Interview with Candida Hunt

If only we could get childhood right, therapists would be out of a job. Parenting expert, author and Oxford resident Candida Hunt is only half-joking with this quip.

Having set up not one but two charities and as the creator of a number of parenting courses, she knows a thing or two about bringing up children.

And what worries the mother-of-two most is the escalating problem of child obesity.

According to the Department of Health, a fifth of all five- and six-year-olds are overweight or obese, and by the time they reach 10 or 11, a staggering one in three fall into that category.

Little wonder Ms Hunt is on a crusade through the shape of Henry, the Eynsham-based national charity she started eight years ago.

Health Exercise Nutrition for the Really Young works with more than 60 health trusts, local authorities, universities and charities around England and Northern Ireland.

After stepping back from the role of chief executive of the charity two years ago, she wrote the Healthy Families book, part of an interactive training programme for health professionals and parents.

It manages to be helpful and fun, without being preachy and parents are given a copy of the colourful, work-book and encouraged to fill in sections as they go along.

“We do as little teaching as possible and people experience their own lightbulb moment.

“It’s not about telling people what to do, it’s more about walking alongside them,” she said.

The course is designed to be fun but the underlying message is serious, since it reveals the inconvenient truth that most parents teach their children unhealthy eating habits from birth without realising.

She explained: “Parents train their children to eat emotionally, so we’ll say ‘you’ve been so good you can have an ice cream as a treat’.

“Or, ‘oh dear, you hurt your knee, have some chocolate to cheer you up’.

“We don’t tend to say ‘you’ve been such a good boy, here’s a boiled egg, or a piece of broccoli’.

“The foods that get emotionally loaded are all the high fat, high sugar ones.

“Food and love are inextricably linked in our minds, so acceptance of food feels like an acceptance of love, while rejection feels like a rejection of love.”

The seed for Henry was planted following a chance meeting between Ms Hunt and Professor Mary Rudolph, a consultant paediatrician who specialises in the prevention of childhood obesity.

The professor approached her for editorial help on a handbook for health visitors, asking ‘Have you got a few hours to spare?’ Ten years later, as co-directors of Henry, their professional partnership is still going strong.

She explained: “Mary is a doctor and academic who is very warm and dynamic.

“She brings academic rigour and obesity knowledge, while I bring parenting and therapeutic skills and know how to put courses together.”

Ms Hunt’s expertise as an author and editor comes from a 30-year career in non-fiction publishing, where she started out as a secretary and rose to the rank of editorial director at the likes of Andre Deutsch and Times Publishing. But her interest in therapy and child development stems from a more personal root.

As a child, she says she was accused of being sulky but believes she was depressed, She explained: “I had a privileged background but not a happy childhood.

“It was a very Victorian upbringing, with fierce discipline and a bit low on compassion and understanding. That experience shaped me, so that I was not very confident and didn’t do very well at school or go to university.”

That proved to be the trigger for a huge change of direction in her career, as having found counselling so useful, she trained as a counsellor.

As part of her research, she became fascinated with the effect childhood has on adult emotions and actions.

Not long afterwards, when her sons Alexander and Oliver were 14 and 12 and she was a divorcee, she experienced what she describes as “a real Road to Damascus moment” and realised that was the area she wanted to specialise in.

After gaining experience in that sector, she and two colleagues formed Family Links charity in 1997.

“That was just brilliant and my children said I was a better parent as a result of what I was learning there,” she said.

She wrote a book called The Parenting Puzzle, which is still a bestseller 10 years on, generating royalties for Family Link, which she describes as ‘a lovely legacy’.

When spreading the Henry message, resistance often comes from unlikely quarters.

She pointed out: “We’ve had health professionals who say ‘I can’t even get my own kids to eat their veg’.

“When you ask if they like vegetables, they say ‘no, I never eat them’ with no trace of irony.

“We had one day course where we laid on a healthy buffet lunch.

“Three health professionals went down the road to the nearest chip shop and came back with all this fried food.

“It is incredibly hard to change your habits about anything, let alone something that has been entrenched since childhood. But a five-year-old is not responsible for what goes in mum’s trolley.”

She feels the charity has just scratched the surface and a change in policy is what is needed if things are to change.

“The first thing that needs to be tackled is the food industry, because they are behaving exactly as the tobacco industry did years ago, by saying it is not their problem.

“We live in a time where there is so much temptation around and if you are on a tight budget, it is not easy. I would put a tax on junk food and ring-fence it to subsidise the cost of fruit and vegetables but there is no quick-fix, overnight solution.”