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Join me, Jess VanderWier, a registered psychotherapist, mom of three, and founder of Nurtured First, along with my husband Scott, as we dive deep into the stories of our friends, favourite celebrities, and influential figures.
In each episode, we skip the small talk and dive into vulnerable and honest conversations about topics like cycle breaking, trauma, race, mental health, parenting, sex, religion, postpartum, healing, and loss.
We are glad you are here.
PS: The name Robot Unicorn comes from our daughter. When we asked her what we should name the podcast, she confidently came up with this name because she loves robots, and she loves unicorns, so why not? There was something about the playfulness of the name, the confidence in her voice, and the fact that it represents that you can love two things at once that just felt right.
Hey, and welcome to Robot Unicorn, a podcast where we explore all things parenting.
I'm your co-host, Scott, joined
as always by my wife Jess, a registered psychotherapist who spent decades working with children and families.
Today we're absolutely thrilled to share our conversation with Dr.
Deborah McNamara
A clinical counselor, developmentalist, and faculty member at the Newfeld Institute, Deborah is the director of Kids Best Bet Counseling Center and brings over 25 years of experience working with children, youth, and adults.
She's an award-winning author whose books include the best-selling Rest Play Grow, which has been translated into more than 15 languages.
This episode specifically holds special meaning for us.
As Deborah has been not just a respected colleague.
but also a mentor and friend to Jess over the years.
Their shared passion for understanding children has informed so much of our own parenting journey and Jess's educational journey.
Today's conversation centers around the themes in Dr.
Deborah's latest book, Nourished, Connection Food and Caring for Our Kids.
We explore how feeding our children is about so much more than nutrition.
It's deeply intertwined with attachment, emotion, and the parent-child relationship.
As Deborah so beautifully puts it, the road to the stomach
must go through the heart.
So whether you're struggling with picky eaters, family mealtime chaos, or simply just curious about the deeper meanings of how we nourish our children.
This episode offers a fresh perspective that moves beyond rigid food rules and toward connection and understanding.
So
Grab a cup of something comforting, like a coffee or tea or something, and join us for this nourishing conversation with Dr.
Deborah McNamara.
Welcome to Robot Unicorn, hosted by my parents, Jess and Scott.
I hope you enjoyed the episode
Our topic today is mostly around nourished and the idea of eat food and eating and relationship and all that.
But before we dive into that, we'd love to hear about a moment or experience that first sparked your
your passion for that concept or understanding how we nourish ourselves just beyond the basics of food?
Because there must have been something that sort of spurred this on.
Yeah, there was many.
I mean I write about in the book about my daughter who was three.
Just incredible what I would call picky eating.
Well many parents would call picky eating.
And just being so frustrated and and going to Gordon Newfeld, who was my postdoc supervisor at the time and saying
You know, what am I supposed to do here?
I'm getting a battle here with my kids.
I'm creating an attachment problem, which is quite ironic because I'm helping other parents with their
attachment issues.
So it was a real crisis of confidence really.
And he basically turned my head around and and his answer, which I won't spoil it for you in the book.
was this isn't actually about the food.
And I think that's the whole underlying theme of everything.
It's actually not about the food as much as we think it is.
Of course we have
you know, neurobiological differences and sensitive palates and whatnot and and smell.
But really when we're starting to get into trouble around food and food issues
It's really about relationships.
So that turned my head around.
I thought I understood how to do this.
I eat, I like food, I fed my first daughter okay.
But my second daughter was completely different.
And so it threw me for a loop.
Yeah.
I love the way and nourished like all your work.
That's the underlying theme, right?
It's not about often the thing that we think it's about
So for people listening, Dr.
Deb and I, we meet regularly.
We've known each other for a couple of years now.
And I was thinking about the one time we were talking about how I was trying to serve my kids chicken on a bun
It was summertime and I just was dysregulated.
I was having a hard day and I thought to myself, I'll just make the girls something really easy that I know that they're gonna want to eat.
They love having chicken on a like a
Literally chicken, ketchup, and a hot dog bun.
Like the easiest thing.
I know they like this.
It's so easy.
So I made it for them and then I just gave them plates and said, okay, go outside, go eat
Like I just mommy needs a break.
I need to sit by myself.
And then they all are just like, I don't like this.
I don't like chicken on a bun.
And I was about ready to lose my my mind.
I'm like
You do, I know you do, I know you like this.
And I remember I told you the next day, and then we had a laugh about it, and then you said
Something so obviously wise, you know, well what kind of rested state were they in before you tried to serve them chicken on a pot?
And then we laughed.
I said, they weren't.
I just threw them the plates and told them to go eat
But I think about that conversation we had all the time because how often as parents are we feeding our kids in that way and then wondering why they won't eat?
Yeah, yeah, it's amazing.
I love that story.
And yeah, I mean it was good food.
It's what you always like.
What what could possibly go wrong here?
And there's so many invisible things that get attached to food.
It is an emotional event
It's meant to be paired with rest and safety and so when we're discombobulated or alarmed or in a hurry, all those emotions get in the way of opening up your tummy and and being receptive to food.
And we're just not meant to eat outside a connection
That's the other huge beats, but we're meant to eat in connection.
So yeah, they feel a little lost when we're not anchoring them.
We've got a million things we're doing in our head, but they're not quite as receptive
Yeah, and and I really wanted to get into that today because I think exactly what you just said, we're meant to eat in connection.
I think that's something that's so lost.
right now and even unnurtured first, whenever I talk about that, a big thing I'll talk about is family dinner and how that's really important to us
And people will say, oh, well, we just don't have time.
Like we're too busy.
There's too much going on.
So I was wondering if you could just expand a little bit on your research and your wisdom in the area of connection being the root of
food struggles.
Well, I mean it certainly put my head for a spin, first of all.
It seems so self-evident, but it's gotten so lost.
And I think what you said is that we're just too busy.
We've got competing responsibilities.
Our kids
have competing responsibilities and activities.
And so what is critical for survival or what is important for survival is getting drowned out by what seems urgent and ever on our doorstep.
And so we don't protect spaces for
connection.
I know it sounds simple, but it's true.
We just don't save those spaces.
It's invisible what happens here, the emotions of care.
of love, we think, well we're showing up, we're working hard to provide a good meal.
The cost of food, the time that it takes, and we think, certainly this should be care.
Well it is
However, if it's not paired with a sense of rest, if there isn't a sense of presence, of warmth and delight.
I asked everybody in my researchers, by the way, I don't know if I should be embarrassed or or what to say that it took me about ten years to write this.
and do the research and interview people.
Like every time I was running into, oh is it about the family table?
No, it's not just about the family table.
Is it about the food?
No, it's not just about the food.
Is it about picky eating?
No, we've got that wrong too
So it took me a long time to turn over a lot of these things and to rethink them.
