Better your kids than mine, Mr. Moto. I still have nightmares about Gerber plums. 
Ok… I admit to feeding my kid chocolate on occasion. I don’t give him the whole bar, and he eats a pretty good diet on the whole. Sweets are treats, not the bulk of his diet. And, in fact, he’s more likely to get sweets during an outing or at school than at home. So cut that lady some slack, willya?
Robin
As a child, after doctor visits we were allowed a donut from the corner bakery. I always got one of the ones with ‘fruit’ (purple is a fruit!) and about 2 inches of that pure sugar frosting on top. Horrible for me I’m sure, but I always looked forward to them even when I was getting a shot. We ate well at home, it was when we were out that we were likely to be getting a treat, and also when people would see what we were eating.
Nobody eats perfectly 100% of the time.
The littering is just sheer laziness on her part, though.
Did you pick up the wrapper?
I don’t think young children have a lot of problems with heart disease brought on by cholesterol. That’s something you need to start worrying about in your 40s, maybe. Breast milk is loaded with saturated fat.
But it’s CaraMILK, so it must be good for you!
For anyone who’s interested, the fat content of Caramilk bars is 25.1g/100g according to this table. According to Cadbury Trebor Allan, the most popular size bar is 52g, so the child was getting about 13g of fat from the bar. The child was also getting almost 100g of calcium, about 12% of the RDA for a child, so it wasn’t completely empty calories.
That’s nothing. Back east I was working at a retail store doing photography to pick up some extra cash before we moved. During the holiday season, mind you. (Never again will I set foot in a mall during the holidays, but that’s another story)
One of my appointments had a two or three year old that was just bouncing off the walls and being an utter shit. The mother couldn’t understand why he was so hyper and cranky. She told me to hold on, and went to the waiting room “to get his bottle, maybe that’ll help”
She comes back, and instead of milk or something like that, the bottle is the color of antifreeze.
Yep, you guessed it, Mountain Dew. I asked her what it was, and she confirmed it, saying that he only calmed down after he’d had a bottle and ‘ran around to get it out of his system’ :rolleyes:
So basically, she’d jack her toddler up on a sugar high, and wait for him to crash to get some peace and quiet. About as sure a recipe for diabetes as I’ve ever heard.
Some people just suck.
You can’t judge them without knowing more about the child’s diet and health. I;m sure you would have been horrified by the diet we were supposed to give my younger stepdaughter when she was underweight-- ice cream, sweets, cover everything with gravy or cheese sauce, etc. The doctor would have been fine with a candy bar-- whatever she would eat that would put some weight on her. (Of course, the problem was not so much that she wouldn’t eat as that when she was at her mother’s house, her mother couldn’t be bothered to stop watching Jerry Springer long enough to fix her anything to eat. Her mother claimed that she just wouldn’t eat. I discovered the arcane secret of getting her to eat-- put food in front of her.)
It wasn’t just the sugar - that stuff is loaded with caffeine.
Understandable. When my mom worked at Children’s Aid, there were some parents who were pissed because a judge had “sentenced them” to take nutrition classes. Their kids were obese to the point where they were at extremely high risk for diabetes and other complications.
The problem wasn’t what they were serving the kids, but rather that they were giving the toddlers adult portions with the threat of “you can’t leave the table until you’ve cleaned your plate.”
Was it a fat kid? If not, I wouldn’t worry about it. He may never have had it before and it might be two years before he has it again. Not every piece of food that goes into a kid has to be virtuous. I don’t know if I would have chosen something so messy though.
You know, when I grew up, I got all the candy I wanted. Sometimes, to get me to shut up, my mom would send me off to the corner store to buy candy and sodas. I got to keep my halloween candy in my room and finish it as I pleased…perhaps while watching my in-room television. Eating chips for lunch wasn’t that big a deal and the kool-aid flowed freely. Heck, even when we ate “meals” it was often cheese slices on white bread.
I’m now a skinny whole-foods vegetarian who hates sweets and doesn’t even own a television. Really…somebody making parenting choices that you wouldn’t have made isn’t the end of the world. Kids arn’t delicate vases or carefully controlled science experiements. While I respect the parents that raise their kids “doing everything right”, not following every demand from the parenting magazines isn’t child abuse.
I remember reading a story about a mother who carefully controlled everything her children ate, including the exact size of the portions, right down to how many ounces of orange juice they were allowed to drink in the morning. Now that’s child-abuse.
I’m not familiar with that candy, but if it *really * has caramel in it, I’d be more upset about that than the chocolate. Caramel is really, really, sticky and a child can easily choke on it. I know. My mother-in-law, against my repeated orders not to do so, gave my first baby a caramel when I wasn’t looking. The child (less than 2 years old at the time) was turning a serious shade of blue before my husband managed to retrieve the gooey thing out of her throat. She was still white as a sheet hours later. Needless to say I gave MIL a good sound verbal thrashing, and accused her of being a murderess.
MLS, Caramilk bars don’t contain anything like actual caramel. They’re milk chocolate ingot-things with a sort of caramel-coloured cream/syrup in the center of each square.
The filling is so ridiculously sweet that if I described it in much detail you’d probably succumb to acute pancreatic failure just reading about it.
Mr. Moto and others. It’s not the fat per se that’s bad. As you point out, kid brains don’t grow/operate well without it. Rather it’s the TYPE of fat you want to look out for. They may appear healthy now, but if the diet is otherwise lacking, kiddo could have trouble later on. COULD. Nutrition has about a zillion variables, genetic & environmental & behavioral. Still, a whole candy bar to a toddler? Not something I’d do, if only because it robs you of the bribery factor for when you really need it.
Chocolate is toxic to small mammals in human sized doses. How much does it take to kill a child? Anyone? At the very least, woman should be slapped around for littering. With carelessness like that my money says the kid grows up to be a non-Straight-Dope-member at best.
Sorry to hijack…but EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW… isn’t that just toasted fat on bread?
Sorry, but none of you know enough about the situation to rip the woman a new excretory orifice. Or condemn her.
My daughter has been under the care of a health team consisting of a pediatric nutritionist, gastro-enterologist, pulmonologist and endocrinologist since age 2. Their advice: Make sure she eats as much high fat, high salt, high calorie food as possible, whenever she wants. Yet from the outside she appears a perfectly normal, healthy child. We experienced lots of glares when we took her out and salted her food, gave her iced cream, fried cheese curds, etc.
So those of you ripping on her for being a horrible mother: Unless you have intimate knowledge of her child’s medical history, Fuck off!.
QtM, MD
Except for the part about her littering. Carry on with that.
You’ve never had white pizza? A properly made white pizza isn’t disgusting at all, it’s heavenly. It’s no more than garlic bread with cheese, really.
Yes. And it’s marvelous, but in moderation. This last bit is the part that we Americans seem to have the most trouble with.