When You Hate How Your Spouse Feeds Your Kid
How to reconcile your Division of Responsibility differences, plus the two relationship patterns that cause most mealtime parenting disputes.
Disclaimer: You’re reading this column because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. I’m not a healthcare provider, and these responses are not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.
Q: I’m wondering how you might approach communicating with a spouse who thinks she is mostly following the Division of Responsibility in Feeding, but is frequently—many times per meal and day—going against its principles in her interactions with our daughter.
She values certain foods over others, encourages her to eat more, provides any number of alterations to the meal to get her to eat…and is extremely frustrated about how picky our daughter is now, at almost 8 years old.
We are a lesbian couple, and more broadly you could interpret the question as: How should people communicate with spouses who have different food/eating/feeding priorities?
So often, when I get a version of this question, my instinct is to approach this as a debate about feeding styles: One parent wants to do it according to the tenets of Division of Responsibility, meaning parents decide when meals happen, where they happen and which foods are served, but leave kids in charge of how much, and which foods, they eat. That’s the parent I hear from, over and over again, because their spouse might agree in theory, but in practice, keeps breaking the rules. If you are the also parent who does more parenting labor in general or food-related labor specifically, this can be maddening.
And I promise, we’re going to talk a bit more about those rules (your word, principles, is better!) and whether it always makes sense to uphold them, in a minute. But the more I’m asked about this, the more I realize: This isn’t a food question. This is a relationship question. So last week, while eating the best rigatoni at
’s house, I asked her spouse Grace Bonney, MFT, to help me out. “Your child needs the two of you to be a united front,” says Grace, a marriage and family therapist who specializes in queer and trans couples and families. “And that’s only going to happen once you work through why your partner isn’t following through in the ways you thought they would.”I also reached out to Taylor Arnold, PhD, RDN, a pediatric dietitian who works with families navigating picky eating from an intuitive eating framework, who agreed that what we have here is a failure to communicate. “I like to have each parent talk about their goals for kids and food, and also say their non-negotiables,” she says. If you align on your big picture goals—you both want your daughter to have a healthy relationship with food, say—it will be easier to respect each other’s no fly zones, and give some ground on the smaller stuff. “Shaming our kid around food would be a non-negotiable for me,” says Dr. Taylor. “But if we’re trying to decide how often we offer dessert, maybe I can be more flexible.”
That said, there are two relationship dynamics that can get in the way of this process, big time. I see them over and over again in my reporting on families and food. Also, sometimes, in my own co-parenting life. And until you name and navigate these patterns, you’re going to stay stuck.