Deborah

It's not like you can parcel out food from learning or your other emotions that you need to be taken care of. It infects the caretaking relationship. And so if you correct it in food, you can actually see the benefits to everything as well, where the child has more receptivity overall to your lead, which is so critical.

Olga

Yes, I'm just doing the Making Sense of Adolescence course with the Neufeld Institute at the moment and Robin Brooks-Sheriff, the course facilitator, who has been on the podcast. There is a wonderful episode with her about parenting our teenagers. And she says, "Let your teen take responsibility. Find those domains they can take over in their life, but don't let it be food. Don't let them feed themselves."

Deborah

As much as possible, you know, And of course there's always parents are doing the best they can, single parents, parents who work different shifts and things like that. But we can still take the responsibility. When we say, I got this for you, it's in the fridge, throw it together. I thought of, you know, you coming home, here's snacks or whatever, I might not be there. There's ways that we can provide without necessarily being there. But yes, taking the lead on food with the team is wonderful. Why? Because they're growing, they're usually quite hungry and they all like good food and they all want someone to take care of them this way and so exploit this need. So you could stay close as well. Teens have a lot more autonomy. They will come home for food if there is a provider and and food available for them, someone taking care of them, they still long for that. And it's a wonderful way to stay close when so much divides you. Mydaughter's in university and she's quite close by, but she lives on campus and she wants to have that autonomy.

Deborah

But I'll get this call sometimes. The other night it was 10:30 at night and she says, "Mom, can we go out and get a lavender latte?" There's this lavender latte she's found at one of the stores at the one of the coffee shops and they're open like all hours like till two o'clock - three o'clock in the morning. It's geared towards students and so I'm in my pyjamas. I'm about ready to go to bed. I do not want to leave my house at 10:30 at night to go get a lavender latte. But I'm like, this isn't about a lavender latte. This isn't about that at all. This is about, I don't know what,

Deborah

but I better get out of my pyjamas and get into the car and get down there to pick her up and go for a lavender latte so that we can connect and she can express whatever it is that needs to be expressed. Maybe she's just lonely, maybe it's nothing big but you know? And that's the thing when we say to people, it's not like we're going to go for a coffee like we've been. We can't drink coffee or tea by ourselves. Hey, let's go for a coffee. Nobody needs to drink coffee with somebody in the sense of the benefits of coffee and caffeine. The whole idea of "let's go for coffee" means let's connect. I haven't seen you. I want to chat. I miss you. It's an invitation, but we say let's go for a coffee.

Deborah

What about the coffee? It's not about lavender latte people. Your teenagers can't say I still need you. Yes.

Joe

I can speak from experience with that one as well. I still remember being a teen and that was the only way to get me back, food.

Deborah

Yeah.

Joe

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a fly to the light. Yeah. I'm coming. Yeah.

Deborah

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't say to your teenager, "Ohh. Come on, give me a hug. I miss you. Where's my little girl?" They'll be like, "Ohh, get away from me, woman. You're too smothering. I'm trying to grow up. What are you doing?" But you say, "Hey, you know I got pizza hanging around. You wanna got pizza?"

Deborah

My daughter. Tonight, she's like, "Mom. If I take an earlier ferry to come over, would there be sushi?" Of course there's sushi. I I text my husband, "We're having sushi tonight."

Olga

Thank God for food!

Deborah

Exactly. I actually did this as part of the research. I look for animals that didn't need to be fed often. There's camels, there's bears, right? Four months or so. Plus they can go without food and hibernation. Desert frogs. I found a something called the water moth, which is a microscopic organism that lives almost 30 years without food and water. Can you imagine what that would look like for us? Ohh, 30 years later. Ohh. Who are you?

Deborah

I'm your mother. Yeah, it's been 30 years. Like, I think nature was very intentional in giving us very small stomachs. Like, think about our body, our arms and our legs. They're very big. Our brain is probably even bigger than our gut. It gave us these tiny, tiny little stomachs. Don't you find that a little odd? Yeah. Like. Hmm. I wonder what she was thinking here. She was thinking.

