How to Trust Your Kids With Sweets When You’re Uncomfortable With Sugar

Every woman who heals herself helps heal all the women who came before her, and all those who come after her.. - Christiane Northrup

True story: I feared how my eating disorder past would shape how my children feel about food and their bodies.

I mean, this felt like a roadblock for me in even having children. Would they somehow be more at risk for disordered eating? Were they doomed to feel poorly about their bodies? Would they feel chaos around food in the same ways I did? 

I’ve come to peace with the fact that I can’t control the outcomes of my children’s lives while also accepting what is effectively within the realm of what I can control: my own relationship with food and my body. 

As an eating disorder survivor and mother of 5, I’ve learned how refining this journey of motherhood truly is. 

There are many things that continue to surprise me in the process of feeding and raising my children. I think one of the most surprising things was learning how I could trust my children to eat and regulate their intake. Especially as someone who’s had a tumultuous relationship with food and my body since childhood, I’m constantly amazed at how my children’s appetites and food choices can be self-regulated and TRUSTED.

I grew up learning  candy was outlawed, sweets had to be earned, and too much sugar was demonized. This was a catapult into the food rules that formed the basis of my eating disorder. 

Don’t eat dessert. Don’t eat sugar. Don’t eat anything processed. If I broke a food rule, I had to compensate for it somehow in ways that punished my body. I couldn’t trust myself to eat, especially sweets and desserts. I would restrict myself from eating anything with sugar (basically everything), then would fall into binging, creating a vortex of a never-ending vicious cycle with food and body shame. 

Everything was calculated, tightly controlled and strictly regulated. 

While this way of eating offered a superficial sense of control, it was an artificial way of living my life. 

Being trapped in my own food rules was keeping me from experiencing life and threatened my very existence. I knew I didn’t want this to be the story I dragged my growing family into, and I wanted to end the generational cycles of dieting, food guilt, and body shame with me - to not pass this on to my own children. I’m thankful for finding food freedom and the confidence this gave me to help navigate feeding my own children. 

Having children reminded me that kids are born with an innate ability to listen to and trust their bodies. In fact, we’re all programmed this way. 

I learned that I didn’t need to micromanage my kids’ intake or keep sugar out of reach. 

I’ve focused on building a trusting feeding relationship and positive eating experiences to support their abilities to listen to and trust their bodies. As an eating disorder survivor, being part of my children’s feeding journeys has been healing on many levels and an important reminder of the roles we play in how our children feel about food and their bodies. 

But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy or peachy keen. There’s been moments where I’ve found my old thought patterns creep back in - especially around feeding my kids. 

Talking about trusting kids with food seems nice in theory, right? 

You want your child to have a healthy relationship with food, but if you don’t trust yourself with certain foods, especially desserts, this can feel challenging.

Even if you didn’t have a difficult relationship with food in your past, you may feel conflicted about how to approach sugar with your kids today. Sugar is demonized in our culture today, and there are so many conflicting messages about sweets and kids that cripple parents with fear.

You’re not alone in this. 

Learning to Trust Your Child With Sweets

I want you to know that it’s possible for you to continue supporting your child in building a positive relationship with food, even when you’re working on healing your own relationship with food. 

Part of me working through my own past fears around food, especially desserts, was understanding that my children needed exposures around sugar at a higher frequency than I might have felt comfortable with. 

Part of working through my own food anxieties was allowing and TRUSTING my children to eat an amount of desserts that was best for their bodies and not allowing my own agenda to interfere with that. 

Let me share this story with you to help explain: 

My kids, like most children, have an affinity for all things sweets. So we have them frequently in our home to ensure they have plenty of opportunities to eat these foods, learn how to self-regulate an amount that feels best in their bodies, and to develop a positive relationship with all foods. 

I remember one particular instance when my oldest daughter, who was about 2 or 3 at the time, had an experience with cake that reminded me of why I needed to trust her with food.  

Now, before I can tell you the rest of this story, I need to share the backstory. When I was struggling with my own relationship with food, cake and other baked goods were a sore spot for me. I went through a baking frenzy craze where I would make the most lavish desserts, including cakes, but wouldn’t allow myself to eat them. I would give them away to friends/neighbors, etc. without allowing myself to enjoy them. 

