This article reminded me of my embarrassment in the past when dealing with young childrens’ comments about my body…! The situation is slightly different because I believe up to a certain age children certainly aren’t trying to be hurtful with their comments, they are just trying to make sense of the world. I wish that instead of saying silent I spoke up though. To correct them. To say, oh, I’m just fat- and sometimes people are fat without being pregnant and that’s fine. Until recently, I didn’t think it was fine. I thought it was shameful for anyone to make comments on my size; it’s all my fault, etc., if I wasn’t so big in a way it wasn’t purposeful (read: carrying a baby), it was somehow terrible. But I noticed thin parents/teachers will be mortified by the comments of kids on bigger bodies too. And I guess just with kids especially, it can be a moment to learn about body diversity or question assumptions they may be learning.
YES, I think the way other adults freeze in the face of these kid comments makes it SO MUCH WORSE, because now you, as the comment recipient, are somehow in the position of managing everyone's emotions about what just happened. Nope. It's a them problem. (But I do agree with your instinct to say oh I'm fat, and some people are fat without being pregnant! It is a great opportunity to normalize body diversity for kids.)
I once had a kid who was about... 6? (the older brother of one of my son's friends) say out loud, twice, to make sure I heard it, "WOW, YOU'RE REALLY FAT!" I didn't know the family well at the time and we had just arrived for a playdate, so I just sort of glanced at the kid and said, "Well, I've been practicing for a long time."
His parents were mortified; the dad took the kid aside shortly after and said... something? I don't know what. But the mom mentioned that me not seeming bothered by it did not convey to the child that it wasn't an okay thing to do, and like... that is not my problem. I reacted in a way that didn't give him the big reaction he was looking for but was still child-appropriate, so I feel very comfortable with my behavior in that situation.
What I teach my own kid is that it's rude to comment on other people's bodies. Because yes, fat is just fat and there's no moral component to it, but you also can't just walk up to somebody and call them fat, either.
I mean, I get the concern that children learn what is hurtful by seeing someone be hurt by it (I often remark that my child is welcome to learn that when he's a jerk, people will get mad at him). But they also learn that fat is shameful by watching adults be ashamed of it and that's not what I'm about.
May 24, 2022·edited May 24, 2022Liked by Virginia Sole-Smith
Tyler Feder's book, "Bodies Are Cool" has been MONUMENTAL in helping me talk with my son about this. He was getting into the stage of noticing different bodies, sizes, colors, hair types etc. Now if he is talking about someone else, I often don't feel comfortable calling THEM fat because many people still take offense to that. But he may have said something like, "Wow they have a really big belly!" or "Look at that big guy!" and I would simply say, "Yeah, he's a big guy (or she has a big belly) and you are a little guy (have a little belly) because bodies are..." and he follows up with, "COOL!" Just kind of reminding him we're all different and not only is it completely normal but also what makes us awesome and unique. Since then, he doesn't really mention bodies too much any more because he is aware of this as fact :) Now not saying that all kids have that same kind of reminder at home but may be a good approach to a kid saying something about you being pregnant, "I'm not actually, I am just fat and other people are skinny and that's because all bodies are different because bodies are cool!" Helps them maybe not focus on the fat or skinny part but that body diversity exists and is awesome and also gives the adults listening that seem mortified a way to also discuss it if they are unaware how to in the future (which obviously they are if they are mortified lol!)
I've been reading that book to my 4 year old and he is fascinated by it but my favorite side effect is that my 2 year old overhears us reading it all the time and now wanders the house muttering "Bodies ...cool, bodies ... cool"
With kids, I always say something like, "Yeah, I am fat. I'm also tall, I have brown hair, and brown eyes. What color eyes do you have?" or something and talk about how cool it is that bodies come in so many different configurations. Normalizing it has been super important for me with the little kids in my life.
I can't remember ever being mistaken for pregnant (to my face) even though I carry a lot of weight in the middle. But when I WAS pregnant, even at 8 or 9 months, people frequently expressed surprise when I mentioned it, and that felt really bad too. That thing you see in pop culture - and real life as you described about the wedding buffet - where pregnant women are given seats on the subway or whatever never happened for me. All I felt was that there was *still* something "wrong" with my body and the expectations people had for it. The one time that I was "supposed" to be fat I....wasn't fat enough? Or something? Not fat in the right way? It sucked.
Oh YES. I forgot to work this in -- I was identified as pregnant FAR LESS when I actually was pregnant, especially my second pregnancy (which i started at a higher weight). Expectations around bodies are so effed up.
