Addressing Weight and Body Image Struggles With Your Children

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Hi everyone. Welcome to the show. I’m Doctor Nicole, and on today’s episode, we’re talking about supporting children with weight-related issues. Obesity’s on the rise, has been on the rise in children and adults, but there really are special challenges and concerns related to addressing issues of weight with kids. Whether a child is struggling with weight due to eating habits. Or it could be medical conditions. Medication side effects is a big one that we deal with in our population or other kinds of issues. It can be challenging for parents to know how to address healthy weight in ways that don’t lead to disordered eating behaviors or other kinds of problems. So to help us sort through these issues, I’ve invited my friend and colleague, Eliza Kingsford, on the show today. Let me tell you a bit about her.

She’s a licensed psychotherapist, who helps clients and families struggling with food addiction, body image, and emotional eating. Eliza is the author of the bestselling book, Brain-Powered Weight Loss, and her work’s been featured on Doctor Phil, Doctor Oz, NBC Health, CNN Health, and many more. She’s run two different companies focused on finding solutions for adolescents struggling with overweight and obesity and has trained hundreds of clinicians to work with food and body image issues. She’s turning the diet industry on its head by combining the science of nutrition with the psychology of eating to create lasting results for her clients. Thrilled to have this conversation today. Welcome to the show.

Eliza Kingsford:

Thanks Nicole. I’m super excited to be here. I love doing this type of thing.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Good. And I think this is a topic that parents don’t really think about until they are facing these issues with their child, right?

Eliza Kingsford:

Yeah.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Where it’s like, “Oh, wow, how do I navigate this?” And there can be so many challenges with it. So I’m excited to delve into it with people.

Eliza Kingsford:

Yeah, I agree with you. I think it’s something that sort of gets left to the back burner until it doesn’t. And then there’s challenges, as you said, that come up with dealing with it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

So I would love to start by having you share just a little bit about your story of how you came to be doing this specific kind of work that you’re doing today.

Eliza Kingsford:

Yeah, I became fascinated with this connection and the relationship between how we choose food and why we choose food and how that affects us really early on in my own life and in high school, and especially in college. I had a lot of anxiety in college about what was the sort of appropriate “diet” or lifestyle for me. And I combined that love when I went into grad school and started really focusing on what makes someone have a disordered relationship with food. And as things would have it, I kept getting clients who were struggling with overweight and obesity and really the pain that comes with not feeling comfortable in your body from a person of a larger size perspective. And I just really loved working with that population.

And so I spent the first over a decade of my career studying that population, studying the right types of treatment and intervention that would provide lasting results for someone who’s struggling with their weight because we all know that there’s a huge multi-million dollar diet industry. Most of it doesn’t work very well. And I was really, and still remain today, very fascinated with what does work? And how do we help people overcome these challenges for good? So it’s not this yo-yo diet cycle and all of that, which really bothered me and irritated me. And so I spent a lot of my career really diving into what actually helps people shift and make lasting changes.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

So important because, as you mentioned, so much of the information out there around weight loss and dieting puts people into this cycle that lasts their entire lifetime of gaining and losing and feeling bad around food and weight. And I think particularly where children are concerned… Well, we find when working with adults that very often the things that they’re struggling with around their weight and their health as adults have their roots in things that happened when they were kids, right?

Eliza Kingsford:

Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

And so when we’re talking about children, we have an opportunity, I feel, to support those issues in a way that maybe is more proactive, that doesn’t set kids up for these kinds of patterns and things that we so often see in adults.

Eliza Kingsford:

Yeah, you’re right. I mean, honestly, I have yet to work with an adult who didn’t have some tie to a pattern of behavior that started in childhood that turned into something difficult to manage in adulthood. And I think what’s so interesting about working with kids… My work eventually led me to working with kids, adolescence, kids as young as 10 and under and then all the way up into adolescence and young adulthood. What I find to be the biggest challenge is that parents are, number one, not getting great information, especially from their pediatricians. And pediatricians will be the first to say, “I wasn’t really trained in childhood obesity or weight issues, and I don’t actually really know what to tell parents to do, but I see a problem. I see a trend.”