But one of the questions I love most in my research is I said, does food have love in it?
And people all said yes.
And then I said, well, well why?
How do you know it has love in it?
Isn't I mean love is invisible.
You can't put it on the packaging of food.
You'll get in trouble from the government if you start listing it as an ingredient
But everybody said, yes, I can taste the love in food.
Well how?
Well, there was a couple of things.
Number one, did someone spend time and attention?
paying attention to what I like.
And it didn't have to be a five-course meal.
It just had to be that the person knew I liked rice instead of pasta.
I like tomato sauce or I like butter
Just very simple things.
Were they paying attention to who I was?
The second thing was did they have good intentions?
Did they actually want to feed me in a way that was met with caring and generosity
Even if you burned your food, if they believe that you had good intentions, your food tastes better.
It was absolutely wild.
Love and connection changes the actual taste of food.
And of course, the last thing that people said was, was their warmth?
Was their caring?
Like real caring, right?
Not just I'm showing up to give you food, but real caring.
and connection and collecting over the food.
And those three things embedded food with love.
They're invisible.
It's about how we show up.
It's not about what we eat.
But these things get missed over and over again.
It's interesting that you say that because I feel like the immediate visualization that I have is going to my grandmother's and having a meal with her.
And we still do that to this day, so now we go camping once a year.
And we've tried to share a meal with her as like Jess, myself and our three daughters spend time with her and actually have a meal or at least one meal, maybe a couple together.
Beautiful.
And and you can feel the resonance, right?
Because food
The senses of food, the smell, the taste, the emotions surrounding it, like taste and food can transport us back to people and places that felt like home.
So why wouldn't we capitalize that, right?
Why wouldn't we capitalize on that in a world that we have so many competing attachments for our kids with the screens
with their peers, with the sheer busyness of life, why would we not capitalize on this very ancient template of keeping us together?
But it requires us to show up around food with these ingredients in tow, with the emotional, relational ingredients.
Yeah, and I I think
that's the part where our generation of parents seems to be really struggling.
I think for a lot of our my friends, I think about it and they're probably like, yeah, I know that
It's important to eat together, but it kind of goes back to that busyness or that feeling of like how?
How can I do that
And then also, but my kids are so picky, right?
So back to the picky eating, right?
So they won't eat it.
I have friends that say that to me all the time.
Because a rule in our house is whatever I make is what it is
If it's chicken on a bun, it's chicken on a bun, essentially.
thoughts on that too and I thought it would be really important to talk about because I have a lot of friends exhausting themselves and really having a hard time at dinner because they're making five different meals, you know, for every kid, making sure that there's something that everybody likes
And it's exhausting and then it doesn't feel for them like it's done with love and nurturing and care because they're frustrated with their kids that they have to make so many meals.
Just adding to the stress that parents already have.
Yeah.
So do those parents.
Yeah, do you do you have some insights for them?
Well, so much has gotten turned upside down with food, right?
Like here we are catering to our children instead of taking the lead on food.
So I liked what you said.
I make the food that I can afford, that I have accessible to me, that you know how to make.
You make all those decisions
for your child, your family, and you show up to provide the best that you can.
The idea that we would put children in charge of food, letting them tell us what they need, how much
what kind of food.
If you look at it from a relational point of view, you're really turning the tables on the caretaking equation.
We're meant to lead, we're meant to know, we're meant to understand, we're meant to gauge receptivity, and we're meant to provide.
Now what that provision looks like
is up to you, but what does a generous provision look like for you?
And so anytime you put your children in the lead, you're going to have resistance potentially
You're going to have upset, alarm, you're going to have bossiness, commanding, demanding, anytime we put our kids overly in the lead on anything that we're meant to be responsible for.
For.
Yes, they should be able to choose from what we provide.
We shouldn't be force feeding them.
We shouldn't be saying you have to eat so much of this.
But how do you show up in a generous way?
Like
I remember this experiment that I write about at Nourished where I basically had people come over for dinner and I knew what everybody could eat and couldn't eat and allergies and things like that.
And we said, well what can we bring?
Nothing
I'm going to provide for you.
What are you gonna make?
Food, and you're gonna like it.
I just remember and it was an experiment, right, Dissy?
incredible arrogance and I thought I'm gonna make a salad, I'm gonna make a soup.
My kids did need soup like that and a some sort of meal.
And I served it family style, which by the way, family style
in the research has shown to be much more effective.
People feel less coerced to put on the table.
People can choose.
People can see Yeah, people can see that other people are enjoying it more.
So if you're more reluctant, you don't feel pushed, yet you can see your loved ones enjoying it.
So that then says to your attachment emotional brain, this must be safe, my loved ones are eating it, therefore I might like it too, if you are connected to that person and that person has influenced you.
So I remember just, you know, preparing this meal very carefully, feeling very good about the generosity, the warmth and the care
that was going into it.
And it shifted something for me when I put on the table, I'm like, they're gonna eat what they want to eat.
How much they eat is up to them.
I'm gonna give them the best food I can possibly have here
And I did, and I just sat back and thought, I have provided well.
Now it's up to you to eat from what I've provided.
So yes, we have to pay attention to what people eat.
My daughter was a vegetarian, so I would add protein and iron-based kind of things.
to the table.
So we'd be eating butter chicken with Edamami and they just thought that's just how we ate.
People are like, well is this does this go together?
I'm like, no no, this is just how we eat.
It's kinda it's kind of fusion
But they didn't know and that's the whole point.
They're not meant to know.
I have to take care of them in the context of what I'm looking at and who's around my table
So I don't think we keep these things invisible enough.
And here's the secret when it comes to picky eating.
It's actually not that difficult, is that at the age of two or three
Most children should come into an age of autonomy.
Me do.
I do it myself.
No.
No daddy.
No mummy.
I do myself.
It's like it's a five-point harness.
Your kid can't do the five foot harness.
No, no, I do it myself or a boom.
We're living that with our three year old right now.
I thought that one might be close to home
Or the boots they want to put on or whatever it is, right?
And you can see them and they they just got this burst of autonomy because they finally come alive in a
sense that they are now more of a coherent little self.
And so of course when it comes to food, they start to say, I want to explore, I want some autonomy, I want to decide.
They're allergic to coercion
at this age.
The more you push, the more they back up.
They go boneless, they fall down, they just pretend they can't hear you.
People send them into
test to get their hearing checked and they're like oh they can hear you they're just locking down our resistance they're absolutely allergic to coercion and then you say you must eat broccoli broccoli is good oh i hate broccoli
You're like, why?
This is organic broccoli that cost me 10 bucks.
How can you not eat this broccoli?
It's got the cheese sauce on it that you like.
What you hit is the child's psychological self who's trying to become their own person
Have a tawny, is allergic to coercion, and you're being coercive with food.
Food is a gift.
