Don't end up eating your words - do as you say

It doesn't matter how often we tell children to eat healthily if we are at war with our bodies, they could be drawn into the same battle. Louise Holden reports

Parents have to put up with a lot of confusing messages about children's diets these days. Young people are at risk of obesity on the one hand, anorexia on the other. We need to get children exercising and eating sensibly, but we mustn't instill in them poor self-image or fear of food. If your daughter or son sits in front of the TV eating crisps all afternoon, that's bad parenting. If you tell them to stop eating junk and get some exercise, and they infer from your comments that you think they're overweight, that's bad parenting too. So how do you win? The trouble for some parents, and especially mothers, is that they don't have a good relationship with food themselves. This makes it very difficult to impart healthy eating messages to children without making food the enemy.

If a mother spends all afternoon cooking a lovely healthy meal for her children and then won't touch it because she's on a diet, that sends out mixed signals to all children, but especially daughters.

Stephanie Pierson and Phyllis Cohen researched the relationship between mothers' and daughters' attitudes to food for their book, You have to Say I'm Pretty, You're my Mother - How to Help Your Daughter Learn to Love her Body and Herself. They found that many teenage girls they interviewed felt that there was a conflict between the advice their mothers gave them about food and the way their mothers ate.

Pierson and Cohen's interviews were conducted in the US, where rates of obesity and eating disorders are higher than here. However, there is plenty of research to suggest that Irish children are catching up on their American counterparts - not least because we are eating the same type of food on both sides of the Atlantic.

Pierson and Cohen urge parents to take signs of unhealthy eating seriously. They believe parents who lie awake at night worrying about sex and drugs might do better to turn their attention to food. But isn't this conflicting advice? Surely the answer to our collective bad relationship with food is not to obsess about it? The authors suggest that we might look at our own diet issues rather than over-scrutinising our children. The girls they interviewed have been damaged by their mothers' fight with food, the authors contend.

"Where do these girls get some of their most misguided nutrition ideas? Where do they pick up some of their worst eating habits? From their mothers. Their food-phobic, fat-obsessed, perpetually dieting mothers. The fact is that women today are at war with their bodies. If there is one thing you can do for your daughter, break the inter-generational cycle and help her make peace with her body."

Pierson and Cohen don't offer any failsafe strategy. Some children will suffer from eating disorders regardless of how their mothers eat. However, they urge parents to watch out for throwaway remarks and behaviour that can plant the seeds of a bad relationship with food in a child's mind. How often have you seen: "A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips" emblazoned on a mug or a fridge door? Have you ever cursed your own thighs or agonized over an éclair in front of your teenage daughter? And consider this - does your dieting and calorie counting have anything to do with good health? Maybe we should think twice before setting up the next generation for a lifetime of guilty, unhealthy eating, and talk about good food positively, instead of bad food negatively.

Parent trends: What's new in the world of parenting

• Researchers in St Louis have warned parents to think twice before putting very young babies to sleep in the family bed. In their study, they found that babies sleeping in an adult bed face a risk of suffocation that is as much as 40 times greater than babies who sleep in standard cribs. James Kemp, an associate professor of pediatrics at Saint Louis University School of Medicine called for a public awareness campaign to alert parents to the dangers of the practice. The findings are published in this month's issue of Pediatrics.

• Girls need a more filling breakfast than boys if they are to do their best academically, according to researchers in Northern Ireland. Health experts at the University of Ulster found boys did better when they were a little hungry while girls were best after a satisfying morning meal including protein and carbohydrates. The researchers suggested girls benefited most because a breakfast high in carbohydrate and protein helped counteract the effect of a negative mood on their academic performance

Family Viewing

When Michael Portillo Became A Single Mum

Tomorrow, 9 p.m. - 10 p.m. BBC2

British MP Michael Portillo takes on the role of a single mother of four, living on a weekly budget of £80. He swaps his Kensington home, complete with cleaning lady, to live, eat and sleep in a terraced house in Merseyside, where he is responsible for all the cooking, cleaning, shopping and daily household chores normally undertaken by mum, Jenny Miner. Portillo must come to terms with running the home and working Jenny's two part-time jobs.