Helping Your Child Trust Their Body (Even When It’s Hard)

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Continuing the Journey: From Your Body to Theirs

If you read Part One, you know that raising a child with body trust starts with learning to trust your own body. Now, we move to the next step: helping your child trust theirs.

This is not about managing what they eat or how much they move. It’s about supporting their connection to their own body’s wisdom—and gently unlearning your urge to control that wisdom.

It’s not easy. Especially if you grew up believing bodies were unreliable, dangerous, or in need of strict management. But here’s the truth: your child’s body is wise. Just like yours was before the world taught you not to listen.

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Children Are Born with Body Wisdom

Before the noise of diet culture, peer pressure, or shame, children know how to eat when they’re hungry, stop when they’re full, rest when tired, and move for joy. Your job isn’t to take over those decisions—it’s to protect and nurture their ability to stay in tune.

That may mean facing the discomfort of not intervening. It might mean sitting with fear when your child asks for more dessert, wants less dinner, or refuses to play outside.

The goal is not perfect behavior. The goal is connection—to their body, their needs, their joy, and yes, sometimes their limits.

To raise a child who trusts their body, you may have to unlearn the belief that bodies can’t be trusted at all. That’s the work.

And even if you don’t fully believe it yet, you can still act as though you do—for them, and for the healing of both of you.

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How Believing in Their Body Changes Your Parenting Language

When you choose to believe that your child’s body is wise, your behavior naturally shifts. But the relationship is not just one direction: The way we speak and act impacts our beliefs just as our beliefs impact the way we speak and act. So choosing to work on your language can help you move closer to trusting your child’s body. And once you spark this bi-directional relationship up, magic can happen. Trust keeps building, and language keeps getting easier. At first, though, both will require a lot of intention, and may feel a bit foreign.

Language Around Trust

Trusting your child’s body can help you use language that teaches them to trust it too. Moving away from language that teaches distrust is a major step in this. For example, you may stop asking questions that inadvertently send the message that they cannot, or should not, trust their own cues. Questions that stem from fear, but can feel like judgment and doubt, like:

• “Are you really hungry again?”
• “Do you need more of that?”
• “Shouldn’t you go outside and move around?”

Instead, you start getting curious and asking questions that help them tune in:

• “How does that food make your body feel?”
• “What is your tummy telling you right now?”
• “What kind of movement sounds fun today?”

Language Around Eating

Another language shift that can foster and grow easier with body trust: As you realize their bodies are wise, you stop treating food, or the desire for food, as the enemy.  When that happens, you stop moralizing food and eating behaviors and start referring to them as the neutral things they are (If it’s not neutral to you yet, that’s ok–you can still get there! And helping them see it that way will also help you heal). Instead of saying things like:

• “That’s not healthy.”
• “You don’t need seconds.”
• “We need to be good because we had too much cake last night.”

You instead start to see that foods can all be neutral, but may impact our bodies differently. Broccoli might give your child a stomach ache but give another child lots of energy. Peanuts might be a powerhouse of nutrients for the neighbor, but spark a nasty allergy for you. And cake might fill you with joy and nostalgia, but lead to an energy crash if you don’t have it with some protein, too. No food is good or bad, but understanding how they impact our body, and how to listen to our bodies to get the most out of our relationship with food, is powerful and requires trust in your intuition. You can help your child there with questions and reflections rather than judgments and assertions.

Language Around Bodies

Change can also happen in how you talk about bodies, size, and weight. As you begin to talk as though bodies all belong, and actually trust your child’s body to grow and develop as your child needs it to, you start to let go of praise and criticism that centers appearance, body, and eating. 

You stop using phrases like:

• “You’re not fat, you’re beautiful.”
• “I miss having my old body!”
• “I can’t wear that anymore.”
• “You’ve put on some weight.”

Even if these words are well-meaning, they reinforce the idea that bodies are not to be trusted—only managed, judged, or corrected. 

Instead, you begin showing your child that their body is not a problem to fix. It’s a home to return to. You might say:

• “What does being fat mean to you? What do you feel about that?” (Hint: fat is a descriptor just like being tall, short, etc. and isn’t an insult, unless we react to it as though it is!)
• “I love how it feels to stretch in my body.”
• “Some days I have a harder time remembering all my body does for me, and some days it’s easier.”

You don’t have to feel natural in this language to start. And you don’t have to be perfect. But a willingness to work on your language will help you trust your child’s body, and help them trust themselves–and that’s where their true power lies.

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Support, Don’t Steer

Your child will have moments of disconnect. We all do. They may overeat. They may avoid movement. They may repeat something they heard at school about calories or bodies or food.

When that happens, your role is to stay calm and grounded. Offer reflection, not reaction. Ask questions that invite curiosity about how their body feels, not shame.

And yes, sometimes it helps to simply observe. To let their bodies speak to them, rather than speaking over them.

The more we get out of the way, the more they stay in touch with the signals we were taught to ignore.

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Don’t Overcorrect

Sometimes, in trying to avoid passing down harm, we swing too far. We turn everything into a lesson, a careful correction, or a new rule about how to be body-positive.

That, too, is control. And kids feel it.

You don’t have to make it a big deal. You can just live it. You can simply model trust.

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You Can Still Be Learning

This doesn’t require perfection. You might still be questioning whether your own body is safe to trust. That’s okay.

You can still behave as if you believe—until your belief catches up. Because that belief is a practice. And your child will benefit from it even as you build it.

You are not behind. You are in it, alongside them. That’s exactly where you’re meant to be.

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Final Thoughts

Helping your child trust their body is one of the most powerful ways to interrupt the cycle of body distrust. It asks you to believe in their innate wisdom—and maybe, to reclaim your belief in your own.

You don’t have to control their body. You only have to protect the trust they already carry within them.

And when you do, you raise a child who lives in their body with freedom, presence, and joy. A child who can come home to themselves. Just like you are learning to do. And hopefully, together, we can make it easier for every generation to come.  If you want more support along the way, I would love to walk with you!