All you have to do is say, Daddy, look at this broccoli.
I got this broccoli.
Wow.
Can I have a taste?
Sure, here, have a taste
I love this broccoli.
Let me see anything else.
If they're sweet on daddy and daddy likes broccoli, they're more likely to want to try broccoli.
They might not try it there.
They might be looking at it.
They might be smelling it.
They might be watching you.
But the research is really clear.
At the age of two, a child knows that what you might eat may not be what they like.
But because they like you, they're more inclined.
To try it.
So as soon as you put coercion in there, all bets are off.
I think that makes a lot of sense.
I mean I feel like most of the time I'm allergic to co
We're still working on some integration
Those parts for him.
But well we should be all allergic to coercion, I think.
It's still a healthy it's instinctive, it's emotional, it's there to serve us and protect us.
So yes, but little kids have a lot of it.
Yeah, I mean it is still important for us.
But I know in our practice too, I I think parents get alarmed very quickly over when their toddler says
No to food.
So we do see this a lot in our practice that I'm curious about yours as well where parents come in, they say, Well they're paying
They don't like anything, or you know, something wrong with them.
Like they used to like broccoli, now today they don't.
What's wrong with my toddler?
They change their minds every day.
And I think it's important to know that that's their job and that's what they'll do, but we don't necessarily join into that chaos.
You're still describing me, I think.
Thank you.
Jess and I have had that conversation.
I am not a fan of leftovers for some reason, just because I don't like having the same thing multiple days in a row.
Yeah.
Oh I hear you on that.
I didn't address the leftover business but in the book.
But it maybe they're a form of coercion leftovers, right?
You will eat these.
You can't waste these
Your question about toddlers, I mean I mean toddlers are predictably unpredictable.
They are not like us at all.
They would qualify for most mental health disorders
But they're not disordered at all.
They're they're just preschoolers.
They live in the moment, they don't think twice, and they don't think about consequences.
And so, of course, our ways of approaching them oftentimes miss the mark
They are relational beings.
They like to play.
They learn through play.
And they learn and copy from the people that they're attached to.
And so if they get to play with their food, they get to make stuff out of food
you know, or pretend stuff.
I mean they don't even need real food to play with it.
They imagine all sorts of wonderful things.
But to your point, I think what's driving us
As adults, I I know for me I was alarmed.
This is so close to life and death.
We've been so programmed by Maslow that, oh, you know, if you don't eat, this is like the most important meat.
Actually, no.
Relationship, you can't survive without that
And then inside of your relationships you're meant to be cared for.
So I know it was alarm that drove me and and when I'm working with a lot of parents, we're alarmed that we're not being a good caretaker.
We're alarmed our kids aren't going to be healthy.
We're alarmed they're not going to grow well.
We're alarmed that other parents have figured out something that we have not.
I mean the list goes on and on.
It just seems to be a parent these days.
You're plagued with feeling like you're not good enough.
just pick a front and you just feel like you're not doing sleep right or food right or homework right or whatever.
But I have to say that we have this in us and I had to wrestle with that alarm in me and to come back to that place where I was the provider
And could take care of my daughter and to feel confidence there.
And that's why Gordon's answer to me, when he didn't answer me about what food or how to hide the food or give this cookbook or follow this person for food, was the perfect answer
You are the provider.
You will figure this out.
Hang in there.
And don't forget that relationship and love is the sip of sauce that makes everything go down.
So when I backed out of coercion
because it wasn't working and I was alarmed because I was creating an attachment problem and I backed into a relationship and things unfolded much better
And I'm happy to say she eats lots of different types of things and she'll remark, Wow Mom, I've sure come a long way.
I'm like, yeah, we knew you would.
Sometimes it just takes a while.
People discover food at their own pace.
But I was highly alarmed.
I can't say that I wasn't
And how could we not?
Is it safe to say that it's easier to start this younger?
So like if let's say I know a child that's 11 years old and have
All they want is chicken fingers and fries or something like that.
How would you start at that age versus yeah, two or three year old the differences in
approach.
Well, yeah, I mean it's a great question because I as a parent we always want to start as early as possible because we think we've broken them or wrecked them or set them up down a horrible path.
What I do know is that as a developmentalist
you know, who basically studies and understands how people grow, develop, is it's never too late to change.
It's never too late to they lower you in the grave.
Development is very forgiving.
So if you have an 11-year-old who's struggling with eating, it's still the same recipe.
Go back into connection.
Reduce coercion.
Find ways to make food and eating more playful.
Switch some things up.
You don't have to eat at a table.
Maybe the table's too provocative now.
Maybe we have to do something different.
But trust in yourself that you can find a way through.
Part of finding your way through is focusing back on your relationship and getting out of these battles and increasing connection, not just around food, but
around anything you're doing from morning to evening.
It doesn't have to be around food.
So yes, ideally we would have a a construction of this and an understanding of this when a child is two or three
But in North America we are lost when it comes to this food culture.
We are so detached from any roots that make sense anymore.
It's in the hands of too many people who have different agendas.
And so I think parents feel very disenfranchised from that sense of knowing what it is their kids need as a strong provider.
I feel like among
our clients and my own personal friends as well.
There's this sense of, well, I really want to respect my child's individual needs.
And I think that there's a balance, right?
A lot of them are coming away from parents who are really harsh and not attuned
to what they needed and so maybe they would force them to eat something that just wasn't right for whatever reason, their sensitivities, their palates.
And so they just never want their kids to feel the same coercion that they felt
And I think what I'm seeing a lot of is kind of the flip, right?
So now we've swung so far the other way where the kids are back in the position of leadership.
And when I share about this online, parents often push back
to me and they say Jess, if I'm the leader, if I'm the person serving, then does my kid have no say?
Am I going back to what my parents did?
How do I balance that line?
So I was curious to get your take on that as well.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, this is and this I get asked this question a lot too, because we're trying to understand
Okay, if this pendulum is swinging from one side to the other, how do we find our way to something?
And and and balance might be the word, but there might be a better way to look at this in the sense of how do we be the provider that our kid needs
So when you ask yourself that question, there is room for autonomy in that question.
A provider doesn't want to override a child's autonomy
A provider wants a child to grow well.
A provider wants their teenager to flourish and to take on the world.
There is no coercion in provider, but there is leadership.
And so starting with a word that makes sense can help guide you
So, but if we go back to something, people say, well, Deb, what does that look like?
Well, come back to the family style.
When we had butter chicken, I wouldn't ask my kids.
if they wanted butter chicken it was just on rotation and it was a quick meal and that's what we do and we hadn't eaten it for a bit so I've decided this is the way to go
I would decide how much, you know, rice would be there and butter chicken would be there and edamami would be there, and I would serve it in a predictable way in a place that is as restful as it can be, with time and space to connect
And then I'm paying attention.
I'm paying attention.