This escalated into a phase where I would binge uncontrollably on desserts, followed by some way of punishing myself and compensating for what I had eaten. It took a lot of dedicated healing work to break this vicious cycle and normalize eating, especially with desserts. 

Needless to say, allowing my daughter to enjoy cake (and several other instances like this) was an exercise of trust on my part as her parent. It’s interesting how certain situations can be a trigger for old thought patterns, or even how it can bring up memories from past negative eating behaviors. But I had to allow those thoughts to pass in order to create room for my children to explore food on their terms and in a healthy way. 

Giving my kids space to eat without interference or judgement on my part, or the interjection of my past grievances with food, has been essential for them to grow into their own positive relationship with food. 

So back to my daughter and the cake. 

We were at a birthday party, and it came time for cake to be served. She saw all the other kids eating it and naturally wanted a piece of cake for herself. She didn’t want a bite off my plate, she wanted her own. 

We gave her a slice of cake on her plate, and she was ecstatic. She ate it happily, and before we knew it, the entire slice was gone. Immediately she asked for more. “More cake, please!”

Since birthday cake wasn’t necessarily an everyday occurrence at our house, this was somewhat of a new experience for both her and me. For a brief moment, I seemed to remember an onslaught of past “rules” around dessert and comments I’d received about kids and sugar:

“Only have one piece!” “Don’t let kids eat sugar so young, they’ll get addicted to it!” “That’s way too much for such a little person!” And so forth. (Side note: Be sure to check out this blog, where I debunk the sugar addiction myth - “Sugar Addiction: Is My Child Addicted to Sugar?”)

But I knew in that moment that I had to push through my own discomforts from past experiences and negative comments in order to create space for my daughter to enjoy her cake. I couldn’t allow my own past experiences around desserts to taint her experiences. After all, I knew innately that she could be trusted to eat an amount that was right for her - even if that amount looked “different” from what I thought or was perhaps more comfortable with. 

So I gave her another slice on her plate with a smile and without a side serve of my own fears. I gave her cake and didn’t say a word. I knew I could trust her to eat. 

What surprised me was how she literally only took 1 bite of her second slice before pushing her plate away and announcing, “I done!” And that was that. We moved one with our day. But I’ll never forget that instance (and countless other situations) where my kids have proved time and time again that they could be trusted to eat. They could be trusted with all foods, including desserts. 

In another similar situation, I remember a time where my son (around age 2) was enjoying brownies and milk for a snack. 

There he was with his brownie on his plate and glass of milk. I watched him first sniff his brownie then begin to eat it excitedly. But he didn’t just wolf it down or swallow it whole. He took a bite and put it down. He took a sip of his milk. He engaged in conversation and noticed his toy in the corner of the room. He ran to get his toy and came back to the table and took another bite of his brownie. He played with his toy on the table before sipping his milk and returning to his brownie again. 

I watched him as he went between his brownie and milk and observed how he enjoyed his snack. 

Again, the most surprising moment to me was seeing how he declared loudly, “I’m done!”, before leaving the table with the tiniest bite of brownie left on his plate. 

This still makes me laugh to myself thinking about it. I mean, who leaves a BITE of brownie left behind? I know I never did. It was always a black-or-white mentality around food, a constant ignoring of my body’s cues and signals it was giving me until they no longer were decipherable.

But you know who’s able to leave a bite of their dessert behind?  I’ll tell you who - a child who is so in tune with his innate hunger and fullness cues and who’s listening to his own body, that’s who. 

Watching how he ate desserts unfold was such a beautiful reminder to me that no matter what my past experiences around food have been, my children can be trusted to eat, and giving them that trust is an essential foundation to a healthy relationship with food and body. 

Learning this trust factor has been instrumental for me, not just as a mother who’s feeding and raising children, but as an eating disorder survivor, who once lived life in a dark place of feeling unable to trust myself and my own body with food. 

If you are a mother who is learning to trust your children with food and desserts after dealing with your own distrust in your body and with food, I want you to know that you’re not alone. 

It takes great courage to change the course of a generation - to recognize that you don’t want to recycle negative thought patterns or behaviors around food or your body to your own children.

