A mom of three was left in tears after hearing her daughter’s response to an offer of candy.
Gwenna Laithland, 41, shared the moment in a post on Threads (@mommacusses) after offering her 7-year-old daughter an Oreo Reese’s Cup following lunch.
Her daughter declined. “I’m pretty full. Can I have it later?” she asked.
Laithland felt an overwhelming sense of triumph after battling years of body image and food insecurity.
“I’m crying,” she wrote in her post. “The candy can wait. She can listen to her body and delay gratification. I did it.”
Laithland, who is mom to an 18-year-old daughter and 7-year-old twins with husband Jackson, told Newsweek about her struggles with her weight.
“I’ve spent my life ‘bigger,’” she said, describing early puberty, years of dieting and a childhood shaped by food insecurity. Diet culture of the late 1990s and early 2000s compounded the issue, leaving her “a walking sack of self-doubt and body image issues.”
Determined not to pass that mindset to her children, she made a deliberate shift in how she spoke about her own body. Sometimes that meant “lying” in the moment.
When her children asked why she was fat, instead of voicing her internal criticism, she answered: “All bodies are different. Mine is bigger but it’s done cool things. Like make you.”
Laithland, who is also author of Thinky Thoughts: All Grown Up and Still Just as Confused, explained that the turning point came years earlier, after one of her children repeated a self-deprecating phrase she often used about herself. Hearing her own voice echoed back through her child was a shock.
“I had one job: do not mess up this little person’s head and six years in, I was teaching her to hate herself the way I was taught to hate myself,” Laithland said.
From then on, she began modeling the language she wanted her kids to internalize, even before she fully believed it. She framed food at home as morally neutral—some foods for the body, some for the brain, many for both.
To her, body positivity isn’t about resignation but care. “It’s loving yourself enough to take good care of the body you’ve got,” she said, noting that care looks different for different people.
At the time of writing, her Threads post has clocked up over 19,000 likes and shares.
In the comments, parents shared similar stories of trying to interrupt cycles of shame around food and weight.
“The first time my kids stopped eating ice cream halfway through and said ‘I’m full’ I almost cried,” one mom wrote.
“To watch that cycle break in real time is one of the biggest gifts we can give all of us,” another added.
Laithland acknowledged her daughter’s response as a quiet breakthrough in a generational cycle. She hopes these small victories are talked about more.
“We don’t celebrate our parenting wins enough,” she said. “The comments show that there are a lot of us who recognize our self-confidence is broken and we, like all parents, want better for our kids. This is the village we have left.”
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