Health
| Raising healthy eaters |
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Page 2 of 2 Of course it is easier to start how you mean to continue, and the biggest challenge is to change horses mid-stream when you have already got an extremely rebellious teenager on your hands. As many parents know, coercion and intimidation are counter-productive. It can be difficult to suddenly switch to asking them what they truly want for themselves and in what ways, if any, you can support them to make the changes they want. The best start with an infant is not to introduce manufactured foods – especially anything containing sugar – on a daily basis. At least while you have more say over what they eat, and before they can go out and buy their own snacks. Make sugar a rare treat, just for birthdays, for example. I will come clean and admit that I have not raised any children of my own, but parents who didn’t introduce sugar early on tell me that their kids didn’t miss what they didn’t know about. Sugar is highly addictive. Our culture tends to see it as benign, even healthy. But, you know, whole cultures can be wrong about things! Most people don’t get their youngsters hooked on cigarettes, caffeine or alcohol, and it is wise to regard sugar with the same caution. Once children get into sugar, because of its addictive nature, they will tend to prefer it to real food. It has a massive effect on little bodies and brains, so they can get hooked very easily. Some people become confused about this, thinking ‘sugar deprivation’ amounts to being authoritarian. Perhaps you can simply not buy it and bring it into the house while they are young enough. As the parent your role is to provide guidance – you wouldn’t hand them a box of matches to see if they will burn the house down, would you? You create safe boundaries and then support them to make choices within those boundaries. How this is done depends on the child’s age. For very young children a star system works well: stars can be placed on a chart when their veggies are eaten, adding up to a new toy, for example. Then, as children get older, they can choose between two or three kinds of vegetables available. Perhaps you could suggest that they save up their pocket money to spend on music or clothing instead of daily sweets. Promote the very enticing benefits of a sugar-free diet: fewer nightmares and emotional meltdowns for little ones, less acne for teenagers, plus better academic and sport performance for both. Anything you can do to get your children to choose anything for themselves will be invaluable, especially when the consequences of their choices can be acknowledged – lovingly, firmly and fairly consistently. There is a common myth in our culture that can get in the way of supporting healthy eating in children. This is the notion that, if left alone, children’s bodies will naturally cause them to want the food they really need. So they might eat some sugary stuff for a while but eventually return to the vegetables and fruit that meet their nutritional needs. There is a great deal of research that strongly suggests this does not, in fact, happen. Our bodies evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago and had no need to distinguish between real food and manufactured rubbish until relatively recently. For the same reason, giant sea turtles can’t tell the difference between jellyfish and plastic bags. So they eat plastic bags and often die as a result. This is not so far away from what is going on with a great many humans and their food in the Western world these days. What could save us is our very human, decision-making prefrontal cortex... If only we know how to use it. Dean’s top 10 tips to keep children fit: |
