Child Psych Podcast | Episode #102

[Tania] Hello and welcome everyone, I’m going to be talking to Dr Deborah MacNamara about her latest book, Nourished: Connection, Food and Caring for our Kids (And Everyone Else We Love). As a trusted and experienced clinical counselor for over 25 years in mental health and educational settings as well as private practice. Deborah serves as a leading international expert who provides counseling and educational supports to support parents, professionals and educators. She is also a professional speaker who has presented to the United Nations and the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. Deborah specializes in the relational developmental approach, based on the work of Dr Gordon Neufeld, empowering parents to become the experts on their children with everyday questions and practical strategies. She comes through this work as a new mother herself curious and confident that his approach could shift not only her children’s futures forever, but also her professional approach to supporting and helping others. Today, Deborah serves on the faculty at the Neufeld Institute. Deborah is the author of the best selling book, Rest, Play, Grow, making sense of preschoolers or anyone who acts like one, The Sorry Plane, and also the book that we’re going to be talking about today,Nourished: Connection, Food and Caring for our Kids (And Everyone Else We Love). Welcome, Deborah. 

[Dr. MacNamara] Thank you. 

[Tania] That’s quite the bio, it’s amazing to see what you’ve done. No, I love it. I absolutely love it. Such beautiful work. And I love your connection with Dr. Neufeld as well. He’s so incredible. Deborah, your beautiful book I was just sharing before we hit record that I just got back from holiday in Phoenix, where it was 43 degrees Celsius every day, it was wonderful. But I absolutely devoured this book. It was my afternoon reading when it got really hot, and then when I ended, because we were there for 10 days, when I finished the book, I wanted another one. It was just so full of just these spectacular gems that I haven’t found in other parenting books, absolutely beautiful. 

[Dr. MacNamara] Thank you. Yeah, it was a joy to write. It took a long time to research and write. I’m delighted that you loved it. So thank you. 

[Tania] Can you tell me a little bit about what kind of invigorated you to write a book on food and connection and love? 

Mealtimes: The Role of Emotion and Attachment

[Dr. MacNamara] Oh, well, a problem. I mean, the problem was that I was a parent of a young child who was picky and not eating. My older one was eating well for me, and I was an attachment based developmentalist, teaching, writing, helping parents. And I realized I started creating an attachment problem with my daughter around food, because we tipped into this place of food battles. You know, the typical questions that we have, “how do I stop the picky eating?” “How do I get them to try healthy food?” “Why is, you know, this is so much resistance and opposition here, and what’s not working here?” and “I’m showing up the same way I did for my other daughter to eat. But why isn’t she eating?” And so then the stress and alarm rises in you as a parent, because, you know, food is very provocative for everybody, but especially when you’re a parent and everybody has something to say about how you’re feeding your kids or what you’re feeding your kids. So, it was out of that problem that I went to Gordon Neufeld. He wouldn’t answer my question directly, which was a blessing and a gift, but then it promoted and propelled me to try to figure this out, and what I came up with, much like with Rest, Play Grow, to be honest with you, what I came up with felt very lacking in any depth or understanding of human development, of the role of emotion and attachment. And I thought, Oh, my goodness, I have all of these keys to make sense of this. I’ve got to delve into it. And so it took, you know, through parenting and raising my kids, and they’re now teenagers and or actually young adults, now out of the home, and it just took time to sit in the material, to replay it, to look at it, to tease it apart. To think about it in my clinical practice, in working with families, in teaching in my own life, and to do research and talk to parents. So it took a long time to put the pieces together, because it was really overturning many sacred, you know, cows and prescriptions and taboos and everything that I kept running into, I’m like, Well, this is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. We’re sitting in a behavioural approach to eating, and we have no insight that we are. We have more insight around discipline that’s behavioural than we do when it comes to our feeding practices. So it – that’s a very long answer to your question, but it came out of a problem I think that probably resonates with many parents is, you know, oh my goodness. Why is this so difficult? 

[Tania] Absolutely, absolutely. And I love that you have lived the problem too, because I think sometimes parents feel so alone. I also love in your book, you talk about how at the very beginning, you went to a workshop or presentation that you were giving, and the poster said it was all about picky eating. And I do think that that’s immediately where parents go, because it is so pervasive. But as I read your book and as I got deeper into your content, I really started to realize how much bigger this is than picky eating. Picky eating is like, it’s like the little crust on the top, but it’s so tiny in comparison to what we’re actually looking at here.