It’s funny, when I was early in my pregnancy (it was still a secret from my coworkers) people were giving me seats on the train- and I really needed those seats. I guess my body read differently to people who knew me, and strangers?
Also long ago, when being mistaken for pregnant felt like an insult to me, an acquaintance congratulated me on my pregnancy and patted my (not pregnant) belly. I just told him “nope not pregnant” and then made him suffer through five more minutes of small talk.
I have known of doctors who expressed astonishment upon learning that their fat patient was pregnant--as if to say, that requires sex, and what man would find you attractive enough to want to have sex with you. One said as much, explicitly, to my fiancé, prior to her having a premarital blood test, which used to be required by the State of New York.
Disappointing to read about the BLW accounts! I stumbled across the book in the early 2010s, and followed it because it met my lazy goals of not having to actively feed a baby while I was trying to eat and not having to acquire/make special foods or do any additional planning. The main conversations I remember were about not oversalting food (because baby kidneys?) and choking.
It's weird (but not unexpected, I guess) that it's taken this turn. I remember the philosophy primarily being "your kids should eat what you eat" and "your kids will eat better if they get to control the process." And this seems like the opposite of that.
My three kids all ate everything we ate until they were toddlers, at which point they ate nothing. Now they're all over the place (e.g., the kid who will eat sushi but not chicken; the kid who thinks roasted broccoli is a treat but hates all other vegetables), like pretty much every other kid.
I was so excited to do this with my second due in October (we did a little with my first but majority purees) because it seems like the most natural way to make a little intuitive eater from the get. (Also love to hear that even with BLW, your toddlers still went the very normal toddler route of being picky! It's literally the one thing they can control in their lives!) But very disappointed to hear about all the sanctimommies out there making it another version of a diet with diet rules :( As most parenting and things in life, I suppose we'll take the good and leave the bad!
“What has changed is parents’ expectations about how kids should eat, and the pressure we feel to perform our parenting through our children’s eating habits.” This is it. I’ve been thinking about this shift... I think my parents would have considered it a win if I tried one vegetable in a week. My mom packed bag lunches of a basic sandwich (like PB&J), chips, cookie, and a fruit. My “picky” sister lived on mac & cheese, cereal, and yogurt, and it just wasn’t a big deal. And I didn’t feel like we were way outside the norm. When I did BLW with my babe, I remember my mom commenting on the “fancy” snack I was preparing (bell peppers & hummus) and saying, “I just gave you Teddy Grahams.” So while the grandparents are definitely not okay in terms of diet culture and body image, I want to give them (the ones in my life, at least) credit for their way more relaxed attitude toward feeding us as children--and their grandchildren now, too. As much as I want to roll my eyes at their comments about sugar, for instance, they don’t try to get my kid to eat a perfectly “balanced” meal or adventurous foods or whatever.
I can't prove it, but as a lifelong picky eater it feels like there's been a shift from "pickiness is bad because it's rude and inconvenient for other people" to "pickiness is bad because not being open to experience is a moral failing".
I LOVE that tweet/IG post you put in the middle and just added it to my stories with the caveat that this also applies to my pregnant body. When I tell people I am 18 weeks etc, I get a lot of, "well you don't look it!" and I understand they mean it as a compliment I guess but it still stops me dead in my tracks because I certainly FEEL it and also, were we even talking about my body, or were we talking about me being pregnant? It's like all of a sudden, when someone thinks your uterus is full, they have license to discuss how you look and it's just not ok! I told a colleague that I was pregnant and he immediately responded, "I thought you were looking fat around there," completely dead panned and serious. I was too shocked to say anything but in hindsight should have said something along the lines of, "Well I am fatter I think lately, but I am also carrying a baby now too."
...does BLW even make sense with how infants eat? I thought the typical pattern was that stationery babies will eat just about anything (within reason), but that most babies become extremely picky around the time they really master walking (for reasons that make sense from an evolutionary perspective: a stationery baby is being brought food and can presumably trust its caregiver, but an ambulatory baby is more independent and potentially eating things it finds itself. Most poisonous things have a strong taste and almost none taste sugary, hence baby's preferences for bland or sugary foods). They then expand their repertoire with repeated exposure to foods, which teaches them what foods their "tribe" has determined are safe. I would think the "combating pickiness" would have to come at the walking stage. My parents, at least, always groused about how I used to be such a good eater as a baby and then abruptly began refusing almost all foods around eighteen months.