These are the foods that I know they typically eat.
Are their tuckies a little bit off?
Do they seem a little bit more agitated?
I'm trying to pick up the cues, just like you would if your child was sick, right?
You're picking up the cues.
Are they hot?
Are they tummies rumbling?
Do they, you know, they go in the bathroom correctly?
But you're always picking up the cues as a provider.
I provided what I know they need, but say my daughter isn't hungry.
I'm like, oh, she seems to
Or she had a snack.
Then I'm thinking to myself, well, I might need to give her something before she goes to bed.
We might have a snack together.
So I'm gonna read a story with her.
I'm not gonna ask her she's hungry.
I'm paying attention to its use
I've got her on my radar.
Then she has autonomy to say yes or no.
She's listening to her body.
She's eating as much butter chicken as she wants.
One day she tried it.
Oh my goodness
Then I had to start making more butter chicken because she started to eat it.
Like I mean, but you're you're just you know what I'm saying?
Like we leave room for autonomy.
Love doesn't suffocate you
It creates the foundation from which you grow.
So just show up in that provider role.
But we can't put the kids in the lead and we can't just override the autonomy.
Neither side works very well for them and for us.
We all suffer actually dearly.
Hundred percent.
Hey friends, so at pickup last week our daughter asked Scott a truly
kind of tricky question in front of her younger siblings.
Scott was telling me that when he heard a question like this, he used to panic, but this time he had a plan.
And he said to our daughter, thank you for asking.
Let's talk tonight when we've got privacy.
And that's a line that he learned straight from
our new body safety and consent course at Nurture First.
So this new body safety and consent course is taught by me, so Jess.
If you listen to this podcast, you know me.
I'm a child therapist and a mom of three and I have taught body safety and consent education for years.
This course takes all my years of experience teaching this education and gives you calm, age-appropriate language for body parts, consent, and boundaries.
You'll learn how to teach your kids that no means no, you'll learn how to teach them to read facial cues, you'll talk about safe and unspeakable.
safe touch and you'll even teach them about their uh oh feeling.
There's guidance inside this course for the real life stuff like tickling that goes too far and even the difference between a secret and a surprise.
We made this course at Nurture First because research shows that body safety education helps kids speak
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So check the course out at nurturedfirst.
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And just full disclosure here, we are the creators of this course and we're so proud of it.
I'm thinking about how you're talking about the provider role, and I think the hard part is just so many people don't have that model
Right.
And so I think when we say be in the lead, parents just assume it goes back to being that harsh model.
Yeah.
It's hard for them to picture this this provider.
And that's where your book is so beautiful because you just outline it in so many different stories in so many different ways.
what it looks like to actually provide.
And I think when parents start to understand that a good provider, wise leader, is someone who actually looks out for the interests of the kids, we're just not asking them a million questions and overwhelming them
I know this has been totally transformative in the way that I support our kids with eating.
Because there was a while, you know, my chicken on a bun era where I just am like
Throwing food at the kids and actually throwing them but you know, here, take a plate, go sit down, go eat.
I need some silence.
Let's have the kids eat outside while we're inside, just eating in the kitchen or something like that.
But then the more I did that, the more I recognized that now meals are always a battle.
And they're always whining, they're always crying, they never like what they're being fed.
And I think it was after a talk, I I saw you talk about
about this maybe a year and a half ago or something like that.
And you had been talking uh about nourished and I really changed the way that I I fed the kid
kids and now we really are prioritizing sitting together as a family and asking each other questions as we eat.
And
not asking the kids, oh, what do you want for dinner tonight?
Like I never ask them that and my friends are like, what?
What do you mean you never ask your kids what they want?
I said, oh no, I just I just make them something and send it out
I just put it on the table and I talk about how yummy it is and most of the times they start with some complaints and then eventually they eat it and
Uh and if they don't, then I notice that and then I offer a bowl of oatmeal that I know that they like before they go to bed
It just reduces the pressure so much.
And we have a sensitive daughter and I noticed that she's willing to try more things.
And if not
the bowl of oatmeal is still there, right?
So it I think just learning how to be a provider is really tough for a lot of parents without that model.
Mm-hmm.
I love your description of I can imagine you as a family now around food this way.
Um and not that it's perfect and not that they
they like it and they eat your seven dollar lettuce, you know, that you've spent your money on.
So there's still frustration I'm sure there as it is for every parent.
But there's a sense of togetherness there that's being paired with what you're serving and coming together.
So that coming together isn't a birth.
Coming together is met with connection.
So of course it just rolls all of that together in a bowl.
I think you're right that we are missing those provider images, role models.
Not everybody had them
We are really trying to change the paradigm in which we raise our children from a very authoritarian to a very relational role.
Food is still governed by a very behavioral mindset where it's about the outcome, how much is it
So we've got a lot of work to do to switch it to a relational mindset.
But I I think one of the things when I was writing Murray it just dawned on me, it just came to me that any time my daughters, when they were playing, they would always gravitate to the kitchen.
two, three years of age, you'll see the very earliest manifestations of caring in a young child come out in food or taken care of.
something and it's not for real.
It's a baby, it's a train, it's a you know, a bug on the road.
If they are cared for, and that has sunk into a child, by the age of two
the caring relational instincts are then moving inside of them to do the same as somebody else.
I had my nephew on my lap, he was 18 months, he didn't speak a lot, and I was feeding him well
people were out skiing and I I was just cutting up an apple and putting it in his mouth and he took the apple from his mouth and then he stuck it into mine
And it was just a very simple interaction.
So why am I telling you that story?
Because those provider instincts are in you.
They first showed up when you were little.
When you were if you were cared for, you made it through where someone had some caring for you.
Those providers of instincts are in you.
And if you didn't, then it would be to fall in love with whoever it is that you need to provide for, because that will unlock those caretaking instincts.
in you to take care of your loved ones, whatever that might be.
You don't have to like cooking or cleaning, you uh you know you or shopping or growing food.
You just have to love the people that you're taking care of
And that's the secret to being a provider.
One of my favorite things too is I think it falls in line, not necessarily with the eating aspect of it, but my daughters and I will typically on a weekend, usually a Saturday morning, we'll make waffles or pancakes together.
And they'll get flour everywhere.
So Jess stays out of the kitchen because she can't be around flour.
But it's that whole experience of doing it together.
I find that to be fun because I actually personally don't really
care for pancakes, but I make it with them anyway because it's just a fun thing to do together and then we all eat it together after we've made them.
That's beautiful.
I've had so many parents tell me the stories of how they've played with food differently in Reading Nourished and and thinking a little bit differently about how do we bring some rest.
the food now this is not play for you Jeff this is like uh a health issue if you're playing with flour but for you and the girls this is play and how that restores just a sense of rest
Around the provision of care and waking up on a Saturday morning.
Remember what Dad used to do?