Relationship as the Foundation

[Dr. MacNamara] The book, as Gordon said, you know, you went really deep. I wasn’t sure where you were going to go with this. I wasn’t sure where, how you’re going to connect it, you know, to families and putting families together this way. And yeah, I went very deep into it, but hopefully in a very non prescriptive, non blaming and shaming, guilt provoking, type of way that has I hope, a hopeful message – that’s what people tell me – is it’s a hopeful message. It’s never too late. We just need some insight into that and the importance of our role. It doesn’t mean you have to have home cooked meals from scratch every night. That is not a reality for most people, not anybody that I interviewed, or that know, even in my own life. So we’ve got to get away from some of that thinking around it, and to think about what is possible here and what really matters when it comes to the connection between food and human relationships. All the focus is on food today, that is one of our biggest mistakes. It’s never been about the food. Yes, of course, what we eat matters, but what comes first is actually the relationship

[Tania] Beautiful. And actually, I love the distinction you made about family dinners, because at the Institute, we do lots of infographics, and we often talk about make sure you’re sitting down for family dinner, these are the benefits from it. Which is great, but I also realize we’re missing this integral piece that you talk about, that it’s actually about the connection and who’s leading that experience, instead of just the benefits of family dinner,

[Dr. MacNamara] Right,  exactly. And that’s where we focus, eating together. I think even Health Canada has this prescription “eat together with joy.” Well, I mean, if you just, you know, as a parent, okay, I’ve got to eat together with everybody at the table, and everybody’s got to be joyful. Like, automatically, can see how that doesn’t work. Like, even though there’s stress and pressure there on you to okay, this isn’t looking right, but you can sit beside someone and not be together. How do you manu – you can’t manufacture joy. Joy is an emotion, an emotion that comes from being together, that is pleasurable. So we got to take steps back into relationship, into emotion and into development, because it’s from those places, when we anchor our children to us this way, in a dependent way, that the benefits of eating together and the joy will come. But we have to be together first, 

[Tania] Absolutely, absolutely, 100% and as you said, if you’re bringing that stress to the table, we lose a lot of the benefits that’s happening, because then we can’t rest and digest with what we’re at with what’s actually happening, both in terms of food and connection. 

[Dr. MacNamara] Yeah, so togetherness is a deep understanding of of love is actually the book is not about food in many ways, it’s actually about love. It’s about human connection, and how food becomes the medium through which we get to reenact this and enact it on a daily basis. You know, it’s interesting. I was, I was interviewing Gordon the other day about Nourish, and he said he’s asked many times, you know, how is it that we lost our children to pure orientation? And he said, I actually think now that when we stop taking the lead around matters of food and children could come back and the industrialization of food, that we lost something that really held us together, and that might be the origin of order to lose our children. Which I thought was quite profound from, you know, his experience in writing, you know, Hold On To Your Kids with Gabor. Yeah, is it that this very sacred union, that something that was meant to go together got torn apart and with it, you know, anchoring that we all needed a return to at the end of the day, a place to call home, a place to rest, not just to eat, but to share our emotions, to share our day, to not feel as alone, to have a place to recover. This is what got lost.

[Tania] I love that. It’s about it’s about the love, not necessarily the food. The food is there. The food is a pathway to being together, but it’s about the love. 

[Dr. MacNamara] Exactly, yeah, 

[Tania] Actually, I have a mom from Toronto sent in a question. I’d love to play it to you, and then we can frame our discussion around her question. Give me a second. I’ll play it for us.

[Parent Question] When I think about my childhood, I think about my mom’s roast potatos and the smell of gravy bubbling on the stove. For my children, dinner’s often rushed and tense. I don’t even think they have a favorite meal. I don’t know where to begin, and I’m scared it’s too late. I love some sort of guidance on a starting point.

[Tania] I don’t think that mom is alone either.

[Dr. MacNamara] She’s just got the courage to voice it and and, but you also hear the yearning there, which is so lovely. This is a caretaker who wants to do something different in this area, and something that had some meaning for her as a child, which is wonderful. So yes, is it too late? Absolutely not. Of course not. Your question reveals that it’s not too late because you’re willing to do something different. And so where do we start? This is a great question. Well, I tried to distill it into three things that would be the most important to focus on.