The argument is that by getting the stationary baby to eat loads of different foods, you will have less pickiness once they get mobile because they already accept all these things, so they won't need to reject them as unfamiliar. The reality, as your parents experienced/so did mine/so did I with my second child -- yes, there are a lot of stationary babies who will eat everything and then become a COMPLETELY different eater in toddlerhood. And some kids are going to grow out of their pickiness at age 5, and some at age 12, and some never. And no method prevents this, but lots of parental anxiety about how a kid eats can sure make it worse!
My perspective with BLW was that it was mostly about which foods you were going to give to your stationary 6-12 month old - banana puree that you have to spoon into their mouth, or a hunk of banana that they can mash around and rub on their face? A special baby meal, or just a mound of spaghetti and sauce? (And, like I said above, one of those options is much more work than the other.)
There was part of it that was very focused on texture - that one of the reasons toddlers might refuse food is because they're used to soft and smooth baby foods, and that if they're given a variety of textures as babies, they might not have that aversion.
But in the BLW of 10 years ago, I don't remember sugar being a thing. In fact, with regard to bread, "toast fingers" were a whole thing (that I thought was unnecessarily fussy) as a delivery device, because it's easier for a baby to smear some bread through apple sauce or yogurt or whatever than to use a spoon.
Re Q1, my kid really likes seafood and people are always like "oh, such sophisticated taste," and it's like, no, he just likes seafood. Salmon and clam chowder are just, on his own, two of his favorite foods (and honestly is clam chowder really sophisticated? it's basically a bowl of cream), it's not that he's some magic kid who'll eat anything. Show him a leafy green that is not in chicken saag from one specific Indian restaurant and you'll learn that real fast.
This reminds me how much my 4yo liked seafood as an infant and rarely touches it (or really, most meats that aren’t chicken nuggets) now. BLW had me convinced that early exposure meant lifelong love. NOPE.
I remembered from my own childhood that my parents would always talk about things I'd liked as a little kid and stopped liking, so I actually took a video of my kid at 18 months chowing down on broccoli (like, having a piece in each hand and stuffing them in his mouth one after the other), to prove that it happened. And sure enough he's a lot pickier about vegetables now than he was then -- even as recently as a year ago he'd periodically eat cooked broccoli and he'd reliably eat roast cauliflower dipped in ketchup, but these days pretty much he only eats raw vegetables.
Haha my kid also loved plain steamed broccoli at 18 months and we have a video of him literally falling asleep sitting in his high chair but unwilling to stop chowing on it 😂
Thank you for writing this about BLW! It CAN be a helpful tool when introducing your infant to solids, but so many people have taken it to an extreme and created way too many "rules" about how to do it perfectly -- just like dieting in adulthood.
A few months ago, a creep at work commented on my “pregnant” belly and was incredulous like awful Norm when I said I wasn’t pregnant but was in fact recovering from recurrent miscarriages and disordered eating. It reminded me that when I WAS pregnant, same creep was asking me if I was going to have the baby “normally “ aka through my vagina or not. I was too exhausted and frustrated at the time to say anything but after the more recent comment, I filed a harassment complaint and my company took some action. My interactions with him are no longer a part of my job. The whole time he was confused about why I was mad. People can be so awful
This: "(I, for one, ate almost nothing but spaghetti, white bread, and strawberry yogurt until I was 12.) What has changed is parents’ expectations about how kids should eat, and the pressure we feel to perform our parenting through our children’s eating habits. "
I do not focus on what my kid eats, and he eats a specific list of foods at home, and apparently an unending list of foods at daycare. I also was a kid who ate mostly bland foods for the majority of my childhood - and now I eat more and I'm fine (although fat, focused on salt, etc.). Is this okay to just not engage with??? Do I need to be pushing variety, veggies, different tastes? Or is this, like potty-training and much else, something that my kid will figure out if given latitude and non-judgement? What is the ruling on this from a Burnt Toast perspective?
The Burnt Toast ruling is that feeding families is totally idiosyncratic and impossible to make general rulings on! Some kids with severe feeding aversions do benefit from (responsive, trauma-informed) therapeutic input. The majority of “picky” eaters aren’t picky, they are just kids eating like kids.
For me personally, the most important value to teach around food is respect for the labor required to prepare it, and otherwise I just want family meals to be opportunities to connect, and for food to be a source of joy. I can achieve all of that without pushing my kids to eat specific foods. They do get exposed to variety, veggies, etc because they see us eating that way - not because I’m insisting on try it bites, etc.
Thank you for replying! It is so easy to feel 'mom-guilt' that I tend to take it on even when I don't plan to change anything!!! I am happy to let this go (for now).
Your content makes me feel so seen and happy. I truly appreciate your efforts to create it. An antidote to Ista-parenting, Insta-food for sure!!!
