Full
On Locking Up Food to Keep Children from Eating
Me on the right. Roxanna in the awesome red cowboy boots.
Last Friday I did an “in conversation’ with the brilliant Roxanna Asgarian about her book, We Were Once a Family: Love, Death and Child Removal in America. A masterful and beautifully-reported book, about the Hart Family murders. Two white adoptive moms, plagued by accusations of starving their Black adopted kids and with CPS on their heels, drove their family of eight off a cliff in California, killing all of them.
I went into this book knowing about the accusations of the children, who would show up at the neighbors house begging for food. Some of the children, one in particular was small and stunted for her age, looking years younger than she should. I went into this read really trying to suss out if the children were being starved in a malaise of intentional evil or if this was more of a locking the fridge and pantry situation gone terribly wrong?
The evidence Asgarian presents is intense, and the kids are clearly in distress, and after reading this book, I decided it doesn't matter what the moms intent was, but I do know that a lot of bad things can happen to kids and families when people start hiding, holding, removing and locking up food.
At the very least, these kids felt the loss of control around their own eating, which corroborates the lack of control in their lives. They felt the hole inside them swell with need and the Harts didn’t give them a way to fill it. And probably, the harder the kids tried to get control, the harder the Harts clamped down, creating an endless battle of control and hunger and lack of attachment.
And ultimately the end of a family.
+++++
Let’s start at the beginning with a look at how people become secure in the world:
“The attachment cycle is fulfilled by meeting physical and emotional needs over and over gain,” Katja Rowell writes in her book. Love Me, Feed Me: The Adoptive Parent’s Guide to Ending Worry About Weight, Picky Eating Power Struggles and More. “Food is simply one of the most reliable and obvious opportunities to help a child feel safe and cared for—and to build trust.”[
So how does this happen?
For babies, all experiences are personal. Babies cannot protect themselves. They are completely vulnerable and dependent on their caregivers. They have to let the world know they are tired. Or hungry.
Or uncomfortable.
They scream.
They cry.
They get loud until they get what they need.
When a baby screams and a parent comes rushing to them with a bottle or a nipple, or a comforting snuggle, an attachment bond is formed. Every time this happens, their bond gets stronger. The baby becomes more and more secure in the world. They know that the same person (or persons) is going to come for them every time.
This builds trust and security in the world.
The baby with a secure attachment, according to John Bowlby’s well-referenced attachment theory, is the baby who gets consistent reactions to their crying, their reaching out, their bubble-blowing, their cooing and screaming. Every time Dad comes rushing in to give a warm bottle to fill a hungry belly, a lattice of confidence and safety sets like mortar in the child’s brain.
This kid grows up knowing the world is secure. And development happens in that framework, as does attachment to other humans.
Attachment is a sticky thing. No caregiver can be there at all times for a baby. Some studies have suggested that even in healthy, attached families, this kind of asking–receiving success happens only about 50 percent of the time.[ii]This is because parents are working, stressed, making dinner, managing siblings. But the attachment also comes from the rupture and the repair.
“I might not be able to get to you right now, kiddo,” a mom will say. “But I will get you those raspberries after I fry the last of this chicken.”
When she gets her raspberries, finally, the rupture is healed. The baby gets that it may not happen when and how she wants it, but it will happen.
Life goes on.
Safety is reinforced.
All is well.
Because humans need food, consistently, multiple times a day, food is one of the first ways children gauge how safe they are. Food, how much they get, when they get it, and how their caregiver provides for them when they cry out, sends a foundational message about their worth in the world.
That message is hardwired into their brain’s pathways. It stays with them, always.
Being fed consistently is safety.
So, the meatloaf you make from scratch might not be a physical incarnation of love. But making it lovingly, warming it to just the right temperature, talking softly and sweetly to your toddler while you hand-feed her the food, making the choo-choo-train song that makes her smile as you put the meatloaf in her mouth. Doing it every day at roughly the same time when she is hungry, filling her need for sustenance, is most definitely love.
Compare that with kids who are in abusive homes or homes with severe neglect. This could also apply to families where there is a lot of love but also scarcity and extreme poverty. Same for families with severe mental health and addiction issues, and kids who go home to home or home to facility. Kids in these families learn on some primal level that the world might not be safe for them. That their needs might not get met. That they will want, and no one will come for them or help them.
And these schisms, these unanswered calls for comfort and nurturance, create cracks in the foundation that affect every development that comes after. In fact, all development from then on is fruit from the poison tree.
Kids from hard places want this safety and security so much because they crave it on a cellular level. Because it is an ache that never leaves them, they bring that schism into their relationships with other people. They cannot trust other humans the same way that a securely attached child trusts.
They see themselves as inherently unworthy.
And that feeling sticks with them. It is hardwired into the system.
“It’s the fight of ‘I don’t deserve to eat’ and it will be with me for life,” a dear friend who was withheld food as a child at the hands of her mentally ill mom, told me. She writes this on an Instagram post I wrote about hunger.
“It’s a horrible inner fight . . . and I’m 60 years old.”
The implications of hunger are lifelong.
Locks are my best friend. -anonymous parent
When I ventured into the world of online foster-adoptive parenting groups, I was bowled over to learn that many foster-adoptive parents lock up their kid’s food.
It is jarring and unsettling.
Locks send a message that some humans have access and others don’t. There is a strata in the family. It is a visual reminder that some people cannot be trusted, that they are not given the same freedoms and privileges, which is deeply unhelpful for kids who you want to trust, but because of their experiences struggle hard to get there.
When parents set up a situation this way, with locks and sometimes cameras to monitor food intake, and the child breaches the pantry and takes food anyway. There is more distrust, from the parent to the child, and the child to the parent. And when the parent reacts with anger, they pull their love away or impose punishments. The parent is stressed by the sabotage. The kid is stressed by the reaction, the punishment, the withdrawal of love and acceptance. The schism gets bigger.
I suspect this is partly what happened with the Harts. The schism in their attachments went from crack to chasm and broke the family.
It is our job as foster and adoptive families to get this right for our kids. And locks are not the answer.
So how does hunger show up in families? Kids who experienced hunger or inconsistency or scarcity in their developmental years (this can happen just being moved from caregiver to caregiver in the system) can hide food under the bed, in the cracks between the mattress and the wall, the mattress and the box spring. They can eat through the night, foraging in kitchens and pantries for cereal, sugary treats. Our son did this in kindergarten, which created a boomerang reaction where cafeteria ladies loaded up his backpack everyday with peaches in syrup, packaged tacos, muffins, granola bars and applesauce.
He told them he was hungry and he wasn’t making it up. I didn’t know this was happening until I found this food behind his bed, spoiling, hairy and moldering over from being hidden in there for weeks. Many foster-adoptive parents don’t find out until the school calls CPS.
In my book, I detail a particularly crazy period where we had a food pantry during the pandemic and the school kept dropping leftover food at the pantry to give out to people who needed it. This included boxes of Raisels, sour-dusted raisins with a wicked level of sugar, around the same as a Snickers Bar. I found boxes of Raisels in every crevice of my kid’s room.
I ended up losing my shit over Raisels more than once.
But it’s on us as parents to remember that food is a marker. Food tells you whether we are okay. Taken care of. Provided for. It tells us where we are. How we are. How much money we have? Education? Access? Our value in the world.
And in this very rich country, it is unconscionable that there are kids who understand their worth simply in terms of what they can and can’t eat.
“I am loss for words. Today one of my kids caught my almost 15 year old eating out of the trash cans outside of our home. I’m mortified, disturbed and just baffled why she did this. She has many food issues. Eats raw food, bites into things, eats sugar packets, hoards food. She has been with us since she was 9. She chooses to sneak and eat odd, random things. Now the trash? Please help me understand this.” - anonymous parent
For parents like the Harts, who took too many kids from trauma on too quickly and became overwhelmed with their children’s issues, they did the first knee-jerk thing they could do: they started locking up and withholding food.
This, of course, just makes everything worse.
Parents have described the feeling around their kids needing certain foods and snacks to be a “frenzy.” What they are referring to is a kind of dopamine stimulation. Kids can become obsessed, focused on the food, getting the food, how much they want or feel they need, and all the attendant questions of will there be enough?
“I have a 10yo who will eat until she vomits. Left to the pantry she will sit in front of it, and consume everything until she is sick,” a parent writes in an online group. “I lock everything up to protect her.”
But is it protecting them?
It’s not that all these parents are trying to starve their kids. They are trying to prevent a kind of obsessive and unhinged relationship to food. Unfortunately locking it up exacerbates that need. It creates a feeling that food is unavailable. It sets up “stealing” where kids have to sneak and lie to get what they feel they need, which is also a dopamine rush. It underscores the message that food is not readily available, that safety is not readily available.
That love is not readily available.
And there in lies the issue: The way to manage issues of hunger and scarcity for these kids is to do the most unreasonable, incongruent thing of all - to go all in with abundance.
Me: Why do you lock up your child’s food?
Parent: So they don’t eat all the good stuff.
In my book, The Meth Lunches: Food + Longing in an American City, out October 2023, I talk about the story of a girl named Lauren Kavanaugh who was locked in a closet and starved by her mother. It is an extreme and excruciating story of abuse at the hands of a mother who had no real attachment to her daughter and this was played out through withholding her food, and other tortures.
If feeding people is love, Lauren went unloved and unfed in the family’s closet where, at eight-years-old, she weighed the same as a two-year-old. When she was adopted by the Kavanaugh’s after her abuse came to light, although their family life was complicated and not without controversy, they responded to this with abundance. When they found Lauren sleeping in a closet, they took all the doors off the hinges. When she hoarded food, they made it hyper-available. The 8-part series on Lauren is worth the read.
Still, there are things that were broken inside Lauren that might never be fixed by love or having enough food.
“I’m not saying I’m not capable of love,” a now adult Lauren says in the Dallas Morning News. “I just haven’t felt it yet.”
“You can’t fill Lauren up,” her therapist says. “She wants more, she needs more, she never feels loved enough.”
Our family knows this well.
And therein lies the problem of hunger.
It is intractable. Forever.
+++++
So what have experienced parents learned to do? Here are some things that have helped:
Open the closets and pantries. It is scary to do this. Because foster parents are like, “They are going to eat everything and become overweight or sick or we will end up in the ER!” And you might face this for awhile, but you have to work through the chaos and the frenzy. According to Rowell, we as the parents choose what kind of food, and the kids choose how much and when.
Create boxes of foods they love in their room. This is beginner-level food advice but it works. A full food box keeps kids from making night kitchen trips, which sometimes just fuels the need because they feel exhilarated by the act of “sneaking” and getting a dopamine payoff with found-food.
Make more of whatever you are eating. My kid is always concerned if there is more, and we always ensure there is more for him to have. This helps with trust. Just like with babies (we are all just giant needy babies after all) every time there is more at the bottom of the pan, it ensures that everything is right with the world, there will be enough, he will be cared for.
Have food on hand that needs to be constructed. We teach Raffi to eat a fat with a carb, so not just toast but avocado toast. Not just a cracker, but a piece of cheese on that cracker. It slows down gourging. Have food around that needs to be microwaved, oven toasted or requires building, like making a sandwich, that buys the kid some time to think and make decisions that aren’t reactive.
Get them to go to the supermarket with you so you can talk and listen, listen, listen about their food needs. I find that stores like Costco with samples also helps us buy fewer snacks obsessively because there is a focus on having the snack to eat in the moment.
Have a whole snack drawer with nutritious foods. For a long while we couldnt have chips and cupcakes around. This might be the reality at first. You might not be able to have tons of crappy food in the house. If this is a problem, maybe it’s worth checking your own eating habits (I sure had to) and eating the way you want your kids to eat - just a suggestion. We all do the best we can do. Lord knows, it ain’t easy to walk the walk.
Does all this work? Yes. And no. The need to have something, anything, might always stay with our kids. Accept that and lean in and listen. Try and work through the discomfort of opening the doors to the fridge and pantry. It is not always going to be easy or comfortable. And that is okay. This is not a success only journey for parents or kids. It’s about figuring it out together, talking, and making talking about these feelings normal and every day.
If your kid says you are “starving” them, listen. They have an un-met need. Meet them where they are. That is how they feel and it’s valid. It might not be rational to you. That’s okay, too.
One of the most successful things anyone can do, inside families or even in the world, is actively substitute feeding someone for love. If your kid is banging around the kitchen looking for food, ask him if he wants to spend time together, go for a walk with the dogs, cuddle up on the couch and watch Fails on YouTube, all curled up and intertwined.
Subbing in love for feeding makes a difference.
And the point is to love anyway. That’s it, everything is or should be about love and attachment. Even food.
