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picky eaters
Jul. 22nd, 2012 01:45 pmI still remember - and still resent -- everyone who, knowing I had a picky eater, told me that her kids never tried that, because they knew she wouldn't put up with it. I understand how pleasant it is to make confident pronouncements of how well you would have solved a problem, if only it had come to you. I still think you're a jerk. Also, probably wrong.
I was a very obedient little girl, because my parents wouldn't have put up with anything else, and not a particularly picky eater, but some cooked vegetables smelled, to me, like sewage. When my parents decided that I would eat three bites of spinach anyway, I held my breath and swallowed the first bite. Then I took a breath. Smelling the spinach, and knowing that I had just swallowed some of that, made me put the spinach and the rest of my stomach contents back on my plate.
It was a valuable lesson in the use of passive aggression to resist tyranny.
I can teach obedience, you know. Two of my dogs came to me as adults with entrenched habits of running away. I taught them to come when they were called, even when they were offleash outside, even when there was something really interesting going on. I didn't teach my children to obey me because I chose not to.
And now they are sixteen and nineteen, and they make nutritional choices that are different from what I would choose for them -- one of them is vegan, and the other drinks whey protein when he goes to the gym in hopes of packing more muscle on his skinny frame -- but:
1.THEIR BODY. THEIR DECISION.
Also,
2. They're both reasonably healthy.
3. They talk to me about stuff, including food stuff and body stuff and health stuff, even when they know I don't agree with their decisions.
But those are secondary back-up reasons. I mention them because they're true, and relevant, but I don't want them to distract from the main reason, because even if 2 and 3 were not the case, 1 would be enough to make my choice RIGHT.
Here's the part where I am also a jerk.
About ten years ago -- so, when I had a six-year-old picky eater -- I was in a book group reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. One of the other women also had a six-year-old picky eater. We were discussing a scene in which the youngest son is punished for refusing to eat his dinner. I know that most people dislike my parenting style and I mostly don't talk about it, but each time someone tried to sum up that part of the discussion with, "Sometimes you just have to be the parent," I protested. You don't have to lean on your child to eat or not eat things. Respecting his decisions will not do him any long-term harm. You can offer (and I do mean offer -- you have to take no for an answer, or it's just more coercion) him good nutritional information, and your help finding nourishing foods he's willing to eat, even as you respect HIS BODY HIS DECISION. I was mostly quoting Ellyn Satter here, who is more authoritarian than I am, but she says:
It is the parent's responsibility to provide nutritious food.
It is the child's responsibility to choose what, whether, and how much to eat.
and she has degrees and research and many years' experience with many families to back her up.
But eventually I had to say why I thought it was worth trying to avoid coercing children about food. I said, well, none of you would make a child submit to an unwanted kiss, right? I think making a child eat something is wrong for the same reasons. It might even be more of a violation of bodily autonomy, since it involves accepting something into the body. I think it's equally harmful.
I think I seriously offended the other mother of a picky eater. Anyway, I had been going to that book group for eleven years, but that was when I stopped.
I was a very obedient little girl, because my parents wouldn't have put up with anything else, and not a particularly picky eater, but some cooked vegetables smelled, to me, like sewage. When my parents decided that I would eat three bites of spinach anyway, I held my breath and swallowed the first bite. Then I took a breath. Smelling the spinach, and knowing that I had just swallowed some of that, made me put the spinach and the rest of my stomach contents back on my plate.
It was a valuable lesson in the use of passive aggression to resist tyranny.
I can teach obedience, you know. Two of my dogs came to me as adults with entrenched habits of running away. I taught them to come when they were called, even when they were offleash outside, even when there was something really interesting going on. I didn't teach my children to obey me because I chose not to.
And now they are sixteen and nineteen, and they make nutritional choices that are different from what I would choose for them -- one of them is vegan, and the other drinks whey protein when he goes to the gym in hopes of packing more muscle on his skinny frame -- but:
1.THEIR BODY. THEIR DECISION.
Also,
2. They're both reasonably healthy.
3. They talk to me about stuff, including food stuff and body stuff and health stuff, even when they know I don't agree with their decisions.
But those are secondary back-up reasons. I mention them because they're true, and relevant, but I don't want them to distract from the main reason, because even if 2 and 3 were not the case, 1 would be enough to make my choice RIGHT.
Here's the part where I am also a jerk.
About ten years ago -- so, when I had a six-year-old picky eater -- I was in a book group reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. One of the other women also had a six-year-old picky eater. We were discussing a scene in which the youngest son is punished for refusing to eat his dinner. I know that most people dislike my parenting style and I mostly don't talk about it, but each time someone tried to sum up that part of the discussion with, "Sometimes you just have to be the parent," I protested. You don't have to lean on your child to eat or not eat things. Respecting his decisions will not do him any long-term harm. You can offer (and I do mean offer -- you have to take no for an answer, or it's just more coercion) him good nutritional information, and your help finding nourishing foods he's willing to eat, even as you respect HIS BODY HIS DECISION. I was mostly quoting Ellyn Satter here, who is more authoritarian than I am, but she says:
It is the parent's responsibility to provide nutritious food.
It is the child's responsibility to choose what, whether, and how much to eat.
and she has degrees and research and many years' experience with many families to back her up.
But eventually I had to say why I thought it was worth trying to avoid coercing children about food. I said, well, none of you would make a child submit to an unwanted kiss, right? I think making a child eat something is wrong for the same reasons. It might even be more of a violation of bodily autonomy, since it involves accepting something into the body. I think it's equally harmful.
I think I seriously offended the other mother of a picky eater. Anyway, I had been going to that book group for eleven years, but that was when I stopped.