I had one of my clients, oh my God, he's just taking this to heart.
And his kids said to him, Dad, could you play chef and restaurant with us
So they had him dress up as a restaurateur and he had a napkin over his arm and he took their order, then he went and he was a chef and then he served it to them and he was the waiter again and
He said they wouldn't stop eating.
They just kept eating and eating.
All they were doing was playing out this restaurant and such delight and enjoyment in him and such delight and enjoyment in their kids.
And it was just slowing down enough.
But what a wonderful pairing of data and connections.
Chenso.
Yeah, I love that.
It just takes so much time to do that and to put a ritual around it.
That's the other thing too that I love what you said is
It's a Saturday morning.
It's waffles with dad.
It's a ritual.
So other things then get pushed out and this gets preserved for that time of connection, which is really wise.
Mm-hmm.
I just wanted to make another note what you're saying about the wisdom that we already have within us, right?
Because we often think, oh, I didn't have a model or I didn't have a way of knowing how to do this.
But
if you watch your children when they're cared for, right?
Like even yesterday, my daughter was yelling at me because I wouldn't sit down and have the tea that sh tea, quote unquote, that she made me with her little teapot, her little set.
She made me a cookie.
Gluten free.
I can tell my children have the ability to care and love me because whenever they make me food and play, it's gluten-free.
So you don't get sick, mommy.
And it's so beautiful.
And they make me sit down and then I have
to eat it and then they ask if it's yummy because they know gluten-free food is often yucky and da say yah so yummy you did a good job and they just run away all happy and it's like
they have it already within them.
They know how to care and and they know how to nurture and we do too, but we just lost it.
And so I think for a lot of parents it's about finding that back.
And we find that back when we love our children and we want to provide care again.
So I think just the way you illustrated that is so beautiful because parents get alarmed feeling like they don't have a model, but they actually already have it.
It's just finding it back
Yeah, absolutely.
That's beautiful.
Oh, and yeah, love your the caring in your children.
They just know this would hurt mummy with the gluten-free and such intention there already.
Such a little body.
You can just see.
You don't actually have to drink the tea or have a real cuss and feel the love that is there for you.
That's the invitation, right?
That's what nourishes.
We realize that the food is just such a small part of this.
The nourishment is on the emotional level, the psychological, how your memories are formed.
The nourishment is all around.
And I guess paired together, it's
It's beautiful.
Yeah, it's funny 'cause you talk about it unlocking memories.
I still to this day say to Jess that anytime there's butter melting in a pan, I go back to being at my grandparents' house as a kid and I can see the sunlight
coming in through their kitchen and they had a big round table on there and my uncles were quite young so I would be sitting around with some of my uncles as well and it's funny how every single time I smell butter melting, I go back to that.
It's beautiful.
And it's it's kind of like the long arm of attachment, right?
You can just pull somebody in, that memory, that sense of mattering, that invitation, the people that were there.
And you can just feel full in a in a psychological way
Nature is profound in how we are wired out this way.
It was beautiful actually to delve into this and to discover
Ah, there's a lot of secrets here in this wisdom of carrying these things together.
This is just a glimpse into that and one can never really understand at all.
But we would be foolish not to follow that in what has been so carefully joined together.
I bet everybody has that.
I I asked everybody, who would be your favorite person to cook for you?
And so the answers were remarkable, but it was always back to this kind of
a story of this person took care of me.
This is what I remember.
This is the food that I attached to them.
This is what brings me comfort.
I had one lady said that when she had her cancer diagnosis
She didn't understand that she ran from the doctor's appointment and just started to eat kanva, Polish sweep.
She just had to eat as much as she could.
Just somehow brought her back to her mother and eating that comfort
her mother had passed just needing that comfort and she didn't understand why she couldn't stop eating this candy.
She realized it was about my mother and even comfort
Yeah.
I think something about your work in nourished for me personally after reading the book, it really healed some pieces of myself and my own food struggles over the years.
As I know for me and for most women and a lot of men as well.
you have all this wisdom when you're a kid uh of eating, right?
And and kids we know too, they c they will tell you when they're full.
You know, they they know how much to eat.
They know what kind of food feels good for their body, all of those things
But then over time you get society's messaging and telling you, you know, you should weigh a certain amount or you should eat this and this much protein or sugar is bad or all of these different things.
And I think you can quickly
lose the wisdom.
And so then you stop eating foods that once maybe provided you with that comfort that you had when you were a kid, right?
Like I always think about my grandma every single Sunday she would make cake.
And its chocolate cake came from a box, had little sprinkles on top, right?
And every Sunday for years I ate this cake until one day my
Whatever the messaging about sugar changed and I said no to cake.
And I remember my grandma being like, what the heck?
You're saying no to Sunday cake?
We have cake every Sunday.
And then for years I stopped having cake.
And I think this approach, this relational approach to food can be so healing for us too.
And I was hoping we could talk about that and how we can
preserve that wisdom in our children so that they don't like like it's just now I look at it and I see everywhere, you know, don't eat sugar or this is bad or eat keto.
Social media experts.
And it's all making us lose, like you said, this ancient wisdom of of what food means, which is so much more than food.
So I was hoping you could touch on that a little bit too, because I know for me that's been so helpful
Yeah, well thank you for that.
It is provocative.
Food is provocative for us now as parents and especially in North America with diet culture, with body image stuff, with food marketing and messages and nutrition.
I mean
It if food is anything but enjoyable it seems.
And it is meant to be a gift.
If you think Mother Nature is a great provider, then food is meant to be a gift to help take care of us.
And so it's become very perverted
It's been reduced to its very basic molecular structure.
It's become nutrients rather than this whole source of
Food.
I think the values around what we eat, getting back to some neutrality of it, that food is a gift, instead of it's good or bad or whatever.
Now you know
foods that you want your kids to eat and so we serve them.
Your grandma decided that chocolate cake was indeed a special treat on a Sunday and that was
That was that.
And that's what she wanted.
That was her choice.
She was the provider.
She was in charge.
You get to make the decision, Sadram, when chocolate cake would be eaten.
Maybe it was a Sunday thing.
You know, dessert doesn't have to be every night
You get to make those choices as a provider.
But the messages to kids that this food is toxic or bad or good and and
Scott, you are so right.
TikTok has now taken over as the influence of choice.
Like, who were the original influencers when it came to food?
You've both speak spoken about them, right?
Your grandparents.
Yeah and your parents.
They're the original influencers.
They were the one who loved you the most, who were most invested in keeping you around, who probably made the best that they could
from your caretaking and in whose hands your body would most likely digest and use the food that was given and would be wholly cared for, increased resilience and everything else would come from those
pairings of food and attachment.
So we've gotten really lost in this and food isn't a gift anymore.
And I hear it all the time.
Oh, I'm gonna go do a workout so I can earn my cake tonight.