You are doing a brave thing. I know it can be hard at times.

You’re taking steps to improve your own relationship with food so you can feed your child with confidence, be a role model, and end generational cycles of diet cycling and food shame.

7 Tips to Help You Support Your Child Around Food

As a mother who’s lived through this experience myself and who’s actively working to change the tide for generations to come, I’d love to share a few tidbits that have helped me along the journey: 

1. Understand your emotional triggers: 

As you approach feeding your children, be aware of your own lived experiences that have shaped and influenced your own relationship with food.

Did you struggle with an eating disorder? Were you chronically dieting or made to feel like you couldn’t trust food or your body? Did you grow up with a polarized outlook on food (good versus bad foods)? Were you teased or bullied for your body size?

All of these experiences can impact your overall relationship with food. How you relate to food and your body can play a role in the way you feed your own children.

For example, if you were shamed for your appetite as a child or told that you “eat too much”, you might feel triggered by seeing your child eating a larger volume of food. As another example, if desserts were off limits in your home, only reserved for special occasions/rewards, or only allowed on a “cheat day”, you might feel out of control when you eat certain sweets.

This may make it challenging for you to navigate sweets with your own child. There are many potential scenarios here, and the important thing is to identify what experiences have shaped your own outlook.

Motherhood is a refining process that can often bring unresolved issues to the surface. These issues can be triggered by various situations you may encounter with your own child, especially around food and body.

When you’re aware of the lived experiences that have shaped your relationship with food, you can have a greater understanding about the feeding scenarios that may be trickier for you to navigate with your own children.

2. Be aware of fears you’re projecting on your child:

When it comes to food and your child, what fears might you be projecting in the feeding process? How have your past experiences around food influenced how you feel about feeding your child?

For example, if you struggle with feeling out-of-control when eating desserts, you may project a fear that your own child will also be out-of-control with desserts.

Or if you restricted sweets for fear of gaining weight, you may project a fear that your child will gain weight or grow into a larger body if allowed to eat sweets.

Understanding your own fears with feeding is essential to helping you separate your experiences from your children, allowing them the space and opportunities to develop a positive relationship with food and their bodies.

This is also necessary to help you respond to your child rather than react when certain feeding situations do trigger fear and/or anxiety for you. 

3. Your child is separate from your past experiences around sugar:

To piggy-back on the last point, it’s essential to proactively separate your past eating experiences from your current feeding relationship with your child.

In order to give your child the best opportunity to learn about her own body and to create positive associations with food and eating, there needs to be intentionality around allowing experiences for your child to learn and grow, even if those experiences may have been triggering for you in the past.

As an example, I really struggled with food-focused holidays in the past, especially where there were a lot of desserts and/or candy involved. Holidays were the hardest, because I could hardly focus on spending time with my loved ones as I was so preoccupied with the food itself. I often ended up binging on dessert and spending all of my mental energy calculating what I would need to do to compensate for it in the next week.

Healing my relationship with food and having kids meant renegotiating what these past experiences meant for me in order to create new opportunities for my children and not allowing the fears from my past to dictate how I feed or interact with my children.

Take some time to reflect on how you may be altering your feeding relationships with your children as a result of negative past experiences around food and your body. This can be an opportunity for growth, for both you and your children. 

4. Watch your language:

How do you talk with your children around sweets and desserts?

Inadvertently, you may have ingrained thoughts and beliefs around food that are projected in your language and the way you talk about these foods to your children.

Your words have a powerful impact on how your children feel about food and their bodies.

If you don’t quite feel comfortable with eating certain foods, like desserts, with your children, being intentional about your language and how you respond to them about desserts and sweets can be a way to empower and encourage them to trust their bodies.

When kids hear polarizing language used to describe food (like good versus bad), especially desserts, it can create confusion and chaos around food. Children can also internalize messages they hear about food to decipher their own sense of worth.

For example, if a child hears, “You shouldn’t eat too much sugar, it’s so bad for you!”, he can potentially interpret this to mean that he is a bad child for eating candy. If you need more support around this area, be sure to check out this blog post: “11 Simple Things To Say To Your Kids When They Ask For Sweets”

5. Challenge your mindset around sugar:

We’re naturally drawn to the things we’re told we can’t have, both as kids and adults.