Deborah

You better come. Home and say hi once in a while. Let me feed you and take care of you. It's a way of keeping us close to each other.

Olga

Breastfeeding babies. How else would we know that they need to be held all the time? But that's our job to feed them. OK, that' we can get easily.

Deborah

Yeah and how beautiful the body orchestrates the breastfeeding like from the temperature from your your milk flow and as it changes like babies who live in really cold areas, the milk changes to have more fat content. The saliva passes back and and the body says, the mother's body says, OK there's this stuff in the baby saliva. I better create the proper immune antibodies in the next round of breast milk. And so there's this beautiful interplay. And not every mother can breastfeed and that's very hard on mothers oftentimes, but that's OK, you can still do connection, you can still hold your baby and you can still do all those pieces. But I think where it falls apart is that in utero hopefully the placenta is feeding the baby. And then we have breastfeeding, which can be a little bit more tricky to get started with some kids, but then we have to take the lead. We then have to say, OK, I gotta prepare food and then feed this child. And nature says, OK, here's your ramp. It's you're slowly coming in now you gotta take the lead and then you get the three-year old

Deborah

who says "I do it myself! No, I don't like peas anymore. I like my sandwich cut into fours now." And you're just like, who are you where did you come from? And it's the age of 3. Two to three is this age of autonomy where they they go from being just simply fed to becoming an eater And then we panic because now they have their own mind about stuff and we're like, what's happened? Why aren't you so easy to be fed anymore. Who who are you? What do you mean you don't like my meatloaf anymore? You used to love my meatloaf? We're like, how did this happen? Well, ah, you now have a child who is like,

Deborah

fully autonomous. We should give them a little birthday at age 3. Happy birthday to you, you have arrived because you've had good attachment. Now you've got your own mind, your own wants, your own wishes, your own desires and you are combative as a result of all this beautiful growth and development. It's incredible, this journey to becoming an eater and how we take for granted what a process this is.

Olga

We can still harness those attachment forces.  With my eldest we used to do the daddy marketing. He will refuse what's on his plate. But if I offer it to daddy and daddy loves it, oh, OK then.

Deborah

Yeah.

Olga

With my youngest who is 2 at the moment, so I'm living this. We will have exactly the same things in our plates. He will reject his, climb on my lap and he literally goes, "Woo mummy's food!" and he loves it and it's exactly the same. Yes it isn't.

Deborah

Yeah, yeah. No, it's your food. It's empowered through love. And they'll feed you too. Like, I had my 18 month old and you just see this ignition of this cascading care or these attachment instincts. 18 months of age. I'm feeding him an apple. He doesn't speak, He doesn't really say too much at all and he's just starting to walk. I put an apple into his mouth. He reaches out, takes the apple from his mouth because he doesn't want me to be left out I guess. Let's get it into my mouth. I'm like, OK, we could do it this way too, but it's this. It's you see, he's so cared for. He is so loved and this beautiful unleashing of caretaking instincts as represented through food. It's just, it's the magic. It's the secret sauce to feeding.

Olga

At the same time, there's no frustration bigger than the frustration of the provider who's cooked this beautiful meal that's rejected. Have you got any words of comfort for that parent?

Deborah

Well, have I ever been there? A hundred times over. I think the key thing is,  why are we so frustrated? Because it thwarts our provider instincts. We want to provide. It's also the work that's gone into it, the sacrifice that's gone into it, the financial issue, the worry about nutrition and how alarmed we are. We feel so responsible for keeping them. Well we can't forget that we have our own set of emotions that is brought into this task of feeding someone. And so when they don't take us up on our offer, my goodness has it ever set up a cascade of emotions inside of us. And I think that the key thing and I, and again for as I reflect on myself as a parent and also what parents in my research told me as well as developmental science, is that this isn't a unique situation in the sense that our kids don't always follow or take us up on our offers. You know  the night time story. It's time for bed. Let's brush your teeth. Let me help you with your homework. This isn't exactly new.

Deborah

We've been dealing with resistance and opposition across the board and so part of it is that we must keep in sight that relationship is key. A child has their own emotions and their own needs. Be curious first of all, and work inside relationship. If you start attaching your own resistance or your frustration or your alarm to this process, it digs in emotions with your child. So stay in that place of caretaking.