That's an outcome.
That's behavioral.
I've gotta be good enough to do this like
Should we not be concerned about health?
No, I'm not saying that.
I'm saying it falls under having a good provider.
Am I taking care of them?
Am I taking
care of me.
And under that guise, you'll make the choices that are in your everyone's best interest.
You don't have to share all of that wisdom.
You just take the lead.
the original influencer should be us and so we have to keep our relationship strong so it doesn't open it up to competing attachments.
And if it does, that they come to us and say, Mom, I'm hearing a lot of stuff about sugar out there.
Is it bad?
I'm really liking cake
And then we can say So do I just Yeah, exactly.
So yes, we still eat cake in our family.
Not everybody agrees, but
Mummy's decided that, you know, this is just how we roll.
The research on eating disorders is really clear.
It's not generally good enough to have one parent acting as a shield around culture, these messages.
You actually need both parents.
to be together on this.
And that serves as a preservative shield around body image types of issues when there's food neutrality in the home, when you're kind of pulling in the same place.
If one parent because remember, a child is attached ideally to both parents.
So you really you create a lot of conflict and you open the doorway to much more distress around food and body image and stuff.
So research is really clear.
Two parents generally, it doesn't matter you know if they're together or apart
but generally pulling in the same direction, providing a shield around culture that is so toxic this way, taking the lead on food.
When it gets to more levels of distress with food
that isn't enough.
The parents pulling in a particular direction together isn't found to been you know implicated in terms of eating disorders.
That we would be much wiser and a lot of people who I did interview who work in eating disorders
Say first myth is that it's it's not about the food.
Eating disorders actually aren't about food.
It's about a chronic emotional stress response.
And food now carries the emotions of alarm and frustration and pursuit and all sorts of things that get stirred up in the face of separation.
So we would be much better off to look at our eating disorders
Even orthorexia, anorexia, bulimia, even ARFID as a chronic stress response.
You can make the argument for RFID in some ways.
It's multifaceted, so we can't just paint everything with the same brush.
There are neurobiological issues here as well.
But generally speaking.
If we can maintain some neutrality around food, if we can take the lead on it, we have our best bet in terms of steering through what is a very toxic food culture, diet culture.
I think about this all the time, Deb, because you know, we we have our girls and right now they are so innocent when it comes to food.
I follow so much of what you just said.
That's how I approach food with the kids.
I think a lot about the rituals that we have around food in the house.
It's huge.
Things like Scott just had a birthday, so we get ice cream cake from Dairy Queen.
And that's the story.
And there's nothing wrong with ice cream cake from Dairy Queen because when it's daddy's birthday, that's what we get and we eat it as a family.
And like all the different rituals, like pancakes or waffles on Saturday morning, things like that.
And so I think encouraging parents to because
We have our own stories in our head of sugar is bad and protein this and kids should eat that or whatever.
We have our own stories that we've learned.
So for parents who are uncomfortable maybe with having sugar in the house or
talking to kids in such a neutral way, like building those rituals in, I think, can be one really positive way at least that's impacted us.
For sure.
I mean they were asking for us to do it last night.
So Sunday evening they're saying can we have pancakes for dinner?
Because I think part of that is they want to help actually make them.
That's part of the fun that goes into it.
Yeah, how lovely.
But I really think as like they get older, one of the protective factors will be continuing the rituals and continuing to talk about why the rituals are important and why we eat cake, right?
Why like for my grandma
you know, why we ate cake on Sunday.
You know, that was important to know that exactly Grandma provides.
Like and this is her way of caring and showing love, is that she bakes the cake on Saturday night, knowing the whole family's gonna come over on Sunday and eat it, right
But preserving that in our kids in a world that's gonna tell them all these other things, like it just it does feel like such a pressure to me.
It is daunting today.
I can't lie.
It is daunting.
I've raised two girls myself and part of it, the challenge is, is that we send our kids out into the world.
It's not all about what happens in the home.
The world is wide open now from
any social media, our kids are influenced from places that our parents couldn't ever have imagined.
So we've got a lot of conflicting information and people competing for their attachment
for their attention and who offer belonging, who offer loyalty, who offer superficial forms of connection oftentimes
So we we have competition on our doorstep, and that is why when I looked at this area I thought, oh my goodness, what a way to be able to hold on to your family and your kids
By showing up as a provider in whatever way, shape, or form that looks like.
Eat in a table, have a picnic, have a coffee while they eat, you know
Cheerios, it's up to you what that looks like.
Go out to Dairy Queen and have a wonderful piece of their ice cream cakes.
Whatever that looks like to you, find your ritual, preserve it.
Peer orientation I think is one of the biggest dangers around food issues.
Because when they become more attached to their peers, when they become more influenced by their peers, want to belong to their peers, act like, talk like, be the same shape as, have the same values
You know what if if if you're part of a peer group that says chocolate cake is evil and you've got a grandma and and mom and dad who say no chocolate cake is fantastic.
You've now got a competing attachment
Whose group do you belong to?
You're gonna go where you feel at home the most.
So as adults, we have to hold on to our kids.
We have to reduce our preoccupation.
That they get along with their peer group or have a social group, but they have to be socialized by their fears.
We spend so much time focusing on that
When in actual fact what we really need to do more than anything is to, as Borde Newfeld and Gabor Mattei write, hold on to our kids, make sure they're connected to their parents.
to their aunts, to their uncles, to the younger brothers or sisters, or you know neighbors, or show off at the community and volunteer and be part of that
And be in beautiful cascading care so that they can feel cared for and they can care for others.
And that is where their influence comes from
so that they're held in that connection.
But we've got that is what is most daunting.
And for parents who've got kids going into teenage years, tween years
The foundation for this is all in the early years, so fold on to your kids.
Make those family meals a priority.
I was shocked at how well it worked through my kids
adolescence.
I'd say, well just, you know, have your friends come over or we'll all go out to dinner and bring your friend and okay, and then we'll go out afterwards.
Okay, that's fine, but let's have a meal first before you go out for the evening.
That changes the trajectory of a lot.
For sure, I can see that.
I think your message it it's so important.
It's a lot of what we try and talk about here too, but in a culture where I think we're really prioritizing extracurriculars and
You know, like I I met with a client recently who's like their child is being tutored.
They were in a whole bunch of extracurriculars.
Every single night was busy.
They never had time for family meals.
And we kind of talked about what is important.
And I think what you're doing by talking about relationships in terms of food is saying
This is actually important, you know, and we think all these other things are, but what if we prioritized relationship and time with our family above and beyond extracurriculars or you know, all these other things we can do, but we don't have to
I think we would see a huge shift in children in the current kind of mental health crisis that we're seeing just like as a broader issue that's going on.
I don't know if it's because parents don't want their kids to fall behind, but it feels like you have to have your kids in every single extracurricular activity out there just to make sure that they're going to know what they want to do after they're done
high school or something.
