Dear Kirsten, 

My 13-year-old daughter keeps stealing food from the kitchen. It started with little things, biscuits, bags of crisps would go missing, I thought it was my other half and he thought it was me.

It's started getting out of hand, all sorts of things are going missing, tins of stuff, things out of the fridge.

Whenever I confront her about it she lies and denies it. We know it's her and I can't understand why she needs to steal food when she can have whatever she wants (within reason) if she just asks.

I feel really let down by her and now that she is lying about not taking things, I feel really angry. She comes from a good home, her dad and I both love her and her sisters dote on her.

I can't understand why she would do this and I don't know how to stop her.

She has started to put on a bit of weight with it and I'm worried other kids will notice.

I'm mortified a child of mine would steal and lie, she hasn't been brought up to be this dishonest and badly behaved.

Name withheld 

Kirsten replies:

I'm grimacing as I write this because I think you might not like my answer. In a nutshell, I would really really want you to reframe her stealing and lying - which has a pretty negative connotation and makes you feel like there is a deliberate/wilful dishonesty, into something different, a bit more compassionate maybe. 

You could be right, she might be - at the tender age of 13, finding a way to really annoy you, she might be having all night fridge raids just to get on your wick.

Alternatively, and this would be where my money is at, she is having a hard time, doesn't know what to do about it and needs some help.

At the core of this is the food and what the food means to her, less about nutrition, probably much more about soothing and repressing feelings. 

Food is a powerful tool - one which many of us turn to when we need some comfort, when this urge gets out of hand, it can be hard to stop and we can begin to equate food with how we gain control over our feelings, how we feel better again, how we calm ourselves down.

When eating behaviours are secretive they're often accompanied by shame.

Shame can be a hideous emotion to navigate, the more you eat, the more shame you feel, the more you need to eat and because this all feels so awful and shaming, you do it in secret and you deny that you are doing anything (which might be where the lying comes in).

It might be that I'm jumping to conclusions, it's often pretty hard to get a full sense of what's happening for a young person unless you are working with them.

That said, I'd rather you considered that there might be something else happening here than just a naughty teen.

One way of working with this is to make some space for her to talk about how she is doing.

Thirteen is a tricky age, hormones are everywhere, friendships are up and down and you've just gone through your first global pandemic. How is she coping? Have school noticed anything changing? 

Try to stop seeing it as stealing and your daughter as someone who needs punishing and think about what she might be communicating with it and why she might be doing it.

Very often, when there is secretive behaviour like this, the young person already hates themselves and is riddled with buckets of guilt, when families also see the behaviour as negative, it can make things much worse.

Make it less about "confronting" and more about a chat.

If she is eating to manage her feelings, help her to open up about it, normalise it, so many of us do this in our own way, even if it isn't as extreme.

Help her learn new ways of managing the feelings if she needs to, naming what she is feeling, using a diary, talking to you about it can start to help shift the behaviour away from food to healthier coping strategies.

It might be that she needs a little bit of support making the shift, your GP, MIND, school or Kooth would be able to help offer some support.

Your daughter's struggles don't have to be a reflection of your parenting, sometimes we just don't feel great and we need a bit of help.

Good luck with everything 

Kirsten 

Kirsten Antoncich FRSA is a UKCP Clinical Psychotherapist based in York. Each week she answers questions from readers. Get in touch with your concerns at @kirstenantoncich