The number of Americans on GLP-1s – a class of weight-loss and diabetes medications sold under brand names including Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound – has soared in recent years; 11% of adults in the US reported that they were taking the medication, up from 3% in 2024, according to a Gallup poll this summer. This means that millions of people are navigating a transformative new medication within the context of parenthood – figuring out if, or how, to talk to inquisitive children who might notice a box of syringes in the fridge, a smaller serving on a plate or a parent’s changing body size. The pervasiveness of these drugs raises new questions about how to approach complicated topics like health, nutrition and body image with children who are witnessing the wide-ranging effects of GLP-1s – both within their families and in the culture at large.
Add to this that the parents facing those questions – Generation X and millennial parents in particular – span a vast gulf between the norms that defined their own 1980s and 90s-era childhoods, and the ones that now shape mainstream parenting guidance surrounding “diet culture” messaging. They might have once tagged along to Weight Watchers meetings or Jenny Craig check-ins with their mums, and thought nothing of pantries stocked with diet foods – but over the ensuing decades, a robust body of research has shown just how harmful weight-focused talk and dieting behaviour can be for children, and many leading experts and influencers promote messages of body positivity and intuitive eating. Parents on GLP-1s are left balancing all of this: the outdated baggage, the modern guidelines and a groundbreaking weight-loss medication.
For Leah, a mum of three in Maryland who spoke on the condition that she be identified by only her first name to protect her medical privacy, it felt right to broach the topic with her fifth- and sixth-grade boys soon after she started taking a GLP-1 medication a couple of months ago. “My sons are very curious,” she says. “They always have their nose in the refrigerator, and I knew they would be wondering, ‘What is this?’”
Her oldest wasn’t particularly interested, she said, while her younger son focused mostly on the syringes; he has also taken medication via injection, so he sat with her to offer support during her first weekly shots. When Leah explained why she was taking the medication, she described her recent diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnoea, she says. She avoided talking about her weight specifically – she didn’t want that to be on her children’s minds.
It is on hers, though. Since starting the medication weeks ago, Leah weighs herself daily, out of sight of her children. “I’m just very conscious about body image, and whatever struggles I have, I do not want to pass that on, especially to my daughter specifically,” she says, referring to her youngest child, a preschooler. “That’s the one piece I try to keep private. I don’t want to send any subliminal messages.”
For parents who want to control their own narrative around GLP-1s, there is the particular challenge of American culture’s deeply ingrained glorification of thinness – and the omnipresence of weight-loss drugs, as well as their marketing campaigns, only intensifies the focus on body image.
On a recent family trip to New York City, Jennifer Anderson – a registered dietitian, author of Feed Them Well: A Guide to Raising Healthy, Confident Eaters for Life and the founder of the online nutrition-focused parenting resource Kids Eat in Color – turned around in Penn Station and noticed her adolescent son transfixed by a massive advertisement for GLP-1 treatments, featuring a larger-than-life image of former basketball star Charles Barkley with a syringe stuck in his arm. The text of the ad had a down-pointing arrow beside the words “45lbs”.
It wasn’t the first time her children had seen advertising for a GLP-1 drug, she says. “I am getting direct mail through my mail slot with pictures of people … and it’s very clearly about weight,” she says. “As adults, we can think, ‘Oh, I have high cholesterol, I have prediabetes, I am doing this because this might improve my life or extend my life’ – there are so many reasons an adult might do this as part of their medical care. And yet the advertising and the allure to anybody in the United States is, ‘You can be thinner, because thinner is better.’”
Those messages make an impression on everyone, including the youngest audiences, Anderson says. “So while I would love for us to not have to talk about weight with kids – and I recommend parents avoid talking about their weight with kids – I am afraid that it’s going to have to come up more and more because of this.”
These discussions should be approached very carefully, she says, keeping in mind that parents (and particularly mothers) who talk about weight or diets are a risk factor for girls developing disordered eating behaviour.
“If at all possible, don’t talk about your body in terms of weight, or weight loss, or saying anything derogatory about your body,” Anderson says. “You could say, ‘I’m taking a new medicine for my diabetes, and it’s going to help me.’ That’s all you have to say. You don’t have to talk about how your body might change shape or not.” (We don’t typically do this for other medications, she points out; most parents wouldn’t alert their kid about a new antidepressant that might cause weight gain.) This assumes that a parent isn’t taking a GLP-1 purely for aesthetic reasons. But if they are – if a smaller body is the primary goal – then it’s even more critical that parents not talk about this with their children, Anderson says, “Because that really is perpetuating the thin ideal of diet culture.”
