REQUIRED READING!

Great insight to fat phobia and how these cultural mindsets and generational traumas are hurting future generations. Love that it also balanced those things with some ideas on how to break these cycles. As a parent, the hardest part for raising good, healthy kids is knowing where to start and how to engage in these conversations. Knowing how to be aware of these things and have a plan to be prepared for the conversations, it gives me hope.

There were interesting ideas in here, and I also found it pretty frustrating when Sole-Smith would take something complex (for example, parents' worry about their children's relationship to sugar) and dismiss all reasons that might contribute to it other than fatphobia. I could just imagine her writing a book about anything else and managing to distill the same complex concept into being so obviously about only this one other thing.

She also had a tendency to ascribe feelings to her interviewees that they may or may not have been having, and it's manipulative to the adults and children interviewed. "[Kid] doesn't say it, but I can tell she's upset with how her parents handled that, in this very specific way that aligns with my narrative" is the sort of thing that happens in this book with irritating frequency.

The book was definitely also missing content about food marketing and teaching children to be critical of how foods are presented for kids, outside of her complaints about anyone ever talking about the health-related content of food. What if we didn't just have to save critical thinking for conversations about fitness influencers on social media, but could also talk about cartoon characters being featured on bars and crackers?

Extremely challenging, empathetic, thought-provoking, and while researched book. The title is a bit misleading. This book is valuable not just for parents, but for anyone seeking to understand, and deprogram themselves from a culture obsessed with diets and thinness.