We have an obesity epidemic in this country. And many of those people are kids. Our portion sizes are huge and are often high in fat. Yet many parents are super concerned about their children getting enough food.
I see parents deny their children even a small piece of candy, fearing it will “ruin” dinner. Many parents make their kids eat everything on their plate, and oftentimes the plates are HUGE. Growing up, I had a few friends who weren’t even allowed to drink anything with their meals, to make sure they get all the food down first.
Most American meals aren’t that healthy, so what’s the big deal if they don’t scarf down enormous amounts of foods. Yeah, I know kids need food for healthy growing bodies, but kids usually have good appetites, so that takes care of itself. Why push them further?
For example, take my 7 yr old granddaughter. She is a very picky eater. Hardly any meat will pass her lips. The only green veggie she will tolerate is an iceberg and tomato salad, with ranch. The tomato is good, but iceberg lettuce has very little nutrition. She loves bread, of course. Crackers, cereal, chips are ok. Doesn’t like to drink milk.
If it’s sugary or starchy she’ll eat it. It’s hard to get her to eat very much when she does eat! She eats a lot of peanut butter and jelly, and she will eat apple slices with it. But she doesn’t finish it.
Her doctor wants her to eat more, because she is underweight. I’m sure in a few years when she’s a teenager her appetite will grow. But it’s frustrating!
Diet affects children more than at any other time in their lives. How they eat now will affect how they grow, and how healthy they are, later. It matters BIG time, so no wonder parents are concerned. They should be! Empty calories do nothing, and a lot of food IS empty calories. There’s absolutely no guarantee that kids will take their structured eating habits into adulthood, lord knows I didn’t, but garbage in = garbage out, and it’s super-important as a kid. And it’s the parents’ job to take care of that need, no matter how ‘mean’ it seems to them or anybody else.
I don’t know Munch. I am an American parent and I think Diamonds is right for once. I never let people force-feed my kids but it is a temptation for lots of adults. Have you ever heard of the “clean plate” rule? Kids have to finish everything on their plate before they can leave the table. That is fairly common. Sometimes it is a more sensible variation like tasting everything rather than finishing it.
I think some of it is a holdover from the Depression era when food really was scarce in places and never to be wasted. Kids often don’t regulate their food intake well or think ahead much so adults instituted some Draconian rules to keep them from starving later in the day. There is no food shortage now but the rules still persist.
I always tell other adults that my kids may be picky sometimes but I will be the first to take them to the emergency room if they ever manage to truly starve themselves. I am not counting on having to do that. The opposite is a bigger threat if they are force-fed rather than learning to regulate their intake on their own.
Good nutrition is one thing but many adults focus on the volume of food kids eat rather than the nutritional profile. Often, the meals they are making their kids eat aren’t healthy either.
I’ve known a lot of kids who will only eat from the beige group: Fries and chicken strips and things that look and taste like them. This is a concern for parents. Not that their kids aren’t eating food but that they are only interested in eating foods that should be eaten in moderation. There isn’t much problem getting kids to eat if you put bowls of candy and french fries in front of them all the time. Or so I hear.
Let me preface this reply with a couple of statements:
My kids get plenty of excercise and eat healthily. They both get several servings of fruit and veggies everyday and treats such as candyy, chocolate and pop are rare.
They get plenty of excercise and are not overweight
That said, a kid who hasn’t eaten enough is a real pain in the ass. My kids get moody and short-tempered when hungry. I don’t understand how you first say that kids never get treats and then say they eat way too much. Isn’t that contradictory?
Also, my circle of friends all make their children eat well. And when their plate is full of a healthy amount of a healthy food, they should be finishing. For example, a dinner may consist of chicken, corn and rice. My children would have to eat their chicken and corn, but can leave the rice if they’re full as rice is the least healthy food (no fried chicken in our house). That seems reasonable to me.
And if carrots/corn/peas/whatever are not eaten they clearly are not hungry enough for ice cream/treat so no dessert. Again, this is common in my circle of friends and seems perfectly reasonable.
Now, if you want to generalize and say eating too much bad food is an epidemic in the USA, maybe you’re right, but in my experience that isn’t true.
If they don’t eat enough, the parents have to deal with hungry, whiny kids later. The parents have to prepare and clean up a snack. The parents have to wonder if the kid ate enough to sleep through the night, or to sleep sufficiently late the next morning so that the parents can get some coffee in them before it’s go time again.
These words are coming from the parent of a skinny toddler. I hope that by the time she’s five or six she’ll have more sense, but right now, I worry about all these things.
