The Manipulation of the “Clean Plate Club”

If you were told you must eat everything on your plate because kids are starving elsewhere, this was a manipulation.

The "clean plate club" and the "children are starving elsewhere" tactics are ones many people grew up with, and they were very damaging.

Some parents shame their children by saying that children who are starving to death would love to have this food.

Make no mistake, this is using guilt, shame and manipulation to control a child's behavior with food.

It's not even logical, which most parents are indeed intelligent enough to know. Food that you didn't eat as a kid had no way to get to a starving child once it was already on your plate. Food production systems don't work that way.

In some cases, parents don't use the "children starving elsewhere" manipulation, but there is just a feeling projected at them from the parents that they are bad children if they don't finish everything. It's still shaming, guilting and manipulation.

Children are naturally self-preserving. If you didn't eat a lot at designated meal times, you wouldn't have starved to death. You'd have eaten again when your body told you that you were hungry.

But what if your parents didn't want to make more food later on for you? Well, if your parents had taught you to make your own food and given you the freedom to choose for yourself when you ate, that would also be no problem. You'd be amazed at how young children can learn to make their own food choices even without cooking skills (say, by being allowed to choose fruit at any time), and how young they can then learn some basic cooking skills to make their own food.

And if your parents grew up with food insecurity or in poverty and you suspect that this affected their pressuring of you to finish everything on your plate, this is still not an excuse for their behavior. Healing their trauma was their responsibility and damaging their child's relationship with food and their body is not ok. They could have chosen differently.

The truth is, there was no situation where a parent using this kind of manipulative, controlling, shaming tactic on you was okay.

Forcing a child to finish all that is on their plate and using shame and guilt to do so, can damage the child's relationship with food well into their adulthood and often takes serious work to unravel.

So if this happened to you as a kid, please know you were actually emotionally abused in this way and it wasn't ok. The good news is, it is possible to heal it! If you can recognize it's an issue of letting go of guilt and shame and fear, you can break the habit of feeling you must finish everything.

Did you grow up with these kinds of messages? How have they affected your relationship with food and your body's signals?

Photo by Bich Tran via Pexels