You left for work this morning with the best intentions.
You packed a healthy lunch. You stocked the refrigerator with the right things. You had the conversation — again — about less screen time, more water, fewer biscuits. You are trying. You are doing the work of a parent who understands that what your child eats today is writing the story of their health for decades to come.
And then you handed them over to someone else for eight, nine, ten hours.
This is not a criticism. It is the reality of modern parenting, and it is one that deserves far more honest conversation than it currently receives. Because the uncomfortable truth is this: the person caring for your child during the majority of their waking hours has more influence over their eating habits, their relationship with food, and their long-term health trajectory than almost any other single factor — including you.
That person may love your child deeply. They may be devoted, attentive, and genuinely well-intentioned. And they may, without realizing it, be quietly undermining every health goal you have set for your family.
Not out of malice. Out of love. Which is precisely what makes it so difficult to address.
The Most Generous Thing in the World
Let me say this plainly, and mean it: feeding a child is one of the most profound expressions of love in human culture. Across the Caribbean, across Africa, across Asia and the Mediterranean and every corner of the world where food is prepared with care and offered with warmth — the act of nourishing a child is not a small thing. It is a language. It is a lineage. It carries within it the memory of grandmothers and the rhythms of generations.
When a grandmother presses a sweet biscuit into a child’s hand, she is not simply offering sugar. She is offering herself. Her history. Her way of saying I see you, I delight in you, you are precious to me. When a caregiver rewards a child’s good behavior with a treat, she is drawing on a deeply human instinct — the desire to mark moments of pride and affection with something tangible, something sweet.
This tradition is not wrong. The love behind it is real, and it matters profoundly to a child’s sense of security and belonging.
What we need to examine — carefully, respectfully, and urgently — is the currency we are using to express it.
What Is Happening to Our Children
The numbers are no longer deniable. Childhood obesity has become a global health emergency. The World Health Organization reports that the number of overweight or obese children under the age of five has risen to over 38 million worldwide. In Caribbean nations specifically, the rates of childhood overweight and obesity rank among the highest in the Americas, with some islands reporting that more than 30% of school-aged children are overweight.
Behind these numbers lies a cluster of consequences that most parents have not been told clearly enough: Type 2 diabetes presenting in children as young as eight. Hypertension in adolescents. Fatty liver disease in pre-teens. Orthopedic problems. Sleep disorders. And perhaps most insidiously, a relationship with food built on reward, comfort, and emotional regulation that will follow these children into adulthood and resist every attempt at change.
We are not talking about children who will need to lose a little weight someday. We are talking about children whose metabolic health is being compromised right now, during the years when their bodies and brains are forming, when habits are being laid down at the neurological level, when the architecture of their relationship with food is being built — often by someone other than their parents.
The Caregiver Blind Spot
In my work in health and wellness, I hear a version of the same story repeatedly from parents across different cultures and income levels.
“I don’t understand it. We eat well at home. But she keeps gaining weight.”
“Our nanny is wonderful. But she gives him whatever he wants to keep him happy.”
“My mother-in-law watches the kids. She thinks I’m being too strict. She says a little sweetness never hurt anyone.”
These are not exceptional cases. They represent a systemic gap in how we think about childcare and health — a gap between what parents intend and what children actually experience during the hours when no parent is present.
The research supports what parents are observing. Studies consistently show that caregiver feeding practices — including the use of food as reward, pressure to finish plates, and offering high-sugar or high-fat foods as comfort — are significantly associated with childhood weight gain and disordered eating patterns. A 2019 study published in Appetite found that non-parental caregivers were substantially less likely to follow parents’ dietary guidelines, and more likely to use food as a behavioral management tool.
Why Food Became the Love Language — And Why It Is So Hard to Change
To understand why this pattern is so entrenched, we need to understand where it came from. For generations across the Caribbean and throughout the African diaspora, food scarcity was a lived reality. To have enough to eat was not a given. To feed a child abundantly — to give them the sweetest, richest, most satisfying foods available — was an act of triumph over that scarcity. It was a statement: we have enough. You will not go without. You are provided for.
What has changed is not the emotional meaning. What has changed is the food environment. Those celebration foods are now everywhere, cheap, aggressively marketed, and available in unlimited quantities. The scarcity that once made them special no longer exists — but the emotional grammar built around them has not caught up. We are still using feast-day foods as everyday rewards in a world where every day is a feast day.
The neuroscience of this is important: highly palatable foods — those engineered to hit the precise combination of sugar, fat, and salt that overwhelms the brain’s satiety signaling — activate the same dopamine reward pathways as addictive substances. When we use these foods as rewards, we are training the brain to associate emotional states — pride, comfort, celebration, love — with a neurochemical hit. We are building the architecture of food addiction in children who are too young to understand what is happening to them.
The Conversation No One Is Having With Caregivers
The person preparing and offering food to your child for the majority of the day needs to understand your health values, share a basic knowledge of nutrition, and be genuinely aligned with the goals you have for your family.
This is not a conversation most parents have when hiring a nanny or au pair. We ask about experience, references, first aid training, and driving records. We do not ask: What is your relationship with food? How do you use food with children? What would you offer a child who is upset or deserving of reward?
We do not have this conversation with grandparents or family members either — because it feels disrespectful. But consider this: we routinely ask caregivers about allergies. We leave detailed instructions about nap schedules and screen time. Food is no different. In fact, food is more consequential than most of these things. And the conversation — handled with respect and genuine appreciation for the caregiver’s love — is both possible and necessary.
Shifting the Currency, Not the Love
We are not asking caregivers to love less. We are not asking grandmothers to withdraw their warmth. We are not demanding that food be stripped of its cultural meaning or its role in family life. The love is not the problem. The love is everything.
What we are asking is this: What if we expressed that same love through different means? What if the reward for good behavior was undivided attention — twenty minutes of play, chosen entirely by the child? What if celebration looked like a special outing, a chosen activity, a handmade card, a story told specifically for them? What if comfort meant physical presence — held close, rocked, talked to — rather than a sugary food that teaches the nervous system to seek sugar when it feels dysregulated?
Research in child psychology consistently shows that children value time, attention, and physical affection from caregivers more deeply than material rewards — including food. The dopamine hit from genuine connection is more durable and less harmful than the hit from sugar. And the emotional message — you matter to me, I delight in you, you are worthy of celebration — is identical.
The love language does not need to change. Only its vocabulary.
A Practical Guide for Parents
Before you hire, ask: What does a typical snack or meal look like in your care? How do you handle a child who is upset or having a difficult moment? What would you offer as a reward for good behavior? These are fundamental compatibility questions about health values.
When speaking to family caregivers: Lead with appreciation. “I am so grateful for how much you love these children.” Then introduce the context as new information, not criticism: “I’ve been learning about how children’s bodies process sugar and I want to share some of what I’ve found with you.” Invite them in rather than issuing directives.
Provide practical alternatives: Do not simply remove food rewards without replacing them. Offer a menu of alternatives — sticker charts, special outings, extra story time, a chosen activity — and frame them as equally powerful expressions of love and recognition.
Make the healthy option the easy option: Stock the kitchen with prepared, ready-to-offer healthy snacks. If the easiest thing to reach for is fruit, cut and visible at eye level in the refrigerator, it becomes the default. If the biscuits are at the back of a high shelf, they become the exception.
Check in regularly: Ask your child what they ate today — not in a surveillance way, but in a warm, curious way. Children will tell you everything if the question feels like interest rather than investigation.
To the Caregivers Reading This
If you are a nanny, an au pair, a grandmother, an aunt, or a family friend who pours love into the children in your care — this piece is written with profound respect for you.
What you do matters enormously. The hours you spend with these children, the comfort you provide, the safety you create — these things shape who they become in ways that cannot be measured. The love you express through food is real, and the children feel it.
And you have the power to be part of something important. Because the same instinct that makes you want to nourish these children — the deep human desire to see them flourish — is exactly the instinct that can drive a shift toward the kind of nourishment that will protect their health for a lifetime.
Loving a child well has always meant doing what is best for them, even when it requires something of us. That has not changed. Only our understanding of what “best” looks like has grown.
References: World Health Organization (2023) Obesity and Overweight Fact Sheet · Pan American Health Organization (2022) Childhood Obesity in the Caribbean · Savage, Fisher & Birch (2007) Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics · Blaine et al. (2019) Appetite · Avena, Rada & Hoebel (2008) Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.
This blog is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice.