If Your Child Doesn't Just Eat...

Image credit: Photo by Proggie on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

I started my day off on Tuesday by reading Lisa Belkin's reflections on what she's learned in the eighteen years of parenting since her son's birth. I thought, "Wow, that was lovely and touching and resonated with me in so many ways, I can't wait to share it. But... There's this one thing she just got so wrong."

A few weeks ago, I read Karen Maezen Miller's Momma Zen and I thought, "Wow, that was lovely and touching and resonated with me in so many ways, I can't wait to share it. But... There's this one thing she just got so wrong."

That wrong I was thinking about were their comments on feeding their children. Karen writes, "Left to their own impulses, children will certainly put food in its proper place." And Lisa echoes, in her own way, "An otherwise healthy child, if food is made available, will not starve to death — so chill."  Of course, what they got "wrong" wasn't really about food.  It was the same thing that all parents get wrong in my book: having a different experience with their kids than I had with mine.  (How dare they!)

Like so many other parents, they have expended their share of parenting energy and stress upon feeding, only to find it was natural for their children to eat when hungry, something that can seem like a remarkable surprise when one is caught up in the heat of battles over food. So, they share their experiences, and offer comfort to the new parent still struggling, and in the process, thousands of parents of typically developing children breathe a sigh of relief and let their shoulders drop away from their ears. It's easy! There are things that children learn naturally. We don't have to teach children to eat or walk or talk. They can figure it out if we just relax and let them.

And in a way this isn't wrong at all.  I witness this miracle every day in my daughter: the naturalness of eating, the naturalness of hunger and an urge for survival that overrides the most stubborn urge for Cheetos or ice cream. When faced with an empty stomach, she eats. She eats what she's comfortable with, and what she's comfortable with is most things. She trusts food. She trusts her body. I didn't have to teach her that. (Which is good, because I'm the one teaching by example about gluttonous consumption of sweets.) But it does seem to be a miracle, just like the fact that she was born with all her limbs and all her organs, with everything in place and working at a balanced norm. It's the kind miracle I've taken for granted at times, but still a miracle.

But I also witness -- daily -- a different kind of child entirely: one for whom those same natural things, like eating and talking, didn't come so easily.  As an infant, and even now, Austen was, by most measures, in excellent physical health.  He has all his limbs and organs, and they're all in perfect working order.  He's always been tall for his age, and an ideal weight for his height.  He sat up and rolled over and walked in perfect sync with his typically developing peers.

Eventually a speech delay that would signal to our pediatrician that all was not typical in the workings of one organ -- his brain -- but even before children are supposed to be able to speak, they are supposed to be able to eat.  Pictures abound of delighted babies digging into their first birthday cakes.  But we don't have one of Austen, who by age one was already refusing new foods.  His relationship with food, his willingness to literally starve himself rather than eat or drink a food that was new or was presented in an unexpected manner, was the first clue we had that his brain worked differently.  And in the end, it was the fact that he was his limited diet and obsessive rigidity around food -- not his delays in speaking or interacting with his peers -- that snapped me out of my denial and convinced me that Austen was autistic.

When Lisa and Karen share their experiences, their words are a relief to thousands of parents.  But to thousands like me, they can feel like an indictment when the words are turned on their head by a pediatrician or a school psychologist or another well meaning mom who clings to the belief that it's so natural for all children to eat that symptoms of eating disorders are seen not as a sign that eating does not come naturally to this particular child, but as a sign that you as a parent are overreacting or doing something wrong to interfere with the child's eating.  So, I share my story (over and over again) to bring relief to a whole different set of parents, the ones who know that eating and walking and talking don't come quite so effortlessly to all children, the ones who know that sometimes they don't come at all.

To those parents still struggling with mealtime, I leave you with something else from Lisa's article: "When your gut tells you they are sick, or something’s wrong, they are and it is."  We may not have had the same experiences feeding our children, but on trusting our own knowledge of our kids, I'm with both Lisa and Karen, start to finish.