Loved reading about your responses to the annoying pregnancy predicters. I'm a teacher and believe me i LOVE middle schoolers but I once had a student who decided to meanly spread a rumor that i was pregnant to the whole grade?? that was a mind fuck.
Everything you post is something that resonates with me! Ok. BLW. I had to do this with my first child, I didn't even know what it was or that it had a name, I just had no choice. She would not let pureed food pass her lips. Or anything on a spoon. Or sucked out of a pouch. Not a drop. So I guess she was picky before she even started weaning? Desperately, I let her start eating small things, or she'd grab things off my plate and start putting them in her mouth -- and that was it! I learned later there was a term for it, but for me it was just the only way I managed to introduce solids to her. She seemed happy and it was really fun for me, also less stressful going out to eat as there was always something she could eat. She turned out a few years later to become a really anxious, really really picky eater (you could count what she would eat on your hands) and I suspect she's a super taster and was just very sensitive to texture too. But she was already so choosy to begin with. Now, however (9 years later) she's completely coming out of her shell and is trying foods on her own, asking for things, stealing things off my plate again! It's a joy. I knew this would happen and it would all turn around, I was just willing to wait another decade or more for it. What I don't understand is why this pressure exists. What do people worry will happen if their kids are picky? If they eat the same 3 or 5 meals every day of the week? What will go wrong if that happens? If they stay in their comfort zone? Some of the closest adults around me (my brother, my husband) grew up as worse picky eaters (lasted until 18 for both) and are now the biggest foodies I know - good cooks, passionate about food and flavours, will eat anything.
Thanks so much for this! I was actually really gung ho to do BLW with my toddler when she was a baby and made little lists of all the foods that would be fun to cook for her (I really do like cooking so it was genuinely kind of exciting). And then it turned out she hated anything that wasn't a pureed texture for months. Which . . . was fine. And now at 2.5, she is no more picky than any other 2.5-year-old. But this puts my finger on something that drove me NUTS about all the BLW rhetoric, which is that everyone always says "oh, it's so much easier because you just feed the baby what you're eating instead of making special food," but then it turns out that means mom has to make 3 homecooked meals a day with no salt and using only whole, unprocessed ingredients that introduce your child to the right new foods at the right time. As if I had the bandwidth for that with a 6-month-old instead of feeding her some mashed avocado and then popping some popcorn for me after she went to bed.
Oh, and you know how I'm going to introduce my baby to branzino? I'm going to take her and her roommates out to a nice dinner when I visit her in college.
"The perfect response to someone else's shitty assumption is whatever YOU need it to be." I love that so much, and I love that it releases me from having to craft the perfect response whilst experiencing a microaggression. As someone both fat and infertile, it is always very hard to have to respond to this question, which I also get often, despite the fact that I don't think I carry my weight in a way that makes me look pregnant at all. Sometimes, depending on the person, I like to turn the discomfort on them and say, "I wish! I can't get pregnant." and just stare at them as they squirm. But I confess I don't usually have the chutzpah for that response. I typically reply just as you do, and say, "Nope, just fat!"
By the time I had my third kid, BLW meant letting him grab soggy McDonald's french fries from his sister's Happy Meal.
I have a mom acquaintance in a larger body and for weeks after meeting her I fretted over whether she was pregnant because I felt like a dick every time I saw her and didn't say "congratulations". I finally asked a mutual friend and she said no and then I felt like a dick all over again. When I was pregnant i remember feeling weird when people asked me about it and also weird if they said nothing.
Yes! I felt weird about announcing my pregnancy to people I knew, and then I felt weird that I hadn’t told people when it came up later. Pregnancy is such a tricky topic to navigate because both talking about it and not talking about it can feel hurtful, depending on the people involved and their unique circumstances.
I love the discussion about BLW! As with most things with my daughter, I found that "all or nothing" thinking was harmful (I was told I should "exclusively breastfeed" but combo feeding with formula saved my mental health, I was told "no purees" by BLW purists, but a combo of table foods and purees was a great transition to solids for us!). So happy to have this community. <3
This article reminded me of my embarrassment in the past when dealing with young childrens’ comments about my body…! The situation is slightly different because I believe up to a certain age children certainly aren’t trying to be hurtful with their comments, they are just trying to make sense of the world. I wish that instead of saying silent I spoke up though. To correct them. To say, oh, I’m just fat- and sometimes people are fat without being pregnant and that’s fine. Until recently, I didn’t think it was fine. I thought it was shameful for anyone to make comments on my size; it’s all my fault, etc., if I wasn’t so big in a way it wasn’t purposeful (read: carrying a baby), it was somehow terrible. But I noticed thin parents/teachers will be mortified by the comments of kids on bigger bodies too. And I guess just with kids especially, it can be a moment to learn about body diversity or question assumptions they may be learning.
