As I double checked the children’s self-packed lunches, I confirmed they had indeed packed vegetables because the bowl seemed pretty full. The girls sheepishly opened theirs back up to add in carrots and tiny bell peppers. Then one of them said, “but mom, other kids make fun of my lunch.”
Sigh.
I knew it would happen. I didn’t get pushy about them packing the hummus they love because I knew it could create a bullseye for teasing. (Let’s be honest about the appearance of hummus.) Our quinoa salads don’t make the cut, and they rarely take vegetable soup as I believed they would as I purchased the thermoses. Our lunches are not exotic.
But they’re also not Doritos, a Moon Pie, a chocolate chip granola bar, and a piece of candy, like the girl sitting next to the eldest daughter. (Can I tell you how handy it is to have one parent who makes appearances in the lunch room? Bird’s eye view of their reality, right there. SO helpful.)
Here’s my conundrum: How do I talk to my kids about the importance of healthy eating without using mechanisms that essentially shame and put fear into those who don’t, especially when it’s not necessarily the child’s fault?
I can tell my kids about the huge rates of childhood obesity and those indicators for later disease in life. But do I want my kids to go to school and say, “well, you’ll get fat and loose a foot and die” to their friends? That would be an emphatic no to that rhetorical question. Allow me to create a laundry list of reasons why:
- I don’t want my kids or other kids scared of food, even tasty treats that don’t serve much of a nutritional purpose.
- We have enough eating-based patterns of disordered behavior in the world.
- Kids don’t need yet another reason why they’re not good enough.
- Much of this has to do with parents.
- I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt and assume that these parents are doing the best they know how, with the information provided, and the time and resources available to them.
- Perhaps other families make decisions based on rubrics unlike our own, and that is fine, too.
So, now how to deal with our situation. I confirmed to my kids, yet again, that mommy shops and prepares food the way she does only out of love, and not because she’s trying to make their life miserable. They know that, but sometimes it needs restated. That was the easy part.
The challenge lies in helping them understand immediate gratification and looking at life through the lens of the long haul, which is hard for adults and seemingly impossible for children. My youngest still only thinks in terms of “yesterday” as the past and “tomorrow” as the future. Their understanding of time is small and slow, so the idea that he will benefit as a 40-year-old man has very little impact on the 9-year-old boy.
I’ve embraced the question, do you want your gratification to be cheap, fast, or good? We can pick two at the most. My children will almost always pick fast. I will almost always pick good. Our society has created freeways toward the cheap and fast, making it an upstream swim toward goodness. And while I maintain there’s a place for cheap and fast, because I’ll lean on those as well, I will riot against the fact that it has become the default setting.
When other people choose cheap and fast, I understand. My life probably looks nothing like theirs. So how do we talk about these kinds of things – what we eat, how we dress, which activities we choose to participate in – without shame? I want to create space for children to make decisions about their lives that includes the answer “because it’s good.” It’s not cheap, it’s not fast (which can mean that I might not see its effects right away), but it is good.
I don’t want to shame people for making decisions that we don’t. But how do we help our kids grow into people who understand the long view that opting for goodness tends to take?
