Food and the Unintended Consequences of Parenting

When Sam was a toddler, someone told us that the way to cure bad behavior was to put a drop of Tabasco on his tongue. But just at the moment Ralph finally decided to reach for the small bottle with the kick-ass contents, he decided there must be a better way to teach baby Sam a lesson than to mess with his taste buds. He closed the kitchen cabinet, forever leaving Tabasco as a condiment for raw oysters rather than a form of corporal punishment.  

I was thinking about that incident yesterday when I read a story in the New York Times about well-meaning parents who have passed on their obsession with health food to the detriment of their kids. Without meaning to, they have doused the equivalent of Tabasco all over what their children eat:

"We're seeing a lot of anxiety in these kids," said Cynthia Bulik, the director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They go to birthday parties, and if it's not a granola cake they feel like they can't eat it. The culture has led both them and their parents to take the public health messages to an extreme." 

The piece goes on:

 "Lisa Dorfman, a registered dietician . . .  says that she often sees children who are terrified of foods that are deemed 'bad' by their parents. "It's almost a fear of dying, a fear of illness, like a delusional view of foods in general," she said. "I see kids whose parents have hypnotized them. I have 5-year-olds that speak like 40-year-olds. They can't eat an Oreo cookie without being concerned about trans fats." 

Like most things having to do with parenting, the lessons you teach about food are not as straightforward as you'd wish. Even though there seems to be considerable distance between obesity and eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, we're just talking about a difference of pounds in terms of the trouble they bring. One doctor has coined the name "orthorexia" for people obsessed with health-conscious eating, the Times says. What we're trying to do, of course, is lay down patterns that will serve our kids well as they grow up and make their own decisions. But how? In terms of sweets, we swing between operating a Hitler youth camp and Candy Land.

In our house, food is not just what we eat, it's what we do. In first grade this year, when he was asked to write his autobiography, "What activity does your family enjoy together," saying, "We cook." As much as it slows dinner prep down, Sam and Julia snap beans (Julia often throws away the beans and puts the snapped ends in the bowl) and cut vegetables with a dull, ivory-handled fish knife. Each time Ralph picks Sam up from school, his first question is always, "Who's coming for dinner?" (When I pick him up, he asks, "Where are we going for dinner?")

It occurred to me in thinking about all this that maybe putting food in the context of family meals rather than talking about the sugar content in a box of Puffins, say, is the way to go. The people I know who have raised successful children put great stock in the family dinner as if some alchemy happens when you sit around a table together. And certainly in my own experience growing up, the profound lessons of my childhood were delivered not from a podium but from behind a place mat. Now that my father is on a feeding tube, those kitchen table lessons seem all the more poignant to me.

Only time will tell whether the right lessons take with Sam and Julia. When I was young, my parents forbade us from going to McDonald's and listening to the Beatles (Burger King and "Winchester Cathedral" were their fast-food and music of choice.) 

All of parenting seems arbitrary, fraught with unintended consequences. My parents were prescient about McDonald's (though not Burger King). As for the Beatles, well, maybe we'll learn one day that they're hazardous to your health.