Connection at Mealtimes: 1. Relationship

And of course, the first is relationship. And so it’s not just about what’s happening at the table, but to really take stock of your relationship with your kids outside of the table. Can you collect them? Can you get in their face in a friendly way? Do they orient to you? Do they depend upon you? Where is it that you could show up for them, take the lead? How could you engage with them throughout the day, not just around food? What happens outside of the table is important – the discipline we’re using. So just be thinking about connection broadly, not just around food. And to be thinking about how to strengthen your relationship with your children so that coming to the table is about connection, and there is a desire to be with you. So the first key is relationship. And of course, we could talk more about relationship and attachment, but that is really the place to start. How do I invite my children to rest in my care and around food?

Connection at Mealtimes: 2. Space for Togetherness and Attachment

The second thing, of course, is about space. It’s about ritual. It’s about creating a space for togetherness, creating a space for attachment. When children are facing separation, they get very clingy. They’re full of pursuit. That pursuit can go in different areas. They can try to, you know, occupy themselves with digital devices or friends or distractions. But what you’re trying to do is to carve out a space that isn’t for urgent things. It’s about being together and so trying to find some ritual through which you can do that, even if it’s only three or four times a week. You get to decide where you’re going to do this, but consciously carving out a space where you can get, gather your children, and, you know, provide nourishment in whatever way it looks that looks like for you. And again, there’s no prescription that way. I had parents who were, you know, single parents who said I would just buy, you know, prepaid pre made chicken, put on a plate, put some vegetables, get some salad, call it a day. Great, do that. Like, there’s no prescription here, that around what food. I trust, and if you look at the research, if you trust the caretaker, the caretaker is going to make the best choices, generally speaking, of what they can provide for their family. So trust in that caretaker to make those choices. So we need relationship in and outside of the table, focus on that. number two, we need space for it. We need to carve out something’s gotten in the way here. So, you know, you’re stressed. There’s some futility here that needs to be faced. It’s something isn’t working, and so that’s part of it. And nourished was really about insight that something is broken. And I don’t think we realize that something is fundamentally broken. This mom realizes it because she says, This isn’t what I want. This isn’t what it felt like as a child. This doesn’t seem to nourish so she’s wanting to do something different, but that means you need to feel the futility and do something different. Carve out a space. There needs to be some rituals to preserve that space. Is it coffee with your kids before they go to school? Is it a snack time and having a snack platter after school if you have the ability to be there. Is it, gathering your kids around, you know, connecting with them before there’s a dinner time, or having some connection around food? You get to decide what those rituals are, but relationship and rituals are really critical.

Connection at Mealtimes: 3. Emotional Rest

And the final piece, the critical piece as well, is rest. We need emotional rest. As this mom says, I’m tense, I’m anxious, or if he’s alarmed, we’re just, you know, I often hear from parents, we’re just shoveling food down our face. Food has become fuel. Uh, there’s no rest in that. So how would you cultivate rest around the table? Well, again, obviously, with connection, but don’t put the focus on food. Like, how many food questions? And you will find yourself how many food things do we say, “Oh, this is really good. Eat a little bit more. This is really nutritious. Don’t you know?” You know, is it healthy? Unhealthy, bad, good? Like, oh, the value judgments around food. Like, I trust the parent to put the best food they have on the table. Then just, if that’s what the case is, you’ve provided well. Then it’s about connection and not putting the focus on food. I would say this generally, the more we focus on food, or your focus is on food, the farther away you are from connection and creating the context in which your children are going to rest in your care. The problem is we become food focused, food alarmed, food obsessed, and we’ve lost the bigger picture. No one is nourished in those conditions. You need to be connected. Focus on connection. That is the context. You couldn’t teach a child. You could be the best teacher in the world. If that child was not connected to you, they’re not going to learn as best as they can from you. Doesn’t matter if you’re the best cook in the world. You have the best food on the table. If your children are not connecting, if they don’t feel at rest, you can’t nourish them. Attachment is the vehicle for the delivery of our care. So step back into relationship. Create some space. Think about emotional rest around the table and outside of it. Get into some play with your kids. See, I couldn’t I can’t give you a prescription for how to do this. I can only tell you that these things have to be there. You need to take the lead to chart a course towards those. And that could look different in every single family, and you will have the answers to this inside of you. If you sit with it long enough you reflect on it, you try some things out, notice what doesn’t work, try some new things. You’ll gather your kids back, but just take the lead.

[Tania] Yeah. I think as we take that lead, I think for so many parents, initially it seems harder, because we have to look at ourselves, look at what our relationships actually look like, what our own rest looks like, whereas sometimes, I think initially, at least, it feels easier just to say “you will sit at the table till everything’s done” or, you know, like “you’re not having any desserts, unless…” it’s all of those behavioral things that come out that initially seem easier, because it’s so much harder to actually look deeply within ourselves as well. 

