Joanne Roach (00:14)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. This episode is going out on Easter Monday. So if you celebrate or you have family and friends who join in with Easter traditions, then you'll probably be knee deep in chocolate about now. But hopefully you'll also be planning or have been doing some nice family things together. So I'm not going to put out a full length episode today. So this is just a quick episode
to wish you a lovely bank holiday and to give you a quick reminder that you don't need to be stressed or feel bad or any kind of way if your child is eating more chocolate than usual over the next few days. Children love chocolate for the same reasons we do, it's tasty and fun and them wanting to eat a lot of it in one go doesn't mean they have an issue with sweet things, they won't have a bad relationship with food just because sometimes in the year they have a big batch of any one kind of food.
Easter chocolate is part of a tradition and a celebration and it doesn't need to be couched in terms of being some rare special treat needs to be rationed. This can just put it on a pedestal for them and can have the unintended consequence of making them think it will be scarce at other times so that they need to eat as much of it as they can while it is available. So just enjoy the lovely foods over Easter, all the foods, the family dinner together, the hot cross buns and yes the Easter eggs.
and let your child exercise a little choice over how much they eat during the celebrations, even if that's more than they normally would eat. Then after the Easter weekend is over tomorrow, you can include their leftover chocolates alongside other foods like their meals and snacks, because at the end of the day, chocolates are just foods like other foods are. And that way you're not making them hyper special or conditional, they're just tasty foods that we enjoy as part of a balanced diet.
But however your family feels comfortable handling the extra influx of chocolate, please do keep an eye both on your own language, but especially on that of visiting friends and relatives about food around your children to protect them from unchallenged messages about good and bad foods or restriction or bodies. If this is something that you find very difficult, I'll link in the show notes to episode 58, where we talked to Bracha Kopstick about how to handle food talk during holidays and to episode 71, where we talked to Dr. Anna Colton
how to talk to children about food. But in the meantime, for the rest of this long weekend and the school holidays if you're at home with kids, do have a lovely time with lots of people you love, share some delicious foods, hopefully have a bit of rest, but lots of fun and happy eating.
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