Anderson suggests that parents let children guide the conversation. Some children might not pick up on any effects of the medication at all. Others might ask questions if their parents eat new or different foods. And if a child comments on a parent’s changing body size, Anderson says, it’s best to respond with neutral language. “We can describe our bodies factually,” she says. “We can say, ‘Oh, my body did change. Sometimes bodies get smaller, sometimes bodies get bigger, our bodies are meant to change size over time.’”
Ellyn Satter, author of Child of Mine: Nurturing a Confident and Joyful Eater and a prominent authority on feeding children, echoes this guidance. “You’re trying not to imply that weight loss is a good thing,” she says. A child might internalise that message, and “we need to accept children’s bodies the way they are”.
A parent’s medication might impact a parent’s appetite or food choices to some degree, Satter says, but that isn’t necessarily a concern so long as this doesn’t affect the way a child is fed (in her widely cited framework, Satter’s Division of Responsibility in feeding, she notes that a child should be entirely in charge of whether to eat, and how much food they eat – and that shouldn’t change). A family should continue offering all kinds of foods in their meal planning, and avoid imposing a “diet mentality,” she says.
She even sees a potential upside: Because GLP-1s are known to quiet “food noise” – a constant or even intrusive preoccupation with food – parents who take the medication might find themselves better able to follow their body’s natural hunger cues, Satter says, which is exactly what their children should be doing, too.
“Always bring the conversation back to ‘how hungry I am’ and ‘how full I am.’ Approach it in a way that focuses on listening to those internal regulators of hunger, appetite and satiety,” she says. “If [parents] can come out of this with more positive eating attitudes and behaviours than they had going into it, and if they feed themselves faithfully and give themselves permission to eat, then that’s a perfect parallel to what they’re doing with their kids.”
This is how Lindsay Maggio thinks about eating around her children. Maggio, a physician who specialises in obesity medicine and a self-described single mum by choice, started taking a GLP-1 medication five years ago. “It’s always been on my mind as a parent – how do we approach food with kids in a way that’s different from how it was done with us in the ’80s and ’90s?” she says. “I was always concerned, because I definitely was eating less.” Maggio didn’t talk to her kids about the medication at first – they were only 2 and 4 years old – but when they occasionally picked up on her shifting eating patterns, she pointed towards the same intuitive, internal cues that she wanted them to follow: “If they ever questioned, ‘Mummy, why aren’t you eating dinner tonight,’ I’d say, ‘Well, it’s better to eat when you feel hungry,’” she says.
Within the first two years on the medication, she lost over 45kg. “It totally changed my life,” she says. Her kids are 7 and 9 now, and they have commented occasionally on how different she looks when they scroll through years-old photos on her phone – but her appearance isn’t the most significant change they’ve noticed. “I’ve run three marathons in the past couple of years,” she says. Her transformation isn’t about what her body looks like, she says: “It’s about what my body can do.”
Leah is still getting used to taking the GLP-1, but she already feels like it’s improving her relationship with food. It used to be that when their family sat down together for a movie night, “we’d pull out all the snacks, and even if I wasn’t interested, I would have everything,” she says. That compulsion has vanished. The same array of treats is offered, and she indulges when she wants to – but only when she wants to. “Being able to model healthier decision-making around my kids has been really helpful,” she says.
Moreno-Hunt’s children have noticed a similar shift in her behaviour – that she doesn’t reflexively eat something just because it’s there. “I think that’s helped them in learning to listen to their own bodies – are they hungry or not hungry?” she says.
Still, she remains sharply attuned to the ways that her family’s experience with GLP-1s might be shaping her teenage children, she says. About a year ago, Moreno-Hunt and her husband noticed that their teen daughter had made some noticeable changes to her eating and exercising habits – focusing on training for sports, cutting back on carbs, eating more protein.
They talked about it as a family, and with their daughter’s paediatrician, and their initial concerns have calmed; their daughter is a healthy eater and a strong athlete, Moreno-Hunt says. She doesn’t take this for granted. “All of our kids have friends who have eating disorders, especially in sports with teen girls,” Moreno-Hunt says. With the many influences shaping her children’s understanding of health and weight and body image – inside and outside their home – “we keep a very close eye on it,” she says, “and we keep talking about it.”