Deborah

Your tummy says it's not hungry right now. That's OK. We're going to eat. It's OK. You eat what you need to at the table. We're all gonna just stay here. You get on with it, you talk. It doesn't have to be just about the food.  In your head you're thinking, OK, what's going on? Are they sick? Have they had a bad day? Is there some tension at the table that I need to pay attention to? There's another practical side, which is how am I going to get, you know, the food, if this child needs food, into them later? Is it going to be a snack that I serve? Do I serve this dinner later as I read a book with them?

Deborah

What does that look like? How am I gonna take the lead on this? I've seen all sorts of different, different circumstances this way. I've seen kids who, for emotional reasons, will not eat at the table and yet the parent will sit down at 9:00 at night. I know it's maybe not the time you want to be eating. Maybe it's not even great for their body to be eating at this time, but it's the time that it gets in. It's a temporary fix to the fact that this child can't eat at a table with you. You sit down 8:00 or 9:00 at night, you have that same meal together. I remember a family doing this and it just slowly brought their child back into relationship to the others at the table because they went to where it worked and then they fostered relationship and then brought them back into the family. There was a lot of things going on for that child relationally at that table that he just couldn't stand to be there. It wasn't about the food.

Deborah

So I I think be curious, be curious about what you're seeing, trying to make sense of it. Don't react. It is frustrating. You'll find a way. Just be patient.

Joe

Just like any feeling as well, we want them to find their hunger. If they need to feel sad, you can't just say OK, that happened. Feel your sadness. It's not gonna happen. We have to set everything up so we can get there, but they have to kind of fall into it themselves at the end. So it's just about getting them to that place where if they fall, great, but if they don't, keep the environment so that when they're ready, they can fall.

Deborah

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You've gotta preserve the context that's so important because you've gotta come back to that over and over and over again. And so if every time you come to the context here, where you're feeding, eating happens, it's laden with arguments and disagreements, like you're going to have a hard time. I had a friend once, her husband passed away. She had two children. Obviously very difficult for the family, but coming to the table was... no one could bear it. There was Dad's place. He wasn't there. I said, well, don't push it. Like, don't. It doesn't have to be happening there.

Deborah

Where does it work? Does it work when you're outside of the house? If you went out and ate somewhere, take out. Yeah, that works. Does it work if you get take out and eat at a picnic table or something closer to home or in the backyard? Yeah, that works, she said. It's funny. It also works when we eat on the couch and we don't eat at the table. OK, Then go to the places where the emotions aren't too intense, that you can feel your hunger and be together and that the sadness doesn't overwhelm you. How could the sadness not? So just back up. Say, OK, what do I need to do to take the lead here? What's going on? How can I help this child?

Deborah

It's not all about us, that's for sure. It's not all about us. It's about what's also happening inside of that child and what they need from us to feel taken care of.

Olga

I'm going to bring in the big S-word: screens. When we were preparing for this episode, yeah, you know where it's going. When we were preparing for this episode, we disagreed on this. Joe was like, "When my kids eat in front of a screen, the note to myself in my head, is this is a one off. We're not going to make a habit of it." So you feel the danger in it, don't you? And to me sometimes it's like, "Oh my God, this is the only way they will eat. I can get that food into them before leaving the house,

Olga

and I will do it in front of a screen if that's what needs to happen." I'm also someone who is really bad at eating by myself. I'm someone who was fed by my grandma when I was a little girl to an endless story of a hoglet and a piglet that my grandma was telling me and making up every time. And the hoglet and the piglet would go on an adventure, and then they would come home to their mothers and always happen to have exactly the same food as I was having. So that was her marketing of the food. And now I I just can't eat by myself. The phone comes out, the screen needs to come out. It's just too, it's just too overwhelming, That plate of food. And that's what I project probably on my kids, that that's at the moment is too overwhelming for them to eat without a screen. Unless obviously our presence works

Olga

the trick. But if it doesn't, if it's not enough, could you speak about that when it's too vulnerable to eat?

