Thank you so much for addressing the ableism that often exists in discussions of health and motherhood! I’m a mom with two chronic illnesses. I continue to work through my ideas of being a “good” mom or “bad” mom in the context of being chronically ill. This has all become so much more complex in the time of Covid. I had to choose between being high risk or having more symptoms (so lucky that I can make that choice!). I do make these types of choices with my three-year-old at the front of my mind. I think, though, that there is a (nuanced and difficult) difference between considering the pragmatic reality of the impact of our health choices on our children to the extent that we can, and believing that we are bad mothers for having bodies that are, ultimately, beyond our control. Thanks so much for this discussion! Your work is a delight!
This is such a good way to put it: “there is a (nuanced and difficult) difference between considering the pragmatic reality of the impact of our health choices on our children to the extent that we can, and believing that we are bad mothers for having bodies that are, ultimately, beyond our control.” Thank you.
The discussion of clean/unclean, pure/impure, reminds me of a lecture I heard years ago by David Domke, who's a communications professor. He'd researched and written a book about the 2nd Bush White House and how they used a fundamentalist Christian dichotomy of good/bad to frame issues after 9/11 and how the press followed along and adopted this very simplistic framing on editorial pages across the country. "You are with us or you are with the terrorists", not "You are with us, or you possibly have an informed and nuanced understanding of American foreign policy and how we've affected people in many nations and that might come back to bite us". You can see how the first one is easy and appealing! And also how it shuts off exploration of a full range of responses, including the ability to change and grow.
I find myself thinking about how often we fall into this all or nothing way of thinking about ourselves, our habits, and some sort of morality judgement. Whether it's healthy/unhealthy, or eating processed oils/oil-free, or anything else, the level of judgment is so high and so unforgiving. Maybe what we need is more like an improv approach of "yes and" to unstick our thinking and open ourselves to more possibilities. (Not in the sense of saying yes to judgey and simplistic things, just to get past the either/or.)
I am genuinely commenting because I want to better understand, so if any of this comes off as defensive or combative, I just want to apologize in advance.
I am a mom of medically-complex twins. They were born 17 weeks prematurely. They had multiple surgeries to address life-threatening gut issues and they had very long courses of antibiotics. One of my daughters had chronic diarrhea for the first year and a half of her life. I talked to three pediatric gastroenterologists as well as two pediatricians, and did a lot of research before choosing to feed my family a whole foods, plant-based diet because there is evidence to support this can rehab the gut microbiome. Our team of doctors were on board with this, and it has worked. It took a long time, but she has progressively gotten better and we have her symptoms managed entirely with diet.
We decided our entire family would eat this way because it seems totally inappropriate to be eating pizza or potato chips while my toddlers eat lettuce wraps.
We all genuine love enjoy eating the way we do. I love cooking, so I don't mind all the extra work it takes to make almost everything from scratch.
Your book intrigued me because, with as much as I want my kids to enjoy fruits and vegetables and chia pudding (ha! I know your sentiments on this), I also don't want them to judge others or be judged when it comes to food. I don't want them to be scared of food. To be general, I want them to have a safe relationship with food and their bodies.
I share all of this because, while I agree that good motherhood and health ought not be conflated, I have a really hard time believing that giving my kids the best quality of life is not a moral imperative.
I recognize my privilege plays a titanic role in my story. I would never blame or judge someone who could not do what I have done for my kids because they don't have the knowledge or they don't have the means, but how could I know what I know about how food has helped heal my kids' very sick little bodies and it not be a moral imperative to keep their guts healthy?
Thank you for sharing all of this. I agree, being a "good" parent does mean protecting your children's health to the extent you are able and makes sense to do. I did not have to think twice about whether my daughter should have heart surgery, or whether we should follow all of her cardiologist's instructions to the letter as we continue to manage her chronic condition.
In this conversation Amanda and I are specifically discussing whether mothers owe our OWN health to our kids—and we believe it's possible to be a good mother who is also "unhealthy" for whatever reason; to understand that good parents can be all levels of health and ability. Because the alternative is to start making rules about who can be a parent and that gets to a pretty gross place, fast. We didn't talk about the obligations parents have to protect their kids' health; I do think that's a different conversation to some extent, though I'd be interested to hear Amanda's take.
And I do think what you're outlining here represents a bit of a gray area: It's amazing that eating this way has helped your daughter. Dietary changes are often not the only option to treat a health issue, though. (Obviously something like a peanut allergy is super clear-cut -- but gut issues, as I'm sure I don't need to tell you! Are often much murkier to sort out. So is something like diabetes; diet management makes sense for some patients, but many also need to rely on medication or use medication so they don't have to alter their diet as much.) So my take would be that yes, you had a moral imperative to keep your daughter safe and relieve her suffering -- but you don't necessarily have a moral imperative to do those things in this way. This is the way that works for your situation and level of privilege; there may be other ways that would work better for other families (and if there aren't, we need to find some because cooking everything from scratch/eating exclusively whole foods/etc does require a tremendous amount of time and labor not available to many!).