[Dr. MacNamara] Yes, I mean, I don’t want you to lose yourself in yourself though, either. I mean, we also need to remember that culture scripted, how we showed up around food, and if culture was carrying us, we weren’t looking directly at ourselves too much this way, and not even at each other in our relationships like culture would, you know, why is it that you had roast beef dinners, you know, roast potatoes, I’m imagining some nice gravy and some vegetables going along, did that happen on a Sunday? Was that your family tradition and your family meal? Did your you know, whoever provided for you to say, Okay, it’s Sunday, we’re having a roast, and just get down to business and collected people. You know, from birthdays to our feast days to how we do you know, our breakfasts, our notes in the lunchbox like it is, just providing a return for your family on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a seasonal basis. It’s just saying there’s always a return. Food be the messenger for that and a reason to show up. Like let’s just put it this way, if you think Mother Nature is wise, then why would she give us a stomach that shrinks to like nothing, only to expand again and then to shrink. You know, there are some animals that can go two years. There’s the water moss, the water bear, water moss. I can go 30 years without food or water. Like, nature designed some species not to have to refuel, but they’re not creatures of attachment. So, we are creatures of attachment that need a return. And it’s not just for food, we need to connect with each other. We feel better after being together. We feel lighter. We feel a lot less alone. You know, we learn something, we see ourselves in a new way. So just provide a return, don’t get lost.  Food is provocative for everybody, and we have such a distorted and disordered and dysfunctional relationship with food in North America. We’re all affected, every eating specialist told me that. So just assume that we’re all carrying some stuff with us, but get out of that and get back into some your own roots, your own culture. Get back into relationship. Focus on the people you’re caring about, put the best food on the table and and show up with as much you know, joy and generosity that you can muster, and let stuff go. Yes, food is going to be harder and feeding for some people based on our own stuff, and there is a lot of lack and loss there, and it is very provocative. You can’t nourish from that place. So if it helps you just to get into some ritual, some motion. I’ve had people tell me, they go back and look at their whoever their favorite people were to feed them. They go back and look at their recipes. They start finding joy in cooking, in those recipes again. Make your I mean, this Mother’s asking, “Where do I start?” I’d say, start with a Sunday roast, with your pudding, with your gravy, and invite your children – see what happens.

[Tania] Beautiful. And I love that. So we create the space, so there’s relationship, ritual, rest, and then if we do come across some sort of resistance, what I’m hearing you say today, Deb is to just go inside and see what’s needed to ask, is it playfulness that’s needed? What do we maybe need to let go of that? What I might be holding on to? Maybe, what do I need to bring in as well? 

[Dr. MacNamara] Yes, notice what comes up for you, you know? And what parent wouldn’t be provoked if a child says, I don’t like it, this is yucky, you know. And you just spend $7 on an organic lettuce if you have a luxury in your life. Do you know? You know children are starving and I’m feeding you organic lettuce like, I mean, who wouldn’t be provoked by that? When we’re on, when we’re thwarted in our capacity to care for somebody, we will feel frustrated, and we may want to push and get them to eat, but that all backfires, so back up. It’s okay to be frustrated, you know, figure out what’s working, what’s not working. Don’t make the focus on food. Don’t make food the battle. Every child needs to have some autonomy around what they’re eating. That might not be for you, but that your sister enjoys that, and you have your you have what your tastes like, and other people have their tastes. And so it doesn’t all have to be the same, but we just respect that other people might have different views on it, and invite the child to have a relationship with food as that would be the ideal, so they understand their tastes, their likes, their textures, the smells, and they’re playing with their food and learning about it and enjoying it. It should be a sensual, a savouring. It’s a very sensory experience food, touching it and smushing it and dropping it and smearing it. You see as your young kids, you know, and it’s just like, Ah, it’s a sensory, sensual experience to have this relationship with food and to put something in your mouth. So just make space for the mess that comes and the exploration, and don’t hurry that play along. Give some autonomy for a child. I think we’ve manufactured picky. I think we’ve manufactured a whole area that and we’d get dug in. You’re not abiding by my desire, so therefore you’re picky. I mean, some kids are very reticent and to try things and very shy. I’ll say that for sure. But picky is that our agenda has been thwarted. Children should be hesitant and a little bit shy. They’re playing with things. That’s how they’re discovering it. It’s okay, don’t be in such a hurry to push. They will get to that if we provide the conditions. They will grow. They will learn. They will play. They will discover. Some kids have a huge, heightened sensorium. That was my daughter. Her sensory system is through the charts. You know, her smell, her taste, her skin reactions there. She’s just highly sensitive in these areas. I didn’t know that, but with time, patience, exposure in the context of connection, freedom to play, she eats all sorts of foods now, but I had to back up off of the “your picky. Why aren’t you following what I’m giving you” into “Oh, okay. I gotta back up into connection. I gotta back up into play. I gotta give some space for this.”