Sometimes I think they are playing me. One night my 11 YO son will wolf down an adult-size cheeseburger with bacon and BBQ sauce and fries. The next night when confronted with grilled salmon, rice and broccoli, he is suddenly not hungry. But then an hour later after dinner is all cleaned up and put away, he is in the kitchen looking for food. It’s BS I tells ya!
THAT’s why I make them at least taste everything on the plate and use it as a teaching opportunity as to what is healthy and what is not. I am not obsessed with their eating or cleaning the plate (bad rule), but they need to learn how to eat well.
Another thing to consider is that it’s important to instill healthy eating habits at a young age, and that kids always try to push boundaries.
If you see a parent denying a child a single jelly bean, do you know how many sweets that kid has asked for so far that day? Might be a lot. And it’s much much easier to stick to a rule that you eat a healthy meal, and then after it’s over, you get a small sweet treat. And that’s the only time you get a sweet treat.
Since you mention obesity being a problem, it seems weird that you then think that parents are too strict by denying candy to their children. Eating all the broccoli on their plates isn’t going to make kids fat. Getting candy and junk food whenever they want it is. I don’t know how other parents do it, but I never had to clean my plate. If I didn’t eat everything that was served, I didn’t get dessert, and I didn’t get to have seconds of my favorite foods until I ate my veggies. But that’s not about forcing too much food. It’s about making sure you get a balanced meal. Clearly, if you weren’t hungry enough to eat your broccoli, then you don’t need any dessert. If I left something on my plate, it just meant I was done eating for the night. If I got hungry later, my leftovers could be reheated.
Hopefully you instill an appreciation for wholesome food that will last once the kid is old enough to start making more of their own food choices.
Another problem is that parents overestimate how much their children should eat. The standard guidelines for a child’s serving of vegetables is only a tablespoon for every year of age. I’m sure there were many unwilling members of the Clean Plate Club who were required to eat far more nasty peas than was necessary.
Er… you know that if a child has any family member who was even born during the Depression, that person is in their mid-80s, right? Any many people raised by food-forcing parents feel incredibly strongly in the other direction? Again, maybe it’s my circle of highly educated late-baby-having moms, but I don’t know anyone in my generation OR my mother’s generation who believes in “clean your plate.” Every parent I know thinks forcing food is insane.
My mom once threw down over the issue at a thanksgiving dinner where my grandma was pressuring my cousin to eat more (To be clear, she wanted him to eat more volume – he had already eaten a wide variety of items, just a little of each, making up a totally reasonable meal for an 8-year-old).
For many adults, it’s a holdover from their childhood. They were forced to clean their plates as children (and they turned out great, dammit, so there was nothing wrong with it… :rolleyes:). So naturally, they believe it’s normal to make their own kids do the same.
For some, it’s a straight-up control issue. My mom enjoyed engaging in power plays over the dinner table, just like she did everywhere else. I remember getting gold stars every day in kindergarten, because I always ate my spinach, brussels sprouts, and carrots. I was a very good kid, and generally ate anything put on my plate with gusto. Except for pinto beans, my nemesis. And for a while, my mom would make a huge pot of pinto beans at least once a month (boiled, skins bursting, grainy, with greasy bits of floating bacon in the bowl–just thinking about it makes me urpy). At first I tried to force them down, but I couldn’t learn to like them. This eventually culminated in a spectacularly vomitous scene. After that, I refused to eat them no matter how hungry I was. And she refused to let me leave the table without eating them. I remember, on more than one occasion, sitting in the dark kitchen crying quietly with my head on the table next to a bowl of stone-cold beans, while the rest of my family watched tv and laughed in the other room.
Eventually, I learned how to talk back (also that I could run faster than she could). No more pinto beans for me.
I can’t speak for all parents, but for me and our friends with kids, we know that if left to their own devices, kids will eat whatever they want. But that might mean Goldfish crackers and lollypops until they’re full. By requiring them to eat a certain minimum amount of everything they’re served, we’re instilling healthy eating practices that hopefully will stay with them when they grow up.
My daughter loves milk. LOVES it. She likes plain milk better than any other drink, including chocolate milk. Great, right? Yes, except for those nights when she guzzles her entire glass as soon as she sits at the table, then ten minutes later has a stomache ache and is too full to eat anything. Kids need guidance with all things, and eating is just one more thing.
We require them to eat certain things (at least some of the [protein], at least some of the [grains], at least some of the vegetable, etc) before they have another biscuit, or whatever. When they say they’re done, we generally check to see that they’ve eaten enough volume, and enough of each food group they were served, so they’re not complaining in an hour that they’re hungry.