Sometimes eating can be traumatic. Traumatic sensations and memories of eating can lead to an eating disorder. Parents must work hard to understand which foods and eating environments are triggering. It also helps to know why they are triggering and learn how to make eating less stressful.
Why is eating traumatic?
There can be many reasons why food becomes traumatic. A combination of sensory issues, beliefs, and experiences can come together to create a stressful eating environment for some children.
1. Sensory issues
Some children have a higher sensitivity to taste, touch, smell, sight, and other senses. This means they will feel and experience food differently. Food that is easy for most children may be difficult for a sensitive child to handle. For example, a child who has a highly sensitive palate might find powerful flavors overwhelming and distasteful. A child who is sensitive to touch may not be able to tolerate crunchy foods or soft foods. This all depends on which type of food feels bad for them. Children who need a sense of visual order may struggle to eat foods that look messy or touch each other on the plate.
2. Eating experiences
Sometimes something goes wrong while eating. For example, a child may vomit during or shortly after eating and the experience is stressful and traumatic for them. Perhaps a child feels nauseated when looking at, smelling, or eating certain foods, making them hard to eat.
Some children have been pressured or shamed to eat certain foods or eat a certain way. A child who has been closely monitored is likely to feel ashamed of their appetite and preferences. They may develop trauma around eating because they are criticized for what and how they eat. On the other hand, a child who feels pressured to eat more than they want can develop a sense of shame and fear about eating. These kids can feel like a failure every time a meal is served.
3. Beliefs
Almost all children in our society are exposed to messages about “good” and “bad” foods. This creates beliefs about whether they themselves are good or bad depending on what they eat. Teachers, coaches, parents, doctors, and other adults may share beliefs about food that can be harmful to a child’s relationship with food. For example, a child is told that sweets are “bad.” But they love the taste of sweets and make the cognitive leap that "if sweets are bad and I love sweets, then I must be bad."
Beliefs like this can become deeply embedded in a child’s sense of self and disrupt their relationship with food, sometimes for life. A child like this may find themselves hoarding and sneak-eating sweets, feeling ashamed. Or they may strictly avoid all sweets, becoming rigid in their belief that in order to be a good person they should not eat sweets, even though they love them.
Identifying traumatic eating issues
If your child is showing strange behaviors around food and eating then it helps to identify which foods and eating environments are triggering for them. These will differ depending on the type of trauma your child has experienced with food.
If your child’s trauma is sensory-based then it’s best to explore which senses are affected when eating. Make a list of the foods your child will accept compared to those they will not accept. Look for trends in texture, smell, taste, and appearance.
If the issue is more about eating experiences, then you want to think through which eating experiences might have traumatized your child and also where it is relatively easy vs. very hard for your child to eat. For example, it might be easy for your child to eat at the kitchen island, moderately hard for them to eat at the dining room table, and extremely difficult for them to eat at their grandparents’ house. Identify these triggers and evaluate what events took place to contribute to your child’s stress.
On the other hand, if you believe the problem with your child’s eating stems from beliefs about food being either good or bad, explore who and how your child received these messages. If you have previously labeled food in this way, begin working on your own relationship with food. Ask relatives and friends to stop food-bashing around your child. Also, pay attention to their larger environment. Is school, a sports team, or social media impacting your child’s relationship with food?
Many times a child has all three conditions. They are highly sensitive, have had negative eating experiences, and have harmful beliefs about food and eating. It's important to get as full a picture as possible about what is going on to help your child feel better.
How parents can help kids with food trauma eat
If your child has food trauma, then you’ll need to work hard to help them get out of their automatic responses to the anxiety that arises during meals. Parents have a direct influence on kids’ anxiety, and studies have shown that we can effectively treat parents in order to reduce kids’ anxiety.
A treatment called Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE) is an evidence-based, parent-based treatment for kids’ anxiety. Developed at Yale, the program teaches parents to respond differently to anxiety and reduce its severity and incidence.
SPACE has been tested and evaluated in kids who have Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) and is being used for other eating disorders as well. It teaches parents to recognize anxiety and how it shows up in eating environments and to pay attention to how they (the parents) respond to eating anxiety. Once trends are identified, parents learn to respond differently to anxiety and, over time, anxiety is reduced because parents aren’t getting tangled up in it.
Want to know more about how this works? SPACE treatment for eating issues
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