The Bad Mother

Don’t get me wrong – if your kid eats nