The first night after we brought our son home from the hospital was a long, rocky one. Every 20-30 minutes, he woke, screaming, and, in a groggy haze, I brought him to my breast precisely as the lactation consultant and all the nurses had instructed me. But after a few moments, he would unlatch his tiny mouth and throw his head back to shriek. His face turned bright red with all the effort he was expending. It was clear that I was failing in my primal duty to feed my baby. I was terrified: How would we make it ’til morning? I was also filled with shame.
We eventually figured out how to meet my son’s need for nourishment. He is now a lanky 15-year-old, and I have to crane my neck in order to make eye contact with him. But I still hold a vivid memory of that night, and the fear that arose from not having the food my child needed.
The work of feeding our children is central to parenting at every stage, and if we struggle, or are criticized, it cuts deep. In researching her book, “How The Other Half Eats,” sociologist Priya Fielding-Singh interviewed parents and children from 75 families, observing four of these families in depth, to learn about how parents decide what to feed their children.
Predictably, she discovered sharp differences between low-income and high-income families. But she also found a through line. While their circumstances were worlds apart, the mothers (the overwhelming majority of her subjects identified as such) were driven to see themselves as “good” moms in a culture that promotes what Fielding-Singh calls “intensive mothering,” which positions moms as pretty much solely responsible for keeping their kids healthy and happy and well-fed.
“Mothers across society, across racial, ethnic groups, across socioeconomic status, all have the same motivation, which is to feel like good mothers,” Fielding-Singh told HuffPost.
What made a mother feel like she was doing a good job, Fielding-Singh found, depended greatly on her circumstances. Most of the lower-income moms she spoke with had endured at least one occasion, like my night with my newborn, in which their child was inconsolably hungry. In the book, she recounts in painful detail how one mother held a crying baby all night long because she didn’t have enough money to buy more infant formula.
These experiences made an impact, influencing moms to prioritize preventing their kids’ hunger over limiting grams of sugar or fat. They bought foods they knew their children would readily eat, whether or not these were the most nutritious options.
All parents want their children’s bellies full, but the ramifications of this depend on families’ resources. In wealthier households, it makes sense to throw away plates of uneaten broccoli in the name of introducing a new food to your child five, 10 or more times to train their palate. But if you only have a few dollars to get through the end of the week, ramen noodles may be your safest bet for full tummies and a good night’s sleep.
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At the same time, the value that a food has for families is far more complex than its total calories. Food also wields symbolic weight. Fielding-Singh found that some wealthier families were faithful to certain brands that felt healthier or more wholesome to them, even when this wasn’t always the case ingredients-wise. One upper middle-class mom wouldn’t buy her kids Oreos, but regularly purchased Trader Joe’s Jo-Jo’s, which are almost almost identical, nutritionally.
When it came to so-called “junk” food, families all had the same understanding of which foods were healthier and which ones were less so. But the symbolic value of these foods shifted greatly between rich families and poor ones. Fielding-Singh chronicled the ways that the wealthy families she observed parented from a place of abundance. They were able to say “yes” to so many of their kids’ requests: music lessons, summer camps, clothes. In this context, moms “had the ability to say no without it being so emotionally distressing.”
Faced with a bag of Cheetos, a wealthy mom “found it annoying to have to say no, but it didn’t make her doubt whether she was a good mom to deny these requests,” Fielding-Singh said.
Lower-income moms, however, parented from a place of scarcity. “They had to, on the regular, repeatedly say no to their kids’ requests because they did not have the resources to provide them. They had to say no to vacations. They had to say no to money for new clothes. They had to say no to summer camps,” she explained. All of this takes a toll on how a parent feels, whether or not they can conceive of themselves as a “good” mom.
“Parenting, in a way where you have to say no all the time to your kids’ requests because you can’t provide them, not because you don’t want to, but because you literally cannot, is extremely emotionally distressing,” Fielding-Singh said.
“Junk” food, which most children request from their parents regularly thanks to intensive and strategic marketing, is everywhere. And it’s cheap. It’s one request that low-income parents can say “yes” to.
The nutritional impact of these foods was less of a concern, Fielding-Singh explained, because moms’ goal was to “emotionally and psychologically nourish their children through these foods.” Saying yes was a way of “making sure that their kids felt cared for and seen and heard by their parents,” she said.
Some moms’ financial burdens make these small splurges all the more meaningful. One mom didn’t have enough money to fix the AC in her car, but she had enough cash to buy Frappuccinos for herself and her daughter on a hot day, bringing them a moment of relief and enjoyment together. The purchase might not have been “rational,” but it made a different kind of sense.
“Wealthy families … parented from a place of abundance. They were able to say ‘yes’ to so many of their kids’ requests: music lessons, summer camps, clothes. Lower-income moms, however, parented from a place of scarcity.”
All of the moms Fielding-Singh interviewed and observed felt the pressure of what she calls “intensive mothering.” The phrase was coined in the 1990s by sociologist Sharon Hays to describe the “unattainably high standards to which mothers in this country are held, specifying that moms need to be children’s primary caregivers, that they should be self-sacrificing, that mothering as an act should be labor-intensive and resource-demanding,” Fielding-Singh said.
Not only is this “an extremely high bar,” she continued, but it is “also a moving target.” The wealthy moms who came closest to providing their kids with a nutritional ideal still felt they were falling short on the job.
“The reality is that for most moms, their kids’ diets are not what they would like them to be. They’re not what they would aspire to, and they’re not what society tells them is the ultimate, the optimized diet for their children.”
The mothers in the book all take on the emotional labor of accounting for the distance between the ideal and the reality. Higher-income moms, Fielding-Singh found, tended to focus on the areas in which they saw themselves as lacking. She calls this “upscaling.” They raised expectations for themselves, creating more anxiety.
Lower-income moms, on the other hand, tended to downplay their hardship, comparing themselves to others who had it worse, or times in which money had been even tighter for their families. They told stories of hope, finding triumph in adversity the same way they found enough money for treats between the couch cushions.
“Lower income mothers can be seen as not caring or complacent about their children’s diets,” Fielding-Singh said. “It’s actually not that at all. It’s that they’ve found a way to navigate the extreme challenges of treating their kids within a context of, often, deprivation, and also be able to keep going each day, keep putting one foot in front of the other.”
Relief for mothers of all socioeconomic levels could come from a less intensive form of mothering that is not “completely individualized and privatized,” Fielding-Singh said.
“We have a really toxic food environment that all of us have to navigate every single day. And it’s on mothers to navigate that environment for their children … the private and the public sector are not making this easier, they’re not taking on any of the burden. They’re not shouldering any of the load.”
Companies could alter their products, as well as their marketing. Parents cannot be held entirely to blame when their children ask for foods that are aggressively marketed to them and carefully formulated to make them want more.
Nutritionist Jennifer Anderson calls these “hyperpalatable” foods — foods like Cheetos and Oreos. These “foods that have been engineered for us to get a bigger dopamine hit than if they had not been engineered … are the foods that we’re going to that are going to override our hunger and fullness cues,” Anderson told HuffPost.
She uses Cheez-its as an example. These (delicious) salty crackers are specifically crafted to deliver a burst of flavor that drops off quickly — leaving you wanting another hit. A parent on a tight budget, she explained, even one who has miraculously found the time to cook their kids a meal from scratch, can hardly compete with these highly processed foods that are so widely available.
“After you ate a bag of Cheetos, your mom’s homemade meatloaf is just not as good,” Anderson told HuffPost. And once a child has had one bag of Cheetos, they’ll probably be asking for more. The addictive nature of the food is, in and of itself, a kind of marketing strategy, she explained.
What’s needed to help families eat better, she believes, is structural change to address issues such as “the food industry dumping food marketing on children in lower-income areas.”
Policy changes that take some of the weight off mothers and acknowledge our collective role as a society in feeding children a healthy diet might include universal free school breakfast and lunch programs and subsidies and incentives to make fruits and vegetables more affordable. Indirectly, other kinds of support for parents such as paid leave and universal health care would also contribute to bettering kids’ diets.
In her book’s concluding chapter, Fielding-Singh writes: “The point is simple. When parents are cared for by society, they can best support their kids.”