She has to eat a daily diet of about 2,500 calories consisting of all the food she hates most – chocolate, chips, cream and cheese. It’s a prospect she dreads.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Common sense seems to suggest to me that food shouldn’t become a control issue. Adults’ anxieties over food and fatness and thinness are being transmitted to children. Who insist on learning from reality rather than words – picking up all the things about us that we don’t want them to acknowledge and treating our hypocritical words with contempt. Maybe generally negotiating controls could actually move the conflict into other areas of the relationship between adults and children and might serve some purpose.<\/p>\n

Also, maybe we could stop fighting biology. Kids love sweet things – it’s a survival mechanism. They naturally eat when they are hungry and their bodies store excess to grow from. They naturally burst with life and enthusiasm for running and climbing and exploring – all the things that burn their food and build their bodies. As adults, we generally don’t live like this – being constantly active, eating when we are hungry – which is why we can’t regulate our own hunger. We bring up kids to live as we do then get confused when their body mechanisms respond. Or their minds respond to their own hunger for control and the social obsessions with weight by exerting control over their bodies through starving them.<\/p>\n

As a society, we can’t bear to see our own attitudes to our bodies mirrored so mercilessly by our offspring. We get obsessed with forcing them to show us a pretty mirror and we distract ourselves from living like human beings by trying to make our kids look as if we do.<\/p>\n