I was in the grocery store today. Ahead of me were a couple of women talking as they shopped. They were obviously either family or close friends. One woman was picking up assorted junk food as she went along. They had with them a little girl who was perhaps four.
The one, obviously the mother, pointed to the junk food and shrugged, while commenting to the other woman that it was all the little girl would eat. That she wouldn't eat healthy food.
I was stunned. Who exactly is the mother and who is the child in this relationship? It's the mother's duty to ensure that the child eats a heathy diet, and the child has absolutely nothing whatever to say about it. When did we move from adults as parents to kids as boss?
When I was raising my two, they had two choices at meal time. Take it or leave it. If they chose to leave it then they obviously were not sufficiently hungry in the first place. There were no snacks between meals if you had not eaten the original meal. At the next meal you were given the same two choices. No child is going to go hungry for long. They quickly learn when the adult they are facing off against cannot be manipulated.
In our house junk of any sort was a treat for weekends, and not every weekend. There was always plenty of healthy stuff if you got hungry. Sodas were special treats for very special occasions. As a result, my kids grew up having tried almost anything under the sun. Some they liked and some they didn't. I always made sure that if I was offering a new food, there was also plenty of other things for them to eat if, after they tried the new one, they decided they didn't like it.
As adults my kids love salads, vegetables, and trying new recipes. They literally eat almost anything. They are adventurous and if they've never tried something they don't say "ewwwww, I don't like that," they consent to take a bite and see if they like it or not.
Looking back on those women and the little girl in the store, I can see where the problem with kids getting fat and existing on poor diets originates. It originates with parents who are either too ignorant or too weak to actually be parents, and who find it easier to give into a kid's whining than to keep the child's best interest at heart and insist that they eat a healthy balanced diet with junk as a treat. And they will pay for it in the future as the child gets more and more out of control of themselves and more and more in control of the home. It's sad. No wonder kids seem to act so stupid in many cases. There's nobody at the helm to steer them in the right direction.
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2 comments:
While blaming the parents for a child's "picky eating" (which in this case, I agree completely), I don't entirely agree with what appears to be your premise that childhood obesity comes only from poor parenting.
Like you, my parents insisted that we "try" everything - and eat some that we didn't like anyhow! (lima beans and liver come to mind...)
We weren't given carte blanche in the fridge, and we didn't have "garbage" to snack on, but there is photographic evidence that 2 kids with the same diet were VERY differently "shaped".
Genetics DOES play a part.
I do not disagree with you at all here. My point was rather that this is one of the reasons for the rising epidemic of heavy kids. In the past, heavy, very thin, normal all sort of were laid out on a bell curve. This was "normal" for our society.
Today, however, the numbers of kids who sit on their butts watching TV while eating garbage has increased at almost exactly the same weight as the increase in overweight kids.
Nothing will change for those kids who are designed by nature to be heavy. However, normal weight kids who do this get fat. My point was more that this indulgent, parenting free way of raising children relies much too heavily on the child to restrain him/herself and kids are like water, they take the path of least resistance.
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