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Fair Fritos, Cheetos and Coke: the parent trap
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The 5-year-old just wears you down. Her arguments are relentless. After a while, you just want to say, “Eat the damn Fritos,” but my daughter, to her credit, never does. And that’s because my granddaughter comes by her perseverance the old-fashioned way. Hearing her argue for 45 minutes for one more piece of ice cream cake brought me back to the days when her mother, my daughter, appeared before the Supreme Court of Mothers and argued for her own box of Cracker Jack.
I’ve heard so many people my age claim that we ate fried food and Twinkies and drank barrels of apple juice, and we’re all right. Except we aren’t. I look around, and many of my contemporaries have heart disease or diabetes or cancer.
Walk through a mall, or take an airplane flight or a cruise. You’ll see obese children and obese parents consuming gross portions of unhealthy food. Visit a food court and just observe what’s being consumed by people who can barely pull their chairs up to the table. It’s like a horror movie, with fat spreading over our belts and down our legs and into the vessels of our brains and hearts.
Obesity in adults is generally a self-inflicted problem, but obesity in children is often learned behavior.
Kids don’t ask to be born. Even when they can dress and feed themselves and go to school, they’re entirely dependent on their parents and other grownups to teach them what’s healthy. My daughter and son-in-law walk the talk by eating healthy themselves, buying organic and exercising regularly. They both work, and they have no household help. They do not own a TV. The children read for a half-hour every morning, and then are permitted a half-hour a day of “video time.”
Sounds too California to be true? It’s far from perfect. At times it’s a madhouse, because these kids aren’t particularly compliant, and it’s very hard to make the case for tossing out a Cheez Doodle because they might get heart disease when they’re 60. They wheedle and whine and generally behave like sugar-seeking missiles.
It’s easy to make rules. It’s very challenging to enforce them, day in and day out, when you’re tired and frustrated and juggling a million chores. Still, when you think about it, is there anything more important than raising healthy children?
I’ve heard so many people my age claim that we ate fried food and Twinkies and drank barrels of apple juice, and we’re all right. Except we aren’t. I look around, and many of my contemporaries have heart disease or diabetes or cancer.
Walk through a mall, or take an airplane flight or a cruise. You’ll see obese children and obese parents consuming gross portions of unhealthy food. Visit a food court and just observe what’s being consumed by people who can barely pull their chairs up to the table. It’s like a horror movie, with fat spreading over our belts and down our legs and into the vessels of our brains and hearts.
Obesity in adults is generally a self-inflicted problem, but obesity in children is often learned behavior.
Kids don’t ask to be born. Even when they can dress and feed themselves and go to school, they’re entirely dependent on their parents and other grownups to teach them what’s healthy. My daughter and son-in-law walk the talk by eating healthy themselves, buying organic and exercising regularly. They both work, and they have no household help. They do not own a TV. The children read for a half-hour every morning, and then are permitted a half-hour a day of “video time.”
Sounds too California to be true? It’s far from perfect. At times it’s a madhouse, because these kids aren’t particularly compliant, and it’s very hard to make the case for tossing out a Cheez Doodle because they might get heart disease when they’re 60. They wheedle and whine and generally behave like sugar-seeking missiles.
It’s easy to make rules. It’s very challenging to enforce them, day in and day out, when you’re tired and frustrated and juggling a million chores. Still, when you think about it, is there anything more important than raising healthy children?
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