[Tania] I love that, and I agree with you the moment I hear the word picky eating, there’s a whole connotation that goes with it, that’s not positive necessarily. It’s like, Oh no, this child’s not doing what they need to. What’s How do I make this happen? It doesn’t feel when you say to me, it’s kind of that shyness that comes with food, that sensitivity space is this like there’s an opening of the heart that says it needs to happen here.

[Dr. MacNamara] Exactly, and it’s a developmental view, because then you’re saying, Okay, well, shyness, exposure will help with that, introduction will help with that, safety will help with that. This will be resolved. What is shy may not be shy forever. And so it opens up a developmental point of view and a relational point of view. If we say that child is picky, how do I get them to eat what I want? That’s a behavioural lens. How do I get that child to sit down and be quiet? How do I get that child to – and you can already feel the force, you can already feel the coercion, and you’re coming at it from a behavioural learning paradigm, which, in this area, wrecks havoc. You get resistance, you get opposition, you get self preservation from the child. “Don’t push me.” They’re not invited into play, they don’t understand their bodies, they don’t understand the satiation response, they don’t develop a sense of taste and understanding food and the tactile stuff that happens, the mouth reflex and the whole motor system that helps with eating. No, force feeding is not the answer.

[Tania] Beautiful. I think backing up, becoming gentler, and just letting things unfold as I should, while leading is really what I’m hearing from you today, 

[Dr. MacNamara] Absolutely, yeah. Don’t take it for granted that it just unfolds. You’ve got to lead, you’ve got to provide the context. We have a critical role to play. They can’t become eaters without us, but we can’t make them eaters on our own.

[Tania] Makes sense, Deb, I’m going to backtrack a little bit you mentioned for the mom, start with the Sunday roasts, and it’s so interesting because she mentions in her question the smell of the gravy, and when I think about growing up, it was my dad’s vegetable soup that he would put up, put on on a Sunday morning, and I can still smell that smell. And it’s amazing, as we think about the senses, how intricate smell is in becoming an eater. 

[Dr. MacNamara] Absolutely, yeah. I did so much research on smell and the brain and the neuroscience too, pieces, of course, and what you discover is that smell is our strongest sense at birth, and it goes straight into the emotional center of the brain, like the olfactory bulb is actually in the emotional center. So what happens is you get these really tight connections between smell and emotion, and of course, that’s where everything starts to open up and gets tied together. So you get smell, you get emotion, and you get memories. And up until the about the age of 10, the smell of something has a stronger visceral sensory experience at actually transporting us back in time. And so the question is, why? Why? Why is this of utility to us? Because what we understand is that nature is invested in getting us to have a home, a place of rest, a place of safety, a place to be anchored, a place to hold on to, to be able to revisit and return to, because it is the answer to our ultimate problem, which is too much separation. Too much separation is the most emotionally provocative thing we could go through as human beings, right? And so what’s nature’s answer is to tie smell together in memory and emotion. So, and that’s how comfort food is created. So we have an unparalleled opportunity, through smell, through cooking, through the senses, to invite our children to the table and to encode those memories. “Oh, why does it smell like grandma’s scones or the gravy or anything?” It’s signature. It’s, it’s what you create in the context of your your home with your children.

[Tania] Just so beautiful, because this is really that, that Mom, that’s what I hear there. It’s a yearning for what when she’s younger.