YES, I think the way other adults freeze in the face of these kid comments makes it SO MUCH WORSE, because now you, as the comment recipient, are somehow in the position of managing everyone's emotions about what just happened. Nope. It's a them problem. (But I do agree with your instinct to say oh I'm fat, and some people are fat without being pregnant! It is a great opportunity to normalize body diversity for kids.)
I once had a kid who was about... 6? (the older brother of one of my son's friends) say out loud, twice, to make sure I heard it, "WOW, YOU'RE REALLY FAT!" I didn't know the family well at the time and we had just arrived for a playdate, so I just sort of glanced at the kid and said, "Well, I've been practicing for a long time."
His parents were mortified; the dad took the kid aside shortly after and said... something? I don't know what. But the mom mentioned that me not seeming bothered by it did not convey to the child that it wasn't an okay thing to do, and like... that is not my problem. I reacted in a way that didn't give him the big reaction he was looking for but was still child-appropriate, so I feel very comfortable with my behavior in that situation.
What I teach my own kid is that it's rude to comment on other people's bodies. Because yes, fat is just fat and there's no moral component to it, but you also can't just walk up to somebody and call them fat, either.
OMG, I think your response was PERFECT. And their child's behavior is so totally not your problem.
I mean, I get the concern that children learn what is hurtful by seeing someone be hurt by it (I often remark that my child is welcome to learn that when he's a jerk, people will get mad at him). But they also learn that fat is shameful by watching adults be ashamed of it and that's not what I'm about.
I've responded with "Thanks, I made it myself!" to a kid saying I had a fat butt. I gotta save that "I've been practicing..." though, that is gold.
Oh, I love that one too. :D
Tyler Feder's book, "Bodies Are Cool" has been MONUMENTAL in helping me talk with my son about this. He was getting into the stage of noticing different bodies, sizes, colors, hair types etc. Now if he is talking about someone else, I often don't feel comfortable calling THEM fat because many people still take offense to that. But he may have said something like, "Wow they have a really big belly!" or "Look at that big guy!" and I would simply say, "Yeah, he's a big guy (or she has a big belly) and you are a little guy (have a little belly) because bodies are..." and he follows up with, "COOL!" Just kind of reminding him we're all different and not only is it completely normal but also what makes us awesome and unique. Since then, he doesn't really mention bodies too much any more because he is aware of this as fact :) Now not saying that all kids have that same kind of reminder at home but may be a good approach to a kid saying something about you being pregnant, "I'm not actually, I am just fat and other people are skinny and that's because all bodies are different because bodies are cool!" Helps them maybe not focus on the fat or skinny part but that body diversity exists and is awesome and also gives the adults listening that seem mortified a way to also discuss it if they are unaware how to in the future (which obviously they are if they are mortified lol!)
I've been reading that book to my 4 year old and he is fascinated by it but my favorite side effect is that my 2 year old overhears us reading it all the time and now wanders the house muttering "Bodies ...cool, bodies ... cool"
So cute!!!
Love Tyler!!
With kids, I always say something like, "Yeah, I am fat. I'm also tall, I have brown hair, and brown eyes. What color eyes do you have?" or something and talk about how cool it is that bodies come in so many different configurations. Normalizing it has been super important for me with the little kids in my life.
I can't remember ever being mistaken for pregnant (to my face) even though I carry a lot of weight in the middle. But when I WAS pregnant, even at 8 or 9 months, people frequently expressed surprise when I mentioned it, and that felt really bad too. That thing you see in pop culture - and real life as you described about the wedding buffet - where pregnant women are given seats on the subway or whatever never happened for me. All I felt was that there was *still* something "wrong" with my body and the expectations people had for it. The one time that I was "supposed" to be fat I....wasn't fat enough? Or something? Not fat in the right way? It sucked.
Oh YES. I forgot to work this in -- I was identified as pregnant FAR LESS when I actually was pregnant, especially my second pregnancy (which i started at a higher weight). Expectations around bodies are so effed up.
It’s funny, when I was early in my pregnancy (it was still a secret from my coworkers) people were giving me seats on the train- and I really needed those seats. I guess my body read differently to people who knew me, and strangers?
Also long ago, when being mistaken for pregnant felt like an insult to me, an acquaintance congratulated me on my pregnancy and patted my (not pregnant) belly. I just told him “nope not pregnant” and then made him suffer through five more minutes of small talk.
