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.