[Dr. MacNamara] Yeah, so start wherever it makes sense to start. There’s no magic place. It’s just showing up to do something different,

[Tania] Beautiful. Talking about emotions that are evoked, earlier on, you had mentioned love and food. In your book, you talk about your research around love and food. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Love: a Critical Ingredient

[Dr. MacNamara] Yeah, it was, you know, it came out of, again, it’s so many rabbit holes opened up. But there is this, this article, and a company who had put, you know, made with love. Love is part of the ingredients, and they got in trouble from the FDA around putting that because it’s a manufactured ingredient. And I’m like, well, if you talk to any Nona or any grandma or any mom or dad, you know, and chefs will tell you, “No, I make my food with love,” but, you know, it’s it’s invisible, so therefore. But so I asked everybody that I researched, that I talked to, and said, “Can food have love in it?” And everybody said, Yes! or is it an expression of love? But yes, absolutely, food needs to be paired with love. And the three ingredients that were part of that, that made someone when I dug down into the research and said, “Okay, well, what infuses food with love?” There was three things in particular. Did someone spend time and attention on the food? Now that didn’t have any time limit or amount on it, it just was there sense that someone took the time to provide for me. They understood what I needed or liked. They paid attention to that, and from that place, took care of me. The second part was intention. What is the person’s intentions as they’re feeding me? And this is really interesting, because if you think about this mom’s question, it sounds like food has become fuel. I just need to get food into my kid’s mouth. Food has become fuel. That does not nourish, that does not infuse food with love. The sense of someone is wanting to provide for me. Someone is being generous here. Their intentions are to serve me. Their intentions are to take care of me. That was equated with love. And the good thing about it is that your food might not be that good, but the perceiving the intention as being good actually changed subjective nature of the food. So food tasted better when you believe that someone was delivering it with care. So you can burn stuff. People are like, yeah, or they might have missed an ingredient. Grandma always forgot to put the salt in the soup, but it always tasted good, it was just how grandma made soup. But, you know, she had good intentions. I heard that over and over again. I also heard people say I could hear my mother clinging the pots and breaking stuff and being angry in the kitchen, and I did not want to eat what she was making because mad, and I didn’t want to go near any of that. So the intention really matters, the time and attention you spend the intentions inside of you that are fueling you to provide. And the last thing that infused food with love was the sense of being cared for warmth, that sense of because, you know, a lot of people say, “well, I care about you, so I’m going to give you this.” Or, you know, in care homes, people get fed, but doesn’t mean your care. You feel cared for the person actually felt cared for. It wasn’t about the nature of the food. It was, did I feel cared for in receiving this? It was received in a vulnerable way, and they were moved to say, yeah, this person, I accept the gift of your caretaking and those three ingredients infused food with love, you can’t buy that. You can’t it’s not an artificial thing that you can put in. It can only be put in by the caretaker who is moved in this direction. And so it doesn’t matter someone’s you’re buying a pre bought a chicken. You can have time and attention, you can have intentions, and you can have caring and warmth there. And so it just taught me, the research taught me over and over again, how little this is actually about food, and how lost we’ve become because we’ve made it all about food. We have significant work to do here to unmake what has become incredibly broken and now normalized.

[Tania] Deb, you know, as you’re talking about that time, intention, attention, care and warmth, I think for so many parents, because life has become so crazy and so rushed. And we’re, you know, they finish school, and then we’re rushing to soccer practice and we’re trying to do homework while we’re cooking. I think that very often food is “I’m doing this, and nobody appreciates it, and here it is on the table. Now let’s jump in the car, and I still have to get home and do the dishes.” We’ve lost that sacredness around it. 