And so parents don’t really know where to go for good health. And they’re also really scared about creating a deeper issue in the child, which I think is fantastic to be aware of. It’s good that they’re thinking about it. But there’s not great resources out there for parents struggling with kids who actually need help, who need intervention at this point. And you probably saw the recent study that came out from the CDC saying that one in five kids are now diagnosed with pre-diabetes and one in four young adults. That’s a trending problem, and we know that kids who struggle with weight and obesity will end up turning into adults who struggle with weight and obesity. And that’s a taxation on our healthcare. I mean, you know all the reasons why it’s important for us to pay attention to this.

But there’s this big backlash from the community on the other side of saying, “Let’s not talk to kids about their weight. Let them just be. Let them be.” And I’ll be really honest at the risk of being flogged, this is not an issue we can just let be. This issue is correlated with so many other issues, anxiety, depression, other mental health issues in kids, and then it turns into very serious medical complications and other health issues as adults. So I don’t think we can just ignore it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

I’m completely on the same page. And while I understand and respect differing points of view on this and certainly respect the desire to not create obsessiveness and issues around weight with kids, we do need to address this as a matter of a health concern for them. And particularly, as you mentioned, the connection between these physical health issues, the what children are eating, their weight status, those kinds of things, and their mental health status because the research is very, very clear about the connections with that. And the majority of parents who are listeners on this show have children with one or more types of mental health or neurodevelopmental kinds of symptoms. And eating is something that we do multiple times a day. It’s something that parents are engaging in with their kids throughout the day.

So when their struggle’s around eating, when their struggle’s around weight, around these types of things, it really can feel overwhelming and very challenging for parents to know what do I do? How do I handle this? So if we can start out by maybe just having you talk a bit about how do you help parents navigate this topic with their child? Because it’s a big one, and I think, as you noted at the start of the conversation, there’s so much information out there now that I think parents feel really overwhelmed about where to turn. Who do I listen to? How do I handle this? So how do you help parents think through this?

Eliza Kingsford:

Yeah. So starting at the beginning, generally when parents come to me… And I want to make this distinction first so that… Some of your listeners may be looking to prevent eating issues or going down a path where their child might be susceptible to weight gain, which is a different type of intervention and work than it is for a parent who’s looking to treat a child who has already gotten to a place where there are some complications with weight. A parent who comes to me usually is in the latter category, although I do have some training for parents who are looking to just create a healthy relationship with food overall, which is important. But if a parent is looking to treat the issue or looking for some interventions to reverse the issue, one of the mistakes that we made as a society as a whole, but especially parents working with kids, is that we focus on the symptom. We focus on the weight. And we say, “Okay, this is an issue. We need to lose the weight.”

And that is the place where a lot of the struggle starts, a lot of the obsessive thought starts. And quite frankly, it’s actually not that helpful. So if you think about it from, let’s say you’re treating a heart attack. If someone goes to the ER for a heart attack, they’re complaining of chest pains and numbness and a whole host of other issues, the doctor is not going to treat the chest pain. That would not treat the issue. That would not treat the cause. And so when you’re dealing with a child who is struggling with weight, you don’t treat the weight. You treat the cause. You treat the what happened in order to get them to be at a place that is not considered a healthy weight. And that cause is… You mentioned it earlier. Sometimes there’s some medication and things from a medical perspective to deal with, which I always take into account. But more often than not, it ends up being repetitive, consistent behavior of overeating and/or eating foods that are not supportive of their health, usually processed foods or inflammatory foods. And then, like I said, it’s repetitive and consistent behavior.

Eliza Kingsford:

And so instead of treating the weight, you don’t want to treat the symptom. You treat the cause, which is looking at the behaviors and looking at the consistent choices around food that got you in to that symptom. This also takes out of it the strong desire to look at the weight as an indicator that you are successful or not because all that sets up, especially for a child… I don’t want a child to worry about their weight. I want them to worry about their behavior. So if your child gets an F on their math test, you don’t focus on the math test. You focus on the behaviors that would help them get to an A, studying, maybe tutoring or some other things that are going to help them get to the result that they want. Focusing on the weight is not going to help them get to the result they want. You want to help them focus on the behavior. So not only will that help them be successful, but it also takes off this pressure on the child to say, “Oh my gosh, I’m either succeeding or failing based on this number,” which that is the thing that perpetuates the disordered eating. So that’s sort of where I start, is helping shift the focus from the symptom to the cause.

And there’s a couple of other really important things. And I completely understand this, but a lot of my families tell me, “Well, I’ve got one child who is really struggling with their weight and one child who can’t keep weight on them to save their life. And so I have this cabinet of food for that child, and then I have the cabinet of food for this child.” And your reaction in your face says it all. If you think about it, I understand where it started. I understand that the parent is saying, “Oh, I want to help my child who’s struggling have healthier foods around.” But really making separate foods in the households for people who are allowed to eat certain foods and not allowed to eat other foods only teaches the child that there’s something wrong with them. And so as hard as it is… And this is one of the hardest parts for families struggling to create a healthy home… is that everybody needs to eat in a way that supports their health. This becomes a family unit rather than as the identified patient. There’s something wrong with child X, so they only get to eat this type of food, and everybody else in the family has free reign of the cupboards is only teaching your child that there’s a connection between their weight and their value. And that is something we never want to create, right?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Yeah. Well, I’m so glad you raised that because I see that often in practice, and it sets up such an unhealthy dynamic in the family between siblings, between parents and kids. And ultimately, to me, from what you’re saying and what I talk with families about, we want this to be a discussion about supporting health.

Eliza Kingsford:

Absolutely.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Not about weight, not about a number on the scale, but how do we eat in ways and live a lifestyle in ways that support a healthy brain and body? And what kind of message does it send when we say, “Well, that’s important for you, so here’s the cupboard of foods for that, but the other kids in the family or other people can eat the Twinkies and the Ho Hos and the Mountain Dew and the whatever”? Kids are so smart. Even young kids are like, “Oh yeah. No, actually this isn’t about health. This is about-

Eliza Kingsford:

Correct.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

“You thinking that I’m fat or me-

Eliza Kingsford:

That’s right.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

“Needing to eat differently.” And I think that often as adults, we dramatically underestimate how savvy kids are at reading between the lines and picking up on that stuff. We’re not pulling anything over on them.

Eliza Kingsford:

Oh, absolutely. I love that you said that because two of my favorite mantras for parents to learn or just sort of the theories for them to learn are, number one, that kids respond to who we are, not what we say. So if we say, “Oh, these apples and curious sticks support your health,” and yet there’s Mountain Dew and dad’s eating Doritos on the couch, they know better. They respond to who we are repeatedly. So when you tell a child something, they’re not listening as much to your words as they are who you are in relation to those things. And they’re incongruent at that point, and the child picks up on that quickly. But most importantly, I tell parents just because you can doesn’t mean you should. So just because you’ve got a sibling who can have Mountain Dew’s and all kinds of junk food and it may not show up physically on their body as weight, that doesn’t mean that that food is good for their systems, for their brain functioning, for their mental health, for their emotional health, all the things that you can’t see on a person, as you well know it. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

So when I have a parent saying to me… And this becomes some of the hardest conversations that I have. They say, “Look, I don’t know how to take the Doritos away from Johnny in support of Sally’s health.” And I say, “But don’t you? I mean, give me a reason why the Doritos are really good for Johnny.” All I need is one reason why this is really good for Johnny’s health and his body and his development and his brain functioning, I mean, all the things. Well, there’s no reason. We know that, other than the fact that Johnny really likes it and his taste buds and his palette has now been adjusted to really want to seek out that type of food. We know that that isn’t supporting Johnny’s health. And they’ll say, “But won’t Johnny then resent Sally for taking that food out of the house?” And I say, “Not if you make this because those are your values as a family,” which means mom and dad have to take a look at what are their values as a family? For instance, what if Sally was deathly allergic to peanuts?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Right.

Eliza Kingsford:

There wouldn’t be any peanuts in the house. And there wouldn’t be any question about Sally’s value as a sibling, as a child, as anyone because she has this deathly allergy. We would just take the peanuts out of the house, and there wouldn’t be any discussion about it. You can make the argument that some of these foods that we’re feeding our children, they may not cause serious complications today, but as we can see with the prediabetic conversation, which then leads to type two diabetes, it’s consistency over time will cause just as many medical complications. And what happens is that when we don’t see that immediate connection, we think that it’s less risky and oh well, maybe we can kind of not make it so important or make it so acute in that moment. And then it becomes slippery. And so what I tell families is, “Listen, this becomes a family affair. We are a family whose values support good health physically, mentally, and emotionally. And this is what we do as a family, which means dad also doesn’t have the ice cream shoved in the back corner of the freezer for those times.”