This is an inherent part of being human. This is another reason why food rules don’t work, especially around desserts.

If you’ve ever told your kids, “No - you can’t have that!”, it’s natural for them to become more preoccupied with it. Preoccupation and feelings of deprivation around desserts can lead to obsessiveness around these very foods.

To help prevent this mindset, it’s important to give your child permission to eat and enjoy desserts, even if you’re not yet fully able to give yourself permission to enjoy these foods.

Challenging your mindset around these foods as being something that’s demonized or dangerous to something that can be eaten with enjoyment is necessary for helping your child have a positive experience with these foods.

Another common scenario is feeling like your child can’t be trusted to eat certain foods, like sweets. This sometimes leads parents to intervening unnecessarily or imposing rigid rules around desserts that undermine their ability to eat.

This may also unintentionally cause a child to feel as though she can’t be trusted around food, therefore unable to trust herself and her body.

As a parent who may be healing from your own issues around food and your body, it’s essential to examine your mindset around trust and food with your kids in order to help them build confidence in themselves. Which leads to the next point:

6. Focus on building a trusting feeding relationship: 

Trust between you and your kids around food is essential for them to develop a positive relationship with food.

One of the most powerful vehicles for helping your children build confidence with all foods, including desserts, is to create a trusting feeding relationship with them.

Feeding is an extension of parenting, and all of your feeding interactions are setting the stage from which your kids will learn about food and their bodies.

Essentially this boils down to you, as a parent, focusing on your jobs with feeding, and trusting your children to do their parts with eating. Feeding and eating are two distinct parts of this relationship you’re forming with your child.

Sometimes, as parents, we try to do our kids’ eating jobs for them, and this is where danger lies. It’s also important to discern where you may have a hidden agenda when it comes to feeding your children and how this might be impacting how they feel about food and their bodies.

For example, you might prefer that your child eat sweets less often and when they do eat sweets, she eats smaller portions.

However, it’s not up to us to decide how much our child might eat from the food we’ve provided. Our kids may also need to eat sweets more frequently than what we feel comfortable with.

Understanding these discrepancies of our own expectations compared to what our children are actually capable of doing when it comes to food and eating is necessary for building trust with your child around food.

If you’ve had a history of eating difficulties, this may be especially challenging for you, as the food rules from your past may now begin to dictate how and what you should feed your child, which brings me to my last point: 

7. Get help when needed:

Feeding kids is hard. If you’ve struggled with issues around food and your own body, feeding challenges with kids can become amplified.

For some parents, feeding kids can trigger past food struggles. If you’re going through this, know this is not your fault, and you don’t have to struggle through this alone.

What’s most important to have awareness of the areas you may need more help and support.

Maybe it’s difficult to let go of your past food rules in order to create space for your child to safely explore food. Maybe you’re feeling okay in feeding your child but don’t yet feel comfortable enough to eat or share certain foods with your child.

Whatever the scenario might be, know that you’re not alone.

Sometimes, this means involving another trusted caregiver who can help take over some of the feeding responsibilities with your child, like sharing desserts with them, if this is something you’re not yet comfortable doing.

This may also mean reaching out for professional support, like an intuitive eating registered dietitian and counselor who can help you on your journey in making peace with food.

If you are a mother who’s recovering from an eating disorder or needing more support around food and body image issues, I’d love to invite you to join our free virtual monthly support group, called Lift the Shame. You can find out more about Lift the Shame and sign up on this page here. 

You Aren’t Alone, Mama

Even if all your experiences around food have taught you that you can’t trust yourself to eat desserts or enjoy the foods you want to eat, there’s always hope for healing, for yourself and your children. 

By continuing to heal your own relationship with food, you will build trust in yourself and in the feeding relationships you share with your children. This can be an invaluable foundation for them to learn about food and their bodies, and to ultimately grow into a positive relationship with both. 

If you need more support in this area, please connect with me today. I’ll also be offering a virtual workshop series this summer on how to feed your children with confidence, which you can sign up for the waitlist below. 

Where do you find it challenging to feed your kids with trust?