The Professional Counselor | Volume 14, Issue 1 43 Counselors Body neutral parenting gives families and counselors alike a framework of how to navigate conversations of body, food, and movement to promote a healthy relationship with body image. Families need the language, including specific scripts of what to say and do, and what to avoid saying and doing, to support their children in their body image development. It appears that many families would be interested in shifting the larger sociocultural narrative, including diet culture, with their approach to raising their children, if they had the appropriate psychoeducation and support (Siegel et al., 2021). Clinical mental health counselors can meet that need. The co-created grounded theory in this study and further research can provide a launching pad for counselors who want to take a more preventative approach to body image and related mental health support for youth. Counselors can teach families about de-moralizing food, bodies, and movement in their household, for example, as part of the counseling process for children and adolescents who are at risk for disordered eating and body image concerns. Counselors can consider how to be of support to families with an interest in integrating body neutrality into their childrearing approach. Mental health professionals can consider how to be of support through the arduous, though meaningful, process of simultaneously parenting one’s children and re-parenting oneself. Some ways in which mental health counselors can support families include normalizing and validating how difficult body neutrality can be and offering specific scripts of what to avoid saying and what to say instead. To illustrate, a counselor might provide psychoeducation to a parent on how to talk to their child about food. Rather than saying “Apples are good for you,” the caregiver could say, “Red food gives you a strong heart” (Kids Eat in Color, 2022). Moreover, families will need support as they navigate the tremendous amount of rewiring involved for body neutral parenting. Counselors can keep in mind the larger overarching goal to drive their clinical decisions in supporting families through body neutral parenting and avoid the negative experience of shame (Ruckstaetter et al., 2017). Counselors can support families in realizing that parenting is an imperfect, human process. Reminding caregivers that imperfect moments will happen, and how to be gentle with themselves, is critical for caregivers continuing the body neutral lifestyle. As practicing counselors, we must engage in deep reflective practice ourselves to support families and children with body neutrality. In order to be culturally responsive and meet the needs of diverse families, we must “gain knowledge, personal awareness, sensitivity, dispositions, and skills” specific to body neutrality (ACA, 2014, C.2.a). All people have internalized messages and “shoulds” about food, bodies, and exercise, and those internalized biases can hinder the counselor’s ability to support the intricate needs of diverse families healing their relationships with food, bodies, and exercise. Thus, it is an ethical imperative for counselors to engage in self-reflective work about their internalized messages and how those biases might impact the body image needs of children. To illustrate, a counselor might have thin privilege and internalized messages of fat phobia and unknowingly perpetuate the social justice issue of sizeism. Similarly, a parent might make negative comments about the larger body individuals on a TV show. When working with a client in a larger body, a counselor might congratulate the client on their weight loss, when the client might actually be struggling with restricting food and exercising for compensation. It remains an ethical and social justice requirement to engage in both self-reflective work and learning new skills, such as de-moralizing food, to be a culturally responsive, ethical counselor. Parents and Caregivers Relatedly, parents and caregivers can consider body neutrality when supporting their children with their body image development. For example, parents might consider the findings of this study and consider what de-moralizing food, bodies, and movement might look like in their home as well as reflect
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