These are some off the cuff/not-enough-coffee musings and I want to think on this some more. You're raising really interesting questions here. And certainly, at this moment in our country, I would say, we have an ENORMOUS moral imperative to protect kids' health and safety by getting guns out of schools -- so it's not that health/safety/morality are never related. But we also need to understand how much "health" is determined by a multitude of factors often beyond our control. "Health" is really a community concept, rather than a matter of individual responsibility.
I am SUPER grateful for your response. I realize the conversation was about our health as mother's and what our moral obligation is there, and I don't know what my opinion on that is fully formed. But I do respect the perspective you and Amanda bring to the table and I have a lot of curiosity as to how that bleeds into our obligations when it comes to our children's health.
And to expand on what you said about dietary changes not being the only option: Yes, were on a cocktail of medications for a long time to manage symptoms, but nothing worked as well as a high-fiber diet. I would love to eventually hear your thoughts on not even wanting to consider diet as a a factor when it comes to health/medical issues.
I feel like I should also add, I am extreme pro-medication. I am not a total whacko preaching a plant-based diet as the cure to everyone's ailments. But I did feel an obligation to explore all of my daughter's options (with the help of a medical team).
While I don't always agree with everything you say, I really appreciate the perspectives you bring to the conversation. I think it's important to see the many different lenses through which people experience the world.
Thank you Laura! I really appreciate your openness to this conversation. And to be clear: I’d never say that we shouldn’t even consider diet as a factor in health/medical issues. When my daughter was on a feeding tube and struggling with major GI issues, I made her blended food from scratch. We’ve also had to live on fat-free diets for periods of time (absolute hell with a toddler!). It’s a piece of the puzzle in lots of cases and it sounds like the biggest piece in your case. My frustration is with doctors/folks who think of diet as the “easy” place to start, without any consideration of the full context -- cost, time, labor required to produce certain kinds of meals, as well as the toll on mental health that restrictive diets can take. Eating a certain diet may be good for someone’s physical health and disastrous for their mental health or quality of life - and so then, what’s our obligation to health? That answer will look different for every family.
Thank you so much for addressing the ableism that often exists in discussions of health and motherhood! I’m a mom with two chronic illnesses. I continue to work through my ideas of being a “good” mom or “bad” mom in the context of being chronically ill. This has all become so much more complex in the time of Covid. I had to choose between being high risk or having more symptoms (so lucky that I can make that choice!). I do make these types of choices with my three-year-old at the front of my mind. I think, though, that there is a (nuanced and difficult) difference between considering the pragmatic reality of the impact of our health choices on our children to the extent that we can, and believing that we are bad mothers for having bodies that are, ultimately, beyond our control. Thanks so much for this discussion! Your work is a delight!
This is such a good way to put it: “there is a (nuanced and difficult) difference between considering the pragmatic reality of the impact of our health choices on our children to the extent that we can, and believing that we are bad mothers for having bodies that are, ultimately, beyond our control.” Thank you.
The discussion of clean/unclean, pure/impure, reminds me of a lecture I heard years ago by David Domke, who's a communications professor. He'd researched and written a book about the 2nd Bush White House and how they used a fundamentalist Christian dichotomy of good/bad to frame issues after 9/11 and how the press followed along and adopted this very simplistic framing on editorial pages across the country. "You are with us or you are with the terrorists", not "You are with us, or you possibly have an informed and nuanced understanding of American foreign policy and how we've affected people in many nations and that might come back to bite us". You can see how the first one is easy and appealing! And also how it shuts off exploration of a full range of responses, including the ability to change and grow.
I find myself thinking about how often we fall into this all or nothing way of thinking about ourselves, our habits, and some sort of morality judgement. Whether it's healthy/unhealthy, or eating processed oils/oil-free, or anything else, the level of judgment is so high and so unforgiving. Maybe what we need is more like an improv approach of "yes and" to unstick our thinking and open ourselves to more possibilities. (Not in the sense of saying yes to judgey and simplistic things, just to get past the either/or.)
This is a GREAT analogy. Thank you.
I am genuinely commenting because I want to better understand, so if any of this comes off as defensive or combative, I just want to apologize in advance.
I am a mom of medically-complex twins. They were born 17 weeks prematurely. They had multiple surgeries to address life-threatening gut issues and they had very long courses of antibiotics. One of my daughters had chronic diarrhea for the first year and a half of her life. I talked to three pediatric gastroenterologists as well as two pediatricians, and did a lot of research before choosing to feed my family a whole foods, plant-based diet because there is evidence to support this can rehab the gut microbiome. Our team of doctors were on board with this, and it has worked. It took a long time, but she has progressively gotten better and we have her symptoms managed entirely with diet.