[Dr. MacNamara] We’re pulled in too many different directions, and food has become a chore. It’s been it’s treated as a chore as well. We don’t make space for it, it’s doesn’t lead to outcomes, the only outcomes we want it to lead to is health, you know, and giving them enough to grow. And so we’ve lost our focus on what this, this needs to be, but we’re not happy. We’re not happy when they’re talking like that, they’re not happy, they’re not fulfilled. And part of that is we have to let go of something that isn’t working. Every time you have a gain in something, there is a loss. Yes, your children might be in gold level soccer and four or five or six days a week, and that’s tough, but there is a commensurate loss in terms of that togetherness. So how are you going to bridge that gap? Is it, you know, half an hour to connect in the car with a smoothie that you’ve made and preserving one night a week for your family meals. That might be something that you have to do to compensate and think about, okay, I still need to preserve this place. That was the you know, when I found the research, I was so troubled by the family meal ideal, because I would have people in my practice as a counselor, where the family meal was a disaster and it was a place of wounding. So don’t tell me, sitting together is always the answer. Sometimes it’s better not to sit with a person who is angry or abusive or narcissistic or has a drug and alcohol addiction or you know that is not great to have to look at two to three times a day. So it’s not the family meal that provides all the resiliency. And there was some wonderful sociologists, Muzek and Meyer, who tried to get rid of all the confounding variables that would influence who was having family meals together, affluence and gender and all sorts of stuff, ethnicity or whatever it might be, and they stripped all those out and said, what is distinct about the families that still have meals together and show robust resiliency and health mental health and health benefits. And the one thing they came down to out of all of it was these families all had a caretaker with a certain set of beliefs and priorities. And it was, togetherness is important. Wasn’t just food. It was, togetherness is important. So it starts with shifting and making a commitment to do something different, to put your family time, and whatever your family looks like. It could be, you have your kids in and out for a week, you know, and there’s divorce and separation. You could have your kids for a week, but what are you going to do in the week that you have? What is your commitment? How are you going to do things differently to make space for your togetherness and to preserve it. Screens, from too much peer interaction, too much structured activities through instruction and schooling, like it all falls to parents and caretakers now. Culture used to help us out this way, so I as a parent, I lament the loss of some sort of cultural, societal expectations that wouldn’t allow this to happen. Like when I grew up in Ontario, the stores were closed on Sunday, you couldn’t go to a store, you couldn’t buy anything. I can remember having to go to the Pop Shop, and my dad getting his beer and going to the pop shop to get whatever you needed, because there was this sense that everything closes on Sunday, but Sunday became a place of rest. It didn’t mean that you had to have any religious beliefs that day, but everything shut down. So, culture and society helped provide some guardrails and a ritual through which togetherness then came the answer. We don’t have that today. It’s 24/7 you figure it out on your own self reliance. It’s just no it’s it’s exhausting and it’s draining. So anchor back into who you are, what you want for your family, there will be some commensurate losses to that, but take the lead in preserving togetherness and how you want that to look. That’s really the key answer, and invite your children to depend upon you again, as Gordon Neufeld says, the greatest tragedy of our time is that our dependents are not depending on us like we need them to. And one of the best places, and I think, I think one of the best places today to recover and reclaim our children is actually showing up around food. They don’t even see it coming, it’s not direct, it’s what they want on so many different levels. They want rest, they want food, they want us, even though they can’t articulate all that. Show up, do something differently, protect it, preserve it.

[Tania] That protects us, almost saying to people, you have the power to write your own story. Don’t let the extra soccer practice and the extra swim practice, write your family’s story. Take it back. Take it back. 

[Dr. MacNamara] Exactly, and it’s hard. It’s hard because the expectations and what comes with all of these wonderful gifts and opportunities our children have today, it it creates a tension around that and making decisions and wanting to support your kids. But I don’t know how – kids can’t figure that out, we’ve got we’ve got to do that.

[Tania] I think the beauty in that, too, Deb, is that when we pull our kids back towards us, it also puts social media at less of an influence where I think a lot of kids are now getting the information about food from. 

[Dr. MacNamara] Yeah, it’s all depersonalized, food is depersonalized. When you’re going to social media, you’re not going to someone that is a caretaker to you, that has intention, attention, warmth, generosity. This is a depersonalized attachment, it’s a depersonalized fix. You can never be nourished from something that’s depersonalized. You’ve taken the love out of it, you’ve taken the attachment out of it. Caretaking was meant to happen in the context of attachment, care, love, warmth, generosity. So as soon as social media becomes the go to we’ve lost the context to raise our children in. They’re not at home with us. As soon as DoorDash becomes the answer, or some sort of meal service becomes the answer, I use this with my kids in university, I’ll order them food. I’m not saying that we it’s a never do this. I’m just saying it can’t be the answer, it can’t be the thing that you associate with your safety, because there is no safety in that. It has to be personalized, so personalize it, whatever that looks like, your smells, what it looks like, how you do that, how you preserve it, how when you show up to eat, what your rituals are around, you know, the feast holidays or whatever. Just make it up if you don’t have any, it’s okay too.

[Tania] Yeah, I love when you say personalizing. You know, in our own family, my husband’s probably more of a cook, but I’m just thinking about how I’ve personalized it with my girls and until it got too cold last year, the bus would drop them off right by a park. And whenever they got off the bus, I had little picnic blanket out in the park with fruit and cheese and crackers. And then I got too cold, the snow came, and my little kindergartner got off the bus and she said, “but Mommy, where’s the picnic?” And no one had ever mentioned the picnic before. So it’s those rituals almost that start to occur that we don’t even realize they’re happening. 

