How to Convince Stubborn Parents to Stop Eating so Much Trash
Talking to a friend about your health can be difficult, but talking to your parents about any changes may seem impossible. Combine the two and you feel like you’re on a stupid assignment.
A close friend of mine recently embarked on that very battle with the best of intentions trying to convince her rheumatoid arthritis mother to try out the potential benefits of including more anti-inflammatory foods in her diet. This proposal, as expected, met with resistance.
As I watched my roommate talk to her parents about diet, I felt a growing sense of closeness. It felt like parenting persuasion to take COVID-19 seriously back in March 2020 (not to mention all the talk going on since then). And many of the tips we mentioned for communicating with parents about COVID apply to talking with parents about what they eat.
The main problem is often not so much arguing over facts as getting the people who raised you to take your advice and change their behavior. As a child, we worry about the well-being of our parents, but as a child, we also feel unable to get our parents to really listen to us. It’s hard to fight the “ I’m in my way ” defense even when we kids are starting from a place of genuine concern (and, well, often, scientific evidence).
With this in mind, we must stop thinking like children and start thinking like professionals. One of the strategies used by clinicians to stimulate behavior change from within is the idea of ”motivational interviewing”. Below are some basic facts on how motivational interviewing works and why it might be the best strategy for convincing your parents to adopt healthier eating habits.
Reminder: There is no single healthy diet.
There are many good faith reasons why your family members have eaten healthier foods, but before you try to convince anyone of anything, it is important to understand that there is no one correct way to eat healthier foods .
It is fair game to want your loved ones to eat more vegetables and get enough protein, but if you are guided by a fancy diet or a private belief that your parents need to lose weight, check your own biases before imposing anything on your loved ones. It’s also important to understand that if you don’t live with your parents, you won’t get the full picture of their daily eating habits – for better or for worse.
This is another reason to use motivational interviewing to induce change independently, rather than dictating “do’s and don’s” to your parents. Armed with this healthy perspective, here’s how to start this conversation.
What is a motivational interview?
According to the National Lipid Association’s Lifestyle Change Toolkit , motivational interviewing (MI) is a guided communication style that helps another person change their behavior on their own. This is a way to prevent someone from feeling pressured to change. MI’s goal is to empower someone to want to change on their own. It is supposed to be about conversation, not interference.
As Psychology Today explains, MI is “a hands-on, empathetic and short-term process that takes into account how difficult it is to change life.” For our purposes, you encourage parents to talk about their health goals and then get them to talk about the practical changes they could make to achieve those goals.
How to use a motivational interview
MI typically includes five key strategies:
- Express empathy. Try to see where your parents are from. Their notions of diet may have solidified decades ago, so don’t expect the change to happen overnight.
- Avoid arguments. This should be real conversation. One of the tips is to find common ground about your health goals, rather than squabbling over certain habits.
- Develop a mismatch. It’s about pointing out any discrepancy between your parents’ current behavior and their health goals.
- Resolve ambivalence. Do you and your parents disagree on what their health goals are? Why? Before you can talk about any change, you must all agree on what kind of change it is.
- Maintain self-efficacy. Chances are, you are not responsible for your parents’ health; they are. The whole point of MI is to encourage your parents to change their habits on their own. Encourage your parents to talk about how they can make specific changes based on practical, intrinsic motivation.
If all of the above strategies seem like a lot, professionals use a convenient acronym. Help yourself become a strong motivational interviewer with OARS:
1. Ask O pen unfolded questions.
2. ffirm your parents, with techniques like verbal verification or even just nodding your head.
3. Practice R eflective listening to show that you are absorbing what your parents are saying
4. S ummarize the conversation and reiterate what a common ground you can settle for.
In the end, someone else’s problem cannot be solved.
MI is an open, honest conversation that helps increase (or channel) someone’s intrinsic motivation. You cannot solve your parents’ problems for them. The most important thing to remember is that even if you come from a place of love, you must accept that which is beyond your control. Find natural opportunities to talk about your parents’ health and remember that ultimately your role is to be supportive. And if you try to talk about it at Thanksgiving dinner, then I have to admit that I don’t know how to help you.