LOVE making him suffer through small talk
I have known of doctors who expressed astonishment upon learning that their fat patient was pregnant--as if to say, that requires sex, and what man would find you attractive enough to want to have sex with you. One said as much, explicitly, to my fiancé, prior to her having a premarital blood test, which used to be required by the State of New York.
Disappointing to read about the BLW accounts! I stumbled across the book in the early 2010s, and followed it because it met my lazy goals of not having to actively feed a baby while I was trying to eat and not having to acquire/make special foods or do any additional planning. The main conversations I remember were about not oversalting food (because baby kidneys?) and choking.
It's weird (but not unexpected, I guess) that it's taken this turn. I remember the philosophy primarily being "your kids should eat what you eat" and "your kids will eat better if they get to control the process." And this seems like the opposite of that.
My three kids all ate everything we ate until they were toddlers, at which point they ate nothing. Now they're all over the place (e.g., the kid who will eat sushi but not chicken; the kid who thinks roasted broccoli is a treat but hates all other vegetables), like pretty much every other kid.
Yes, completely agree -- there's been a strange inversion of the logic. (I do think they were always more salt-phobic than is strictly necessary!)
I was so excited to do this with my second due in October (we did a little with my first but majority purees) because it seems like the most natural way to make a little intuitive eater from the get. (Also love to hear that even with BLW, your toddlers still went the very normal toddler route of being picky! It's literally the one thing they can control in their lives!) But very disappointed to hear about all the sanctimommies out there making it another version of a diet with diet rules :( As most parenting and things in life, I suppose we'll take the good and leave the bad!
Totally! It's completely possible to use BLW to make your life easier/in a non-diet culture way. Just stay off Insta ;)
“What has changed is parents’ expectations about how kids should eat, and the pressure we feel to perform our parenting through our children’s eating habits.” This is it. I’ve been thinking about this shift... I think my parents would have considered it a win if I tried one vegetable in a week. My mom packed bag lunches of a basic sandwich (like PB&J), chips, cookie, and a fruit. My “picky” sister lived on mac & cheese, cereal, and yogurt, and it just wasn’t a big deal. And I didn’t feel like we were way outside the norm. When I did BLW with my babe, I remember my mom commenting on the “fancy” snack I was preparing (bell peppers & hummus) and saying, “I just gave you Teddy Grahams.” So while the grandparents are definitely not okay in terms of diet culture and body image, I want to give them (the ones in my life, at least) credit for their way more relaxed attitude toward feeding us as children--and their grandchildren now, too. As much as I want to roll my eyes at their comments about sugar, for instance, they don’t try to get my kid to eat a perfectly “balanced” meal or adventurous foods or whatever.
I can't prove it, but as a lifelong picky eater it feels like there's been a shift from "pickiness is bad because it's rude and inconvenient for other people" to "pickiness is bad because not being open to experience is a moral failing".
Totally see this -- I wrote about it a lot in my first book.
Oh that’s an interesting observation, and I can see what you mean. It sucks that there are any moral judgments of how a person chooses to eat.
Yes, the standards have shifted and not in very helpful or realistic ways.
I LOVE that tweet/IG post you put in the middle and just added it to my stories with the caveat that this also applies to my pregnant body. When I tell people I am 18 weeks etc, I get a lot of, "well you don't look it!" and I understand they mean it as a compliment I guess but it still stops me dead in my tracks because I certainly FEEL it and also, were we even talking about my body, or were we talking about me being pregnant? It's like all of a sudden, when someone thinks your uterus is full, they have license to discuss how you look and it's just not ok! I told a colleague that I was pregnant and he immediately responded, "I thought you were looking fat around there," completely dead panned and serious. I was too shocked to say anything but in hindsight should have said something along the lines of, "Well I am fatter I think lately, but I am also carrying a baby now too."
Yes yes yes. The commentary on pregnant bodies is MADDENING.
...does BLW even make sense with how infants eat? I thought the typical pattern was that stationery babies will eat just about anything (within reason), but that most babies become extremely picky around the time they really master walking (for reasons that make sense from an evolutionary perspective: a stationery baby is being brought food and can presumably trust its caregiver, but an ambulatory baby is more independent and potentially eating things it finds itself. Most poisonous things have a strong taste and almost none taste sugary, hence baby's preferences for bland or sugary foods). They then expand their repertoire with repeated exposure to foods, which teaches them what foods their "tribe" has determined are safe. I would think the "combating pickiness" would have to come at the walking stage. My parents, at least, always groused about how I used to be such a good eater as a baby and then abruptly began refusing almost all foods around eighteen months.
