Nurture

A book review of Nurture: How to raise kids who love food, their bodies and themselves by Heidi Schauster, MS, RD, CEDS-S, SEP

Stars: *****

Hummingbird Press (2024)
Self-Help
185 pages

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This post contains affiliate links.

Summary: Confused about the conflicting recommendations about how to feed children well and prevent eating and body image problems in teens? Reading Nurture is like having a conversation with a compassionate fellow parent who has done decades of fieldwork on the subject. Heidi Schauster writes from her nearly 30 years of experience treating people with disordered eating, her own lived experience as a recovered person, and as a parent of two young adults.

This book is a much-awaited follow-up to Nourish, Heidi’s award-winning book on healing relationships with food, body, and self. Nurture contains sane and sound advice that anyone who spends time with children or teens will benefit from reading.

This book is a life-enhancing tool for:

• Parents and caregivers who have had their own food and body issues and don’t want to pass them on to the next generation
• Parents and caregivers with kids exhibiting body image concerns
• Parents and caregivers with kids exhibiting disordered eating who want direction
• Parents and caregivers with kids in larger bodies who feel unclear as to how to help them in the fat-phobic culture we live in
• Parents and caregivers with picky eaters who don’t want to create dynamics around food that might lead to eating and body issues later in life
• People who spend time with children and teens and want to create an inclusive, health-and-well-being-enhancing culture around them

Nurture

Nurture is the perfect book if you want advice on raising your kids to love food, their bodies and themselves as the title says. The book does exactly what it says it will. The only problem I found was that I should have read this book when my children were younger. There WAS advice for older children too for sure. But it would have been easier to change the mistakes I was making earlier.

The book teaches you why dieting isn’t the answer, how to respect and speak well of bodies, why depriving your child will backfire, who is in charge of what they eat, social media, joyful movement and more.

It’s a small book at less than 200 pages which is a good thing because parents, especially of young children, don’t have a lot of time to read.

Each chapter has a summary and reference and resources. So if you want to read more on the subject, you can see what resources to check out.

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