Like it's challenging.
Yeah, it is.
And it's very sad.
How did we come to value ourselves so less as the primary influencers and caretakers in our children's life?
Like how did we come to value what it is that we have to offer?
It's a little.
Right?
When they grow in a healthy way, become their own separate person, they get to play, they're gonna figure out what they want to do
They can learn well.
Kids are fantastic as as learners when they're at wet rest and they feel taken care of and the basic needs are all there.
They're gonna grow, they're gonna learn, they're gonna discover, they're gonna explore
But it comes back to, I think, again, to just not trusting in what we have to offer, getting talked out of that.
You know, my mom had five kids
She breastfed one of them because she was talked out of breastfeeding by the formula companies who basically said, we have a better substance here for your child than you can produce in your own body
Now, I'm not against formula for when it's necessary and life-saving efforts that are needed for uh for a child, but the idea that my mother would be talked out of what she provides
is a sad story, but it still happens and is replicated over and over and over again.
You ask most kids what they would prefer to do
And if they are connected to their families and their homes, it's very hard sometimes to get them out of the house.
Getting out of the house to an activity is overrated.
They'd rather stay in their pajamas and play with you any day if there's connection, safety, and play at home
They just want to be near their people.
And that's the way they grow best of all.
But we've lost such faith in that.
It's such a tragedy when it comes to relationship.
And I really want parents to know it's okay
You're right.
If if you prioritize a night, hey, yeah, it's a school night and yeah, I could sign them up for gymnastics, but you know what?
We're just gonna stay home Tuesday nights and it's gonna be pajamas and picnic dinner on the floor if the table's too hard right now, right?
I think
We also get stuck on some rigid rules.
I had a a follower of Nurtured First say that one of her hard and fast rules is absolutely no toys at the table ever.
And I thought of you, Deb, and I remember you talking in your training about, oh, if the table's hard, maybe bring a little truck on the table, right?
And I remember thinking how eye-opening that is to so many parents who feel like we have to have all these rules
and rigidity and yes, structure is important, but we can get creative too when meals are hard or, you know, and we need to reconnect ourselves back to our kids.
Yeah.
I think there's a difference between rules and rituals, right?
I think what I get most alarmed is I oftentimes try to control and lock things down and keep them really rigid because that's my alarm system, just trying to to have a little bit of structure.
a little bit of safety, but it's not.
It feels coercive if I'm coming from that place.
Whereas a ritual that's done to preserve connection, it's about gathering, it's about play
feels very, very different.
The research showed that to have some of the preservative effects of the family meal, so healthier self-esteem, less drug and alcohol use
like vocabulary.
You want kids like the best literacy program would be s eating with people who have good words.
Because essentially you're learning in attachment, not just the food
But because you're dependent and you're receiving the food, you're receiving the stories, your intergenerational history.
You know, you're being collected, you're learning your values, your vocabulary is influence, your self-esteem.
So it's one of the best mental health strategies we actually have is to eat together in connection.
Not just at home, but at school.
Can you imagine how schools would be transformed by caring about each other through food?
In the schools that I did do research on, it was amazing.
Grandparents were part of it, parents were part of it, kids were feeding other classes and stuff.
But the research shows eating at home about three times a week is the bare minimum.
And for some busy families where there is structural routine and kids are involved in sports, yes, it's not like quitting all those things, but we have to keep time for what is important.
So maybe you're having a smoothie in the car with your child on the way to practice and you're connecting.
That's you know fair game.
You're providing for your kid, but three times a week
trying to get together and with teenagers because of their age, their mobility, their flexibility, their engagement, it's harder to hold on to kids.
particularly the teen years and we see a huge decline there in terms of family meals and I think what we're seeing is more peer orientation and preferring to be the the
So we get to figure out a lot of this in the context of our own family.
Who's working, who's available, single parents, whatever that looks like, parents can figure this out.
Schools need to figure this out
Especially in Trent.
Yeah, I am I'm visualizing even postpartum moms, right?
Like what would it mean for them to have their grandma come and bring a meal and just sit with them and eat together?
Right.
I think there's just so much isolation.
I think about myself as a new mom and you were working, right, and I'm alone all the time.
I was traveling constantly, so it was
Almost never home.
Never eating with anyone.
The isolation we face right now is so real and it's so hard and we've lost a lot of the intergenerational support as well.
And I just think if we could bring that back, I just wonder how much things would change for parents who are struggling.
Oh, it'd be profound.
Everybody wants to hold the new baby, but who's holding the mom and saying, or the dad?
You know, can I help you here with food?
All the research I showed that, you know, people eating alone don't eat as much or eat as well, like senior citizens.
They don't eat as well when they're alone.
There was one program that was operated by a a nonprofit organization and the goal was to have mental health patients come in and learn how to cook because they're not cooking well when they're on their own.
So we want to teach you how to cook
So that when you go back, you have better health and nutrition because that'll help your mental health.
And they found the program was success.
People showed up, they loved it, they were participating, they said this was the best program ever.
When it ended, they were just
devastated, but the researcher who was talking about the program said it was it was a failure in the sense that they didn't go home and make those meals and eat better.
I'm like, are you kidding me?
You've lost the plot.
It's because they are on their own that that's not happening.
You need to bring an even community
That was replicated over and over and over again.
We do better.
And so family programs that say, hey, listen, after work, come to our drop-in program, we're gonna cook you food, you can socialize with other parents, let your kids play.
Do you know how popular those were
programs are they're the most popular ones someone's gonna feed me i get to come and to socialize with other families oh
Yeah.
It's so beautiful.
I think even one of my friends, we don't live in the same city, but she said every Wednesday night she makes soup and
We'll invite friends over and all they have to bring is bread.
And she said, every Wednesday night I make the soup, someone brings bread, and we just share a meal together.
And she just was saying how
deep the impact that's been on their life and the life of their family and their children and what they all sit and eat together.
It's so simple.
But I think about all your work and and everything that you've been sharing, just even
as adults, right, to to stop our own loneliness that we have and the burnout that we face as parents.
Like can we share meals with friends?
Can we lighten the load a little bit and and have some other people over?
And
I feel like we've been doing a lot more of that and it's incredible how much that's even deepened our relationships with our friends too.
Yeah.
Well I love it.
It's beautiful.
This is an area that we can play with so much.
It's just seeing that we are in the lead of this
We get to be a provider and show up however we want.
The benefit of not having tons of role models this way is that it gives you a lot of creative license
Freedom.
You know, so I know that I love when I show up and play the food, whether it's having raclette or a pizza oven I got for my birthday one year because my family said that my pizza suck
So they got me a proper they got me a proper pizza oven.
So it was bittersweet.
And they said, Your pizza's horrible.
Please stop feeding us that.