Deborah

What to do? Ohh well my goodness I should have done a chapter on screens is what I'm realising in this book. I didn't do a chapter on this. I should write this and then just give it away. This chapter. Ohh this is a great question. So 1 why I think we eat with a screen or with music or TV on is there's again this is a myth. OK so ohh it's so horrible people are eating with screens on and stuff. I'm like hmm. How did we do it? I'm curious. The research on loneliness suggests that the people we have the hardest time keeping nutrition and food in are actually our elderly, because a lot of them are on their own, eating out by themselves. So they did a study where they put a mirror in front of them and so they could see themselves. They found that the appetite, the the amount of food they ate increased when they had a physical presence.

Deborah

It was theirs. It was a mirror. And then I thought, hmm, putting the radio on or the TV on. It's about connection. It's depersonalised, but it's connection. We want the sounds of other people. We want the sounds of connection. The times that I slept the best was not in a quiet house. It's when my parents had my relatives over and there was a raucous going on, like there was a party going on in the kitchen. I remember falling to sleep on those nights, the most rested because I could hear the sound of everybody I was attached to. The sounds of our loved ones is not a problem. We are now searching, because we are eating more on our own, for the sounds of anybody and trying to attach that way, I think. So that I think is what's going on as you talk.

Deborah

When I raised my kids and they're, my eldest is 20 and then the youngest is 18. I could have turned on the TV, I guess, but I didn't have cell phones, iPads. I really just didn't pay too much attention and they slowly came in. I was a very late adopter. Now I'm now, I use it all the time. But I didn't have these things to get food into my kids. I never had the temptation. I had to figure it out. That's what you've been robbed of. In all honesty, that's what you've been robbed of. Is that you figuring it out as a provider. What is going on?

Deborah

How am I gonna do this? This is so frustrating. Do I play a game? Do I, you know, sit down with them? I'm not sitting down with them. We're not eating the same food. We're not eating family style. I'm not feeding them at the wrong time like they're sick. When we go to these quick fixes you're robbed of insight into your child. Sometimes you've made a mistake. You're trying to do too many things and hurrying out in the the morning and and getting them ready. Sometimes you haven't had enough connection time in the morning, like warm it up a little bit.  I had a family who had a four year old.

Deborah

It's like, OK, hurry up, get up, get your shoes on. Get dressed. Come on, let's go down. I'm just like, "You wake up your 4 year old like that? That's not gonna work. They need to be collected. They need a story, They need a hug. They need a little yes or something before they're gonna work and get ready for you to go to face daycare all day. How about a hello? Yeah, and then the child wants to move for you." So what are you missing when you use screens? What are you missing when you say oh it's a quick fix is what it is.

Deborah

And so that quick fix robs you of knowledge and insight and also the growth as a parent to try to figure out how am I going to make this work, this dance of relationship work. It's interesting what they say in a whole other side about feeding kids in front of screens. I was talking to a feeding a specialist who fixes like really severe eating issues in kids and she said that the pattern and the trend towards putting younger and younger kids in front of screens while eating, they now have to go back in and repair the mechanics and in that unconscious eating. In early ages, the kids are not programming or not getting wired up for eating and chewing swallowing. They're losing their sensations and their awareness of it, especially at the early years when you put a screen in front of them,  there's an unconsciousness about the process of eating, which is absolutely alarming for me to even think of it that way. So there's a developmental physical piece that comes when you put screens in the way and there isn't that conscious wiring of how to eat. The thing about screens is it's depersonalised. You know it's not you. The question I'd have for you, I'm not going to give a prescription to anybody about screens because you're going to do what you need to do.

Deborah

And every family has their own story and their own challenges and their own reasons. If I was going through a really hard time or say I was going through some physical challenges or cancer treatment, I might put on a little show at the table so we could all be together and probably bear what might be difficult for me, I don't know. There's a story out there. Why a screen would be helpful to be altogether around a table, especially if food is really challenging, I don't know. So I'm not going to give you a prescription. But what I will say is, ask yourself the question is, does that screen interfere with the connection getting to each other's faces, to the food, to understanding this and what does it do to human vulnerability? It lessens it, but maybe you need to have less because there's some tricky situations at the table. But does it allow for relationship? Maybe you wanna move it into more vulnerable territory. Well, screens might be in the way of that. So just play around with those two dynamics, relationship and vulnerability. And what is the screen doing in this?