The argument is that by getting the stationary baby to eat loads of different foods, you will have less pickiness once they get mobile because they already accept all these things, so they won't need to reject them as unfamiliar. The reality, as your parents experienced/so did mine/so did I with my second child -- yes, there are a lot of stationary babies who will eat everything and then become a COMPLETELY different eater in toddlerhood. And some kids are going to grow out of their pickiness at age 5, and some at age 12, and some never. And no method prevents this, but lots of parental anxiety about how a kid eats can sure make it worse!
My perspective with BLW was that it was mostly about which foods you were going to give to your stationary 6-12 month old - banana puree that you have to spoon into their mouth, or a hunk of banana that they can mash around and rub on their face? A special baby meal, or just a mound of spaghetti and sauce? (And, like I said above, one of those options is much more work than the other.)
There was part of it that was very focused on texture - that one of the reasons toddlers might refuse food is because they're used to soft and smooth baby foods, and that if they're given a variety of textures as babies, they might not have that aversion.
But in the BLW of 10 years ago, I don't remember sugar being a thing. In fact, with regard to bread, "toast fingers" were a whole thing (that I thought was unnecessarily fussy) as a delivery device, because it's easier for a baby to smear some bread through apple sauce or yogurt or whatever than to use a spoon.
Re Q1, my kid really likes seafood and people are always like "oh, such sophisticated taste," and it's like, no, he just likes seafood. Salmon and clam chowder are just, on his own, two of his favorite foods (and honestly is clam chowder really sophisticated? it's basically a bowl of cream), it's not that he's some magic kid who'll eat anything. Show him a leafy green that is not in chicken saag from one specific Indian restaurant and you'll learn that real fast.
This reminds me how much my 4yo liked seafood as an infant and rarely touches it (or really, most meats that aren’t chicken nuggets) now. BLW had me convinced that early exposure meant lifelong love. NOPE.
I remembered from my own childhood that my parents would always talk about things I'd liked as a little kid and stopped liking, so I actually took a video of my kid at 18 months chowing down on broccoli (like, having a piece in each hand and stuffing them in his mouth one after the other), to prove that it happened. And sure enough he's a lot pickier about vegetables now than he was then -- even as recently as a year ago he'd periodically eat cooked broccoli and he'd reliably eat roast cauliflower dipped in ketchup, but these days pretty much he only eats raw vegetables.
Haha my kid also loved plain steamed broccoli at 18 months and we have a video of him literally falling asleep sitting in his high chair but unwilling to stop chowing on it 😂
OMG adorable.
Yes, total myth! (Or maybe it comes back, we shall see...)
Thank you for writing this about BLW! It CAN be a helpful tool when introducing your infant to solids, but so many people have taken it to an extreme and created way too many "rules" about how to do it perfectly -- just like dieting in adulthood.
Exactly! So frustrating that we take something fundamentally useful and turn it into an opportunity to shame moms.
A few months ago, a creep at work commented on my “pregnant” belly and was incredulous like awful Norm when I said I wasn’t pregnant but was in fact recovering from recurrent miscarriages and disordered eating. It reminded me that when I WAS pregnant, same creep was asking me if I was going to have the baby “normally “ aka through my vagina or not. I was too exhausted and frustrated at the time to say anything but after the more recent comment, I filed a harassment complaint and my company took some action. My interactions with him are no longer a part of my job. The whole time he was confused about why I was mad. People can be so awful
This: "(I, for one, ate almost nothing but spaghetti, white bread, and strawberry yogurt until I was 12.) What has changed is parents’ expectations about how kids should eat, and the pressure we feel to perform our parenting through our children’s eating habits. "
I do not focus on what my kid eats, and he eats a specific list of foods at home, and apparently an unending list of foods at daycare. I also was a kid who ate mostly bland foods for the majority of my childhood - and now I eat more and I'm fine (although fat, focused on salt, etc.). Is this okay to just not engage with??? Do I need to be pushing variety, veggies, different tastes? Or is this, like potty-training and much else, something that my kid will figure out if given latitude and non-judgement? What is the ruling on this from a Burnt Toast perspective?
The Burnt Toast ruling is that feeding families is totally idiosyncratic and impossible to make general rulings on! Some kids with severe feeding aversions do benefit from (responsive, trauma-informed) therapeutic input. The majority of “picky” eaters aren’t picky, they are just kids eating like kids.
For me personally, the most important value to teach around food is respect for the labor required to prepare it, and otherwise I just want family meals to be opportunities to connect, and for food to be a source of joy. I can achieve all of that without pushing my kids to eat specific foods. They do get exposed to variety, veggies, etc because they see us eating that way - not because I’m insisting on try it bites, etc.