So here's a nice pizza oven.
So
But the pizza I mean I I you know, just bring it out and you have people over and you're one person that has a pizza at the time and you're making it and you're talking and everybody's together and we found that the pizza tastes better if you play Italian music and
It's just yeah, it does.
The music enhances it.
It just enhances the play.
But just stopping and you know people say, oh, that was really good, but then you realize it wasn't just the food.
You're already full before the food even gets into your belly.
Because you've got relationship, you've got play, and there's this sense of rest.
And you're just like, oh, I just needed that.
I just needed that break from everything in my life.
I can get back to my work.
But we need to to have those places of rest.
It's interesting because I think it's very easy to fall into the mindset of
I'm so busy, I have to make so many decisions in the day.
So then to decide to have that family meal and spend all that time preparing.
It's like that one extra thing, but it I mean we've seen it in our own family, how much of a difference that makes in the relationship we have with our girls and how much we have learned about what's going on at school.
with their friends and they're almost they're starting to help each other even though they're quite young.
They're like interjecting and helping each other out on their own already.
I think we forget, like to your point Scott, we forget that it gives something back to
us when we give to our children.
And it's I mean the same I think with sleep with so many different things.
We feel like oh it's exhausting.
It's another thing you have to do.
But once you do it, the family meal or helping your kids sleep well, all these things
We realize it actually returns something to us and can actually help us feel full as well.
And I think that's the piece that's missed in this conversation as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
And and and the ritual, the ritual that you put around it.
We do not have pizzas every minute, that's for sure.
That is a big undertaking.
And sometimes we just order in a pizza
and just call it a day and have a movie.
So when you put a ritual around it though, then you know, okay, I've gotta be prepared for that and
It takes the work out of it because you're just in the rhythm and every tune.
But it can be simple, it can be grand, it can be whatever you want.
Is there a ritual that
You would say is standard for your family that you always kind of do that your family can expect?
Yeah.
One of them is is again just inter it's a generational one.
So my parents were both immigrants
to Canada from Britain and uh met here.
And roast dinners are always a big thing, Sunday roast dinners.
And Yorkshire puddings in particular.
So my mom was always very big on making roast beef Yorkshire pudding for a celebration.
And there's five girls in my family, five daughters.
And my mother would say, if you have a boyfriend, because you know, boys would come and go,
Don't bring someone home unless they're roast beef worthy.
We don't need to meet everybody.
Just bring home the ones that, you know, are roast beef worthy that might be sticking around for a while.
And that was the way of sort of introduction and a way of breaking the ice as my mum would make this beautiful.
Yorkshire Pudding.
She passed away actually last year and at her service, one of my sisters remarked that you remember
mum, grandma saying that her Yorkshire were so big that you could put saddles on them and ride them.
And this was her way of saying that they had puffed up so beautifully.
Now, I have not mastered that.
I don't know why I've I asked her a million times
Mine are short and stubby and doughy.
But if you ask my kids, and so we have Yorkshire pudding and most beef dinner, same kind of tradition, on a Sunday, sometimes, you know, when everybody can gather
But my kids will tell you that my Yorkshire puddings are better than my mother's.
And I will tell you that my mother's Yorkshire puddings taste better than mine's
It's so beautiful.
Just a note on grief and food.
I think there's such a tie to like a healthy grief and eating the food.
I was mentioning my grandma's cake a few times and
I mean I can't eat it anymore 'cause now I have celiac I didn't know as a s as a kid.
But my family, my extended family still gets together almost every Sunday.
And they still make the same cake.
And they make grandma's cake and a lemon cake.
And I always think to myself, you know, what a beautiful way to celebrate her memory of her making it.
And I watch the kids, our kids, eat her cake.
And I just think to myself, like, this is it.
This is so beautiful.
This is how you see that food is so much more.
than what we put in our body and the sugar and whatever, the nutrients.
Like it it's comfort, it's grieving.
It's just beautiful.
It's profound.
And your work has really helped me shape the way I see it in a new way.
So thank you for that
that.
Well thank you for that and thank you for bringing it alive in the context of your family and the beautiful girls.
So I guess this is a good place for us to close down.
But what do you think for you is the next, I don't know, frontier for this conversation?
Like where do you hope to see or how do you hope to get this message out to more people?
Because again, I think it's very easy for us.
We have so many decisions to make that it we're like,
Like, okay, let's just have a healthy meal.
Kids, eat your broccoli.
It's good for you.
It's good for your brain.
It helps you grow.
Just do that.
Don't ask questions.
So I guess where where do you want to see this go so that maybe parents aren't so much like that and are a little bit more focused on the relationship and of course feeding healthy foods and
whatever, all that stuff, but knowing that there is that balance or that the relationship is very important.
Well I think that awareness alone will help guide you.
I think if you got that, you're you're in good standing.
It's already started to help you formulate different questions, like how do I lay the table, not just in the food or the place settings, but for connection?
That's a great question.
What's getting in the way of my kids being receptive?
Where have there been battles that I need to step away from?
So if you're
top question is is how do I do this in a way that nurtures and takes care of my family and shows up in a way that invites them without force, without coercion, allows them to have autonomy, but it's a generous offering.
It starts with the invitation.
And so change what you're doing.
Experiment.
Be creative.
Be honest with yourself.
Try to read your kids and where you're at.
And you might not like everything you see.
You might feel a lot of emotions as we usually do as parents.
Guilt, shame, blame.
Oh, there's so many more.
But don't be afraid of them.
Just you can go through them.
Sometimes they have to be looked at
I ended up writing a book about something I never thought I would write about and was transformed in the process of looking at what wasn't working
And that is always the place of world.
So don't be afraid to have a look and trust yourself.
Beautiful.
And everyone should read nourished.
Yeah, we'll we'll put a link to it as well.
Anyone who's interested.
Hopefully there are lots of more lots more interested people after our conversation today.
We really appreciate you coming on.
Well thank you so much.
It's so delightful to meet both of you.
I've heard so much about you, Scott.
Yeah, likewise.
Yeah.
All good things.
But yeah, it's always it's always beautiful to talk.
I mean, I feel like I could talk about this conversation forever, but it's such a good one, and I hope a lot of people will re-nourished and
I know we've talked about this a lot, Deb, is like the the more people talk about it, the more they read the book or listen to this podcast and talk about it with their friends.
Like
I think that's really how the message grows and how we can change as a society the way that we we talk to our kids about food
So I think it really is in these conversations, right?
For sure.
I agree.
I agree completely.
So thanks.
Thanks for being part of it.
And asking such great questions, insightful questions.
Hey friends, thank you so much for listening to today's episode.
We are glad that you are here.
If you enjoyed today's episode and found it interesting, we'd really appreciate it if you'd leave a rating and a review.
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Thank you so much for listening and we can't wait to talk to you.
you again next time.