[Dr. MacNamara] Can you imagine having all day at school, and you’re missing home and school’s tired, and all you think about is, “oh, I’ll get on the bus, and after the bus, there’ll be a picnic.” I mean, that’s the kind of stuff you hold on to that gets you through the day. My husband goes to work now, and my kids are both in university. You know, we’ll be like, “Okay, well, what are we gonna do for dinner?” And we’re always connecting to dinner time and are you gonna cook? Am I cooking? And, oh, we got this. And it just feels like okay when we’re together again and we’ll have a meal. So it is an incredible bridge, and helps us hold on that promise of a return, not just for the food, but a promise of a return to each other. This book is not about food, although it would appear to be about food, it’s not about food. It’s about love, it’s about connection, it’s about holding on, it’s about a prime, a primordial relationship, a primary primordial, you know, attachment, that was meant to be preserved.

The Communal Table: Food as a Gift

[Tania] Deb, you you finish off the book talking about the communal table. Can you chat a bit about the communal table?

[Dr. MacNamara] Yeah. So I felt really, this book transformed me from the inside out, doing the research. And one of the books that challenged me a lot, or and I loved is probably one of my favorite books, if on my list of favorite books is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and just looking at the environmental and implications of food and leading your children to have a relationship with nature, because Mother Nature is the greatest provider of food, nourishment and a home and safety. And so it’s many layers, I realize this isn’t just what happens in our home, it’s also about how we connect to seven generations past, as our indigenous teachers tell us, and seven generations forward. And in my own Celtic background, again, there was a sense of who has, who are we inheriting from, and who are we preserving things for. And so really, one of our most sacred jobs is to matchmaker children to each other and their caretakers to the food on their plate, but also where it comes from, and to put ourselves back into relationship with nature as a great provider, so that there is more gratitude and there’s a reciprocal sense that we must also take care of nature so it takes care of us and generations who are to come. This very materialistic, behaviorally driven, you know, domination, colonial view that we have of nature is not serving us, and it trickles down into this, you know, care that we ultimately deliver our children. They don’t see themselves as connected as a relational being in the world around them. And the other aspect that came to that is many times I hear when I work in this area, you know, we need to help our children with their eco grief and the grief that they have around the world that they’re losing. Well, stop the bus. They need to fall in love with the world first. You can’t grieve something you haven’t loved. And so I strongly believe in our childhood, in our kids childhood, we need to matchmake them to this love of nature, whatever that looks like in your part of the world, it’s they must fall in love with something in order to want to preserve it. And so there is an onus on us to walk our children into the hands of nature, whether that be a garden or, you know, farm or animals or hiking or whatever that might be looking at in terms of, you know, these practices that says you are, you are smaller in relationship to the cascading of care that is all around you. And so that’s what that chapter is about. And it was probably the easiest to write, to be honest with you, it just came out of me with at the very end, because it just culminated this whole story of food as a gift. Food cannot be a gift until it’s received from somebody in mother nature yearns us into existence as well. So I never knew this was in me, developmentalists I’ve been a gardener, but I can tell you, wow, something grew inside of me as I was writing this book. And so if you need help in that way, I would say, go to Robin Wall Kimmerer. She’s an incredible mentor, guide in this way, in her beautiful book, Braiding Sweetgrass. But that was why I ended on that chapter. Is it’s much bigger than our table. It’s the communal table, the one that we all share, that we have are responsible for passing on here with our kids.

[Tania] And again, it goes back to love, doesn’t it?

[Dr. MacNamara] Always about love.

[Tania] To finish off any kind of final thoughts or final words for our mom or for anybody else who might be listening in today, 

[Dr. MacNamara] Final thoughts. Well, I’m not sure they’ll be final, but what comes to in this podcast? Oh, I thought of that, and then what really comes to mind is just be patient with this material. Take your time with it, don’t be in a hurry. Something has been broken here, and insight is needed to go back. And in that, don’t take yourself too seriously or to become too conscious with it. Don’t let it be another thing that weighs you down. Let it be an area that pulls you forward into different possibilities and to be curious about it. But don’t just let it, let it sit and reorganize itself over time. There’s no one right path here, I don’t want everyone to think, oh, I should be doing Oh, no, no, that’s not the answer. This took me 10 years to write to figure out. It sat in me in a long time. So be patient, let it move through you, do some things differently. But just know that that will make if you steer in this direction, whatever you do is going to make an impact in your family, and it will be for the better for your children. You’re not going to hurt them, and you’re going to be pushing in the direction of you know, these attachment, developmentally friendly conditions that we all feel, we all do better in what’s good for our kids is also good for us.

[Tania] Beautiful. Thank you so much Deb, for your time today.

[Dr. MacNamara] So lovely to talk to you. Thanks again. This went really quickly.

[Tania] Thank you, Deb.