But there are a lot of ways to do this math!
Thank you for replying! It is so easy to feel 'mom-guilt' that I tend to take it on even when I don't plan to change anything!!! I am happy to let this go (for now).
Your content makes me feel so seen and happy. I truly appreciate your efforts to create it. An antidote to Ista-parenting, Insta-food for sure!!!
Loved reading about your responses to the annoying pregnancy predicters. I'm a teacher and believe me i LOVE middle schoolers but I once had a student who decided to meanly spread a rumor that i was pregnant to the whole grade?? that was a mind fuck.
OMGGGG. Nope, nope, nope.
Everything you post is something that resonates with me! Ok. BLW. I had to do this with my first child, I didn't even know what it was or that it had a name, I just had no choice. She would not let pureed food pass her lips. Or anything on a spoon. Or sucked out of a pouch. Not a drop. So I guess she was picky before she even started weaning? Desperately, I let her start eating small things, or she'd grab things off my plate and start putting them in her mouth -- and that was it! I learned later there was a term for it, but for me it was just the only way I managed to introduce solids to her. She seemed happy and it was really fun for me, also less stressful going out to eat as there was always something she could eat. She turned out a few years later to become a really anxious, really really picky eater (you could count what she would eat on your hands) and I suspect she's a super taster and was just very sensitive to texture too. But she was already so choosy to begin with. Now, however (9 years later) she's completely coming out of her shell and is trying foods on her own, asking for things, stealing things off my plate again! It's a joy. I knew this would happen and it would all turn around, I was just willing to wait another decade or more for it. What I don't understand is why this pressure exists. What do people worry will happen if their kids are picky? If they eat the same 3 or 5 meals every day of the week? What will go wrong if that happens? If they stay in their comfort zone? Some of the closest adults around me (my brother, my husband) grew up as worse picky eaters (lasted until 18 for both) and are now the biggest foodies I know - good cooks, passionate about food and flavours, will eat anything.
Thanks so much for this! I was actually really gung ho to do BLW with my toddler when she was a baby and made little lists of all the foods that would be fun to cook for her (I really do like cooking so it was genuinely kind of exciting). And then it turned out she hated anything that wasn't a pureed texture for months. Which . . . was fine. And now at 2.5, she is no more picky than any other 2.5-year-old. But this puts my finger on something that drove me NUTS about all the BLW rhetoric, which is that everyone always says "oh, it's so much easier because you just feed the baby what you're eating instead of making special food," but then it turns out that means mom has to make 3 homecooked meals a day with no salt and using only whole, unprocessed ingredients that introduce your child to the right new foods at the right time. As if I had the bandwidth for that with a 6-month-old instead of feeding her some mashed avocado and then popping some popcorn for me after she went to bed.
Oh, and you know how I'm going to introduce my baby to branzino? I'm going to take her and her roommates out to a nice dinner when I visit her in college.
😂
"The perfect response to someone else's shitty assumption is whatever YOU need it to be." I love that so much, and I love that it releases me from having to craft the perfect response whilst experiencing a microaggression. As someone both fat and infertile, it is always very hard to have to respond to this question, which I also get often, despite the fact that I don't think I carry my weight in a way that makes me look pregnant at all. Sometimes, depending on the person, I like to turn the discomfort on them and say, "I wish! I can't get pregnant." and just stare at them as they squirm. But I confess I don't usually have the chutzpah for that response. I typically reply just as you do, and say, "Nope, just fat!"
By the time I had my third kid, BLW meant letting him grab soggy McDonald's french fries from his sister's Happy Meal.
I have a mom acquaintance in a larger body and for weeks after meeting her I fretted over whether she was pregnant because I felt like a dick every time I saw her and didn't say "congratulations". I finally asked a mutual friend and she said no and then I felt like a dick all over again. When I was pregnant i remember feeling weird when people asked me about it and also weird if they said nothing.
Yes! I felt weird about announcing my pregnancy to people I knew, and then I felt weird that I hadn’t told people when it came up later. Pregnancy is such a tricky topic to navigate because both talking about it and not talking about it can feel hurtful, depending on the people involved and their unique circumstances.
I love the discussion about BLW! As with most things with my daughter, I found that "all or nothing" thinking was harmful (I was told I should "exclusively breastfeed" but combo feeding with formula saved my mental health, I was told "no purees" by BLW purists, but a combo of table foods and purees was a great transition to solids for us!). So happy to have this community. <3