Deborah

What is it robbing in the child? What is it robbing in me? Is it or is it facilitating? Is it helpful? And then make your mind up about screens. There's a time and a place for them. Is this the time and the place that you would choose?

Olga

So it's almost what could have been in the place of the screen.

Deborah

It's like play. You put them in front of a screen. What gets lost is play. It's like, well, it doesn't do any harm. Yeah, but it doesn't add to potential. The loss of potential is a loss. It is a lack, and that's the piece we don't get. We're like, ohh, there isn't a problem. Yeah. But you're not seeing what you are not getting to

Deborah

because you've got something that's getting in the way that's placating you where you're a consumer, where you're not a creator. You're consuming, consuming, consuming, but you're not in that creator emergent mode where you're individuating. If we're just sitting back and just consuming and sometimes we just want to tune out.

Joe

Have you got plans to write that chapter?

Deborah

I should now you've inspired me. If I do, I'm going to dedicate it to the two of you. I should have written more about screens in there. It just the topic is so big and we are using screens and it is a myth that needs to be looked at from both sides. There is two sides to this coin and you don't want an elderly who's on their own to listen to their favourite radio show, whatever it might be. Of course you would. It's connection. We want them to be in connection. I'm sorry that it's depersonalised but I'm not going to give out a prescription or platitudes that ohh no never screens. Let's understand why they're important or understand why someone's using it. What is it? What does it represent about their needs?

Olga

We can connect and have this screen on as well. Sometimes if we're not using it as a babysitter, we could watch something and eat together and there's connection as well.

Deborah

Ohh yeah, I have. I have this pizza oven my husband got me for Mother's Day. Of course, right. He gets me food things and it's like, well, let's be honest, my pizza was really horrible and I really loved pizza. My kids are like, dad, please don't let her make pizza anymore. He's like let's get her a pizza oven. So anyway, now I have the best pizza ever. But the reality is, is that when I get around and we have dinner parties with the pizza oven and everybody makes their own pizza. And then one of my friends just puts on some music, like on a screen, like YouTube or whatever it was and it was Italian music to go along with the pizza. And it was just like, Oh my gosh, this is the music we've been waiting for. It just elevated the whole experience. I'm just like, thank you Ohh, this is a wonderful idea. It's just made it so joyous and happy and so yeah, you know, there's a place for all of this.

Olga

Ohh, that's lovely.

Joe

Olga's got the last question normally that we like to ask everyone OK.

Olga

You wouldn't be surprised to hear. And you've just mentioned play. What do you do for play, Deborah?

Deborah

Ohh, I love this question. Of course. Well play. I love to play. There's many things that I love to play at. I love to move, I love to swim. I love my bike rides. I like to be in nature. I love to play with my dogs. I love to play with other adults. I love to play with ideas. I love to play music. I love to listen to music. I love play. I just don't oftentimes have enough time for my play.

Deborah

But no, I am. I'm always there for a laugh. I'm always there for a good time. I love music, though. I would say that's probably the closest to my heart. Music is exquisite in terms of the emotions that it can move out of me in play. It's definitely my therapy.

Olga

And it can even rescue a pizza.

Deborah

Yeah.

Joe

It certainly can. Thank you, Deborah. Thank you so much.

Olga

Thank you so much, Deborah.

Deborah

Lovely to meet you, Joe and Olga.

Olga

Thank you for listening. It was an absolute delight to talk to Deborah. If you liked the episode, please give us a rating and a follow on the platform where you're listening. That'll really help us. You can find the video clips from the interview, as well as the full transcript and a link to Deborah's work and the podcast on our website, www.thecaringinstinct.com. If you'd like to find out who our next guest is and have a chance to ask them a question, we invite to sign up on our website as well. Thank you and until the next time.