We decided our entire family would eat this way because it seems totally inappropriate to be eating pizza or potato chips while my toddlers eat lettuce wraps.
We all genuine love enjoy eating the way we do. I love cooking, so I don't mind all the extra work it takes to make almost everything from scratch.
Your book intrigued me because, with as much as I want my kids to enjoy fruits and vegetables and chia pudding (ha! I know your sentiments on this), I also don't want them to judge others or be judged when it comes to food. I don't want them to be scared of food. To be general, I want them to have a safe relationship with food and their bodies.
I share all of this because, while I agree that good motherhood and health ought not be conflated, I have a really hard time believing that giving my kids the best quality of life is not a moral imperative.
I recognize my privilege plays a titanic role in my story. I would never blame or judge someone who could not do what I have done for my kids because they don't have the knowledge or they don't have the means, but how could I know what I know about how food has helped heal my kids' very sick little bodies and it not be a moral imperative to keep their guts healthy?
Thank you for sharing all of this. I agree, being a "good" parent does mean protecting your children's health to the extent you are able and makes sense to do. I did not have to think twice about whether my daughter should have heart surgery, or whether we should follow all of her cardiologist's instructions to the letter as we continue to manage her chronic condition.
In this conversation Amanda and I are specifically discussing whether mothers owe our OWN health to our kids—and we believe it's possible to be a good mother who is also "unhealthy" for whatever reason; to understand that good parents can be all levels of health and ability. Because the alternative is to start making rules about who can be a parent and that gets to a pretty gross place, fast. We didn't talk about the obligations parents have to protect their kids' health; I do think that's a different conversation to some extent, though I'd be interested to hear Amanda's take.
And I do think what you're outlining here represents a bit of a gray area: It's amazing that eating this way has helped your daughter. Dietary changes are often not the only option to treat a health issue, though. (Obviously something like a peanut allergy is super clear-cut -- but gut issues, as I'm sure I don't need to tell you! Are often much murkier to sort out. So is something like diabetes; diet management makes sense for some patients, but many also need to rely on medication or use medication so they don't have to alter their diet as much.) So my take would be that yes, you had a moral imperative to keep your daughter safe and relieve her suffering -- but you don't necessarily have a moral imperative to do those things in this way. This is the way that works for your situation and level of privilege; there may be other ways that would work better for other families (and if there aren't, we need to find some because cooking everything from scratch/eating exclusively whole foods/etc does require a tremendous amount of time and labor not available to many!).
These are some off the cuff/not-enough-coffee musings and I want to think on this some more. You're raising really interesting questions here. And certainly, at this moment in our country, I would say, we have an ENORMOUS moral imperative to protect kids' health and safety by getting guns out of schools -- so it's not that health/safety/morality are never related. But we also need to understand how much "health" is determined by a multitude of factors often beyond our control. "Health" is really a community concept, rather than a matter of individual responsibility.
I am SUPER grateful for your response. I realize the conversation was about our health as mother's and what our moral obligation is there, and I don't know what my opinion on that is fully formed. But I do respect the perspective you and Amanda bring to the table and I have a lot of curiosity as to how that bleeds into our obligations when it comes to our children's health.
And to expand on what you said about dietary changes not being the only option: Yes, were on a cocktail of medications for a long time to manage symptoms, but nothing worked as well as a high-fiber diet. I would love to eventually hear your thoughts on not even wanting to consider diet as a a factor when it comes to health/medical issues.
I feel like I should also add, I am extreme pro-medication. I am not a total whacko preaching a plant-based diet as the cure to everyone's ailments. But I did feel an obligation to explore all of my daughter's options (with the help of a medical team).
While I don't always agree with everything you say, I really appreciate the perspectives you bring to the conversation. I think it's important to see the many different lenses through which people experience the world.
Thank you Laura! I really appreciate your openness to this conversation. And to be clear: I’d never say that we shouldn’t even consider diet as a factor in health/medical issues. When my daughter was on a feeding tube and struggling with major GI issues, I made her blended food from scratch. We’ve also had to live on fat-free diets for periods of time (absolute hell with a toddler!). It’s a piece of the puzzle in lots of cases and it sounds like the biggest piece in your case. My frustration is with doctors/folks who think of diet as the “easy” place to start, without any consideration of the full context -- cost, time, labor required to produce certain kinds of meals, as well as the toll on mental health that restrictive diets can take. Eating a certain diet may be good for someone’s physical health and disastrous for their mental health or quality of life - and so then, what’s our obligation to health? That answer will look different for every family.
Virginia (and Amanda) - you keep pushing me in all the best ways. Jennifer
Thank you for the willingness to be pushed!