Nourished: Connection, Food, and Caring For Our Kids (and everyone else we love)
What does it mean to be nourished?
Nothing could be more basic than food. However, food is only one part of the concept of nourishment, but it has consumed our focus and eclipsed something far more critical for thriving – connection. We have lost sight of the fact that feeding our families is about human relationship and emotional well-being.
In Nourished, developmental and relational clinical counsellor Dr. Deborah MacNamara shows us how feeding is part of the caretaking relationship and cannot be separated from it. Informed by attachment science, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and research on human emotion, Nourished reframes our approach to providing for our kids and helps us hit the reset button on our relationship with food. After reading this seminal work, it will be impossible to ever view food as just plain food again.
As parents we need our kids to be receptive to what we offer but the road to the stomach must go through the heart. As relational and emotional creatures, our deepest hunger is one that food by itself cannot fill. In this book, Dr. MacNamara gives us the keys to transform the everyday act of feeding our children (and other loved ones) into a most fulfilling and nourishing dance of attachment. Based on developmental and relational science, qualitative research with families, counselling parents, and her own experience as a mother, in Nourished, MacNamara combines storytelling with science and puts food in its rightful place.
Click HERE for purchase, book club & study guide details.
Click HERE to view the recording of the Nourished book launch webinar with Gordon Neufeld, Deborah MacNamara, and Tamara Strijack on September 19, 2023.
Deborah presented “The Wisdom of Gathering to Eat” at Neufeld Institute Conference 2023.
Session Description:
It is in our nature to eat together. It turns out that it is also in our best interests for a whole host of reasons that science has only lately uncovered. Unfortunately, as food became an industry, and eating an independent activity, the natural relational context that converts food into true nurturance – for both the body and the self – has been lost. Deborah will inspire us to take back this territory in order to recover the natural power of food in both our own lives, and the lives of our loved ones.