Eliza Kingsford:

And it’s a simple, not easy shift, I find, for families. And it takes some support and guidance and coaching sometimes to help them even mentally make their own shift from okay, what’s important to me here? We know especially for kids that when you have unhealthy, processed food snacks in the same cupboard as more healthy snacks, research and studies, it makes sense, they choose the unhealthy snacks. And maybe not the first time, but eventually they will because their brain is going to pull them to those processed food snacks each time, which then makes them feel like a failure, which then sets them up to make them feel like they’re not good enough. And so we systematically talk through ways about how to make the household support their health and then also had a talk about the health in a we discussion instead of a you discussion. You need this, and you need that. It’s a we eat this, and these are our values as a family.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

So important. And it really shifts the focus of the conversation away from this is about this particular child and their number on the scale to this is about all of us being as healthy as we can be, which is a different and much more effective conversation. And the reality is if the family is eating in such a way that this particular child is having issues with overweight or obesity, chances are there are changes to make there across the board that will positively impact everybody’s health, right?

Eliza Kingsford:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that’s a point, is that sometimes when people implement this, the other child that can’t keep weight on, they’ll say, “He’s sleeping much better. His grades are going up. He’s engaging with me and his friends differently.” Because you’re getting out of some of those other side effects that processed food can… And I keep mentioning processed food. I should be clear that I think that children, adolescents, and young adults are the most susceptible to the issues that processed food has in our society because they have low impulse control. They have a high need for instant gratification. And those are the two things that are triggered when you’re eating that type of food. It is very difficult for them to be able to moderate themselves successfully. I do believe they need support in this area. I think it needs to be intentional support that we give kids to be able to… If they’re going to eat processed food, be able to balance it and be able to moderate it on their own because their brains are… I mean, as adults, many adults are struggling with it, but their brains are underdeveloped to be able to deal with what the processed food is triggering in them.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Well, I mean, there’s a huge argument to be made that that has been very intentional on the part of the processed food industry to put chemicals in foods, to create foods, to create advertising around foods in such a way that we have children from a very early age who get really focused on, and even we could use the word addicted to, these kinds of foods that shapes their palette, and then they become adults who continue to consume and purchase these foods. And unfortunately children have really had the most significant effects of that because this generation or even our generation, we’re raised on a lot of these foods. And when we look at the setup then for health concerns, and it’s overweight and obesity, but also, as you mentioned, it’s all the complications that come along with that, type two diabetes, all of that, we’re seeing the impact of that play out now.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

But I think that we have more understanding about that now. And so we have an opportunity to intervene, to work with kids, to shape this in a different direction now moving forward, which I think is the great part of it. And so I love the ways that you’re framing that for people to think about it. I want to go back to something you said earlier because I think this is really important and something that parents struggle with. This whole idea of talking about weight, focusing on weight with kids and the connection between that and eating disorders because there are places that parents can look online. There’s even practitioners who will tell parents, “Don’t talk about this stuff with your kids because you’re going to give them an eating disorder.” So I’d like you to talk on that for a minute.

Eliza Kingsford:

Yeah. And I always step lightly into this topic. Well, I know for certain that there are ways to approach this conversation that support health and well-being. And then there are ways that parents inadvertently approach this conversation that has an impact that they didn’t intend. I believe that parents are doing the best they can most of the time. Certainly, there are outliers here and there, but that’s not who’s listening to your show, I’m guessing. And they’re doing what they feel is right. So for instance, a kiddo comes in… And I’ve seen thousands and thousands of families and kids over the last 12 years… and what usually happens is they’ll tread lightly on the conversation. And it starts to be, “Let’s not have seconds. You don’t need that.” They have a concern about their child’s weight, and they’re trying the things that they know how to do. And they’re saying, “Okay, we’ll have them eat less, and then they’ll lose the weight. And so I’m going to say don’t have those seconds because that will help them eat less.” And inadvertently, they’re sending the message that your weight is bad. Losing weight is good. And when you choose that behavior, that’s bad. Let’s choose a good behavior.

So we start to set up this good, bad dichotomy with food. And that is always going to be unhealthy. It’s unhealthy for adult. Instead, what I’ll teach families to we use a we instead of a you. And choosing food becomes about health and the connection with health. For instance, “Listen, we want to eat protein because it supports our brain functioning. We want to eat carbohydrates that don’t go through us so quickly, so we have more energy to think throughout the day. We want to eat vegetables,” which is always a struggle with kids. And I always tell parents, “Don’t fight it. Don’t push it.” Even with my own daughter, who’s six. And here I’ve been doing this work for however many years, and you’ve got kids, so you probably ended up having these moments where you’re going, “Okay, this is my profession, but how do I deal with this in real time?” My daughter doesn’t like vegetables. News flash. But we don’t push it. We encourage trying it. We say, “Okay, it’s okay to not eat it. You can leave it on your plate, but I want you to try it because our taste buds sometimes don’t know what they like until we try it. Maybe we don’t know what we like until we’ve tried it a lot of times. Just try it, and then you can decide.”

But if you have a child who is still young enough… And I mean, so they’re not into their young adults and teens where they have probably already developed some of their relationship to food and food and body things. If you have a child that’s kind of just starting out, I encourage you to allow them to understand their own food cues. And so your role as the parent is to start giving them cues to identify their own cues in their own body. So that would be things like if there’s food on their plate and they say that they’re done, you say, “Okay, great. Does your body say you’ve had enough?” And they start to try and make that connection between whether or not they feel full or they feel satiated.

Eliza Kingsford:

I don’t have parents have their kids clean their plate. I think we grew up, especially I think probably you and I, in an era where whether it was our parents or our grandparents, there was this cleaning the plate from the great depression, and there was some real validity to that argument. That is no longer the case for us, and for parents who are struggling, for whom it’s triggering them if their child doesn’t finish their plate, I always use this analogy that it’s either extra food is trash in their body or it’s trash in the trash can. You decide where you want that trash to be. But you can also do things like cue them back to, “Oh, remember yesterday how your eyes were really big, and they chose this amount of food?” And then your tummy said, ‘Mommy, that was too much.’ Maybe today we try to have our eyes be a little bit smaller and choose this amount of food and then see what your body says.” And you make it kind of an experiment.

Eliza Kingsford:

“Remember how much you had yesterday? Let’s see what your body says today and when it says you’ve had enough.” And so it becomes taking out the language of you can have and you can’t have and input language of cuing. “What does your body say? Does your body tell you you’re full? Does your body tell you you’re hungry? Wow. How interesting. Your eyes told you how hungry you were, but your body said you were a little less hungry. That’s so neat. Isn’t that interesting how the body works?” That’s young kids, right?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Right.

Eliza Kingsford:

As we get older and as now parents are concerned with their child’s body weight, it’s very important to not use language that becomes, “No, you can’t have seconds. Yes, you can have this, but you can’t have that. You need to stop eating. Do you really need that second cookie?” These are all things that parents are well-meaning. What they’re trying to do is get their child to stop and think, but in reality when we start using can and can’t have, it creates that what’s wrong with me? And it starts to create that obsession with food. So instead, what I try to have parents do is talk to their kids. Again, it’s not too late to teach hunger cues. It’s not too late to start saying things like, “Wow, sometimes I put way too much food on my plate. I think I got too much. I think my eyes were a little bigger than my stomach” type of thing. And it becomes, “Hey, I think we all need a little more balance here in our meals. I know that I sleep better when I’m not filling my body with a big plate of pasta before bed” or something like that.

It becomes cues to help the child think about oh, well, what am I doing? Without saying you can or you can’t have. It’s really important, again, that the parents are not focusing on the outcome, which is the weight. Instead it’s the process. So first pay attention. What is happening in the household? Is it over-consumption of food? Is it eating too often? Is it too much at one sitting? Is it snacking all day? So instead of the we need to lose weight, let’s look at the behavior. We break down the behaviors that got us there and start to work on each behavior systematically. And what I find is that once I start working with the family system and understand what the behaviors are, what messages mom is bringing in, what messages dad is bringing in, and then the sibling situation, we can easily pinpoint some certain behaviors that we can work on that will then lead to a different outcome. But every family I get without fail, well-meaning comes in wanting to work on the symptom, which is the weight. And we got to kind of back it up a few steps.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Such helpful strategies and just things that parents can start thinking about in terms of ways that they talk about it. And I think that circles back to what you were talking about earlier of the focus on health and the kinds of foods we bring into the home and the entire family making those changes because really what I have found as a parent is I’m responsible for what comes into the house. If I’m bringing things in that do not support the health of my children, then I bring it on myself those arguments, those conflicts, those issues around can I have this? I mean, really I should be bringing things into the home that there shouldn’t be a question about can I have it or not, right?

Eliza Kingsford:

Yeah.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

And so these pieces all fit together. And really what I hear you saying is that while it may be the child who’s having the specific symptoms, the issue of addressing this really starts with parents.

Eliza Kingsford:

Absolutely. I mean, and you’re right, it starts with at ground zero what comes into the home. And that really is our responsibility. I talk to parents about their lane and staying in their lane. And as early as possible, their lane is what comes into the home, when the food is eaten, and how it’s eaten. So it’s do we have meal times? And how is it laid out? Do they serve themselves? Are you serving them? And then what the food is. The child’s lane, then, should be if they eat it and how much. And that part’s really hard for the parents when they’ve made the dinner and sort of the child says, “Well, I’m not going to eat it.” And that’s actually one of the things that parents tell me a lot, is, “Well, my kid’s a picky eater, and he’ll only eat this, this, and this.” And I say, “Well, your child has trained themselves to be a picky eater based on their palette of yes, it’s natural for kids to want mac and cheese, hot dogs, and chicken nuggets. That’s where their pallets are. And if we feed them that, then that is how they train their palettes.

So one of the things I say to parents is they don’t have to like the fish that you’ve put on the table, but you still get to say, “Okay, if this isn’t what you like for dinner, here are the other two options.” And you create those options. And all of those options should be within the what is in the home. And then they get to decide if you’re going to eat one of those options and how much they’re going to eat. Another thing that when you were talking came up for me is that one of the important things to start paying attention to is if and when your child starts to eat food out of an emotional comfort. I will say it happens really young, but oftentimes it happens in young adolescents. And somewhere around the 10 to 13 age, people can kind of say, “Oh, I started to comfort myself with food.

Eliza Kingsford:

The problem with comforting yourself with food is that it is comforting. As you know, it turns down the threat response system. It does make you actually feel better in the moment. And as a child, they learn very quickly oh, that thing that I just did actually makes me feel better, and then their brain is going to search that out. It’s important to recognize that because that’s when I start to see kids starting to sneak food and hide food, and that becomes a problem that parents are very concerned about. If your child is sneaking or hiding food, it is a clear indicator that there is shame and guilt around it. Nobody sneaks or hides something that they don’t feel like they shouldn’t be doing. So you automatically know that they’re harboring some thoughts or emotions around the food that says I shouldn’t be doing this, but it’s making me feel better somehow.

Eliza Kingsford:

And this is where I really want to encourage parents to open up the right dialogue. A lot of parents start going, “You can’t sneak and hide food,” which again is just putting a band-aid on the larger problem, which is why are they sneaking in hiding food? There’s two facets to that. One, why do they feel shame and guilty about it? And two, why do they want to do it to begin with? And really the work is figuring out… And it’s different for each family and it’s different for each situation. It’s figuring out what the root cause of it is, but what I can say with a blanket statement is just addressing the issue, which is the sneaking and hiding is never going to get you to dealing with the cause, right?

Yeah, yeah. Really getting to those root issues and understanding that eating behaviors are an outgrowth of other things that are going on. Yeah, yeah. Such great information. So many things to get parents thinking about these issues. Just great stuff. I want to make sure as we wrap up here that I give you a chance to share with listeners where they can find out more about you. I know that you’ve got a wonderful book. You’ve got great online resources. Where can people find you?

Eliza Kingsford:

Yeah, thank you. People can find me at elizakingsford.com. And all of resources, different classes or different ways to work with me online or even just follow along with some of the messages are all right there, elizakingsford.com. And I do have a couple of parenting classes that are coming out-

In 2020 just based on the volume of people saying, “Here’s the struggle,” and me being able to say, “Great, here’s a master class on how we could go about starting to address that. So if you’re interested, definitely sign up for my newsletter, and I’ll get you information on that.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Fantastic. Those sound like great resources. I’ll be keeping an eye out for those and definitely sending people that way. And we’ll have your website link in the show notes too so that people can easily click on that. But I do encourage all of you who are listening to check out all of the wonderful resources and things that Eliza has available. Thank you so much for being with us today and for sharing this information. It’s been a really, really helpful conversation.

Eliza Kingsford:

Thank you. This was wonderful. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

And thanks to all of you for listening. We’ll catch you on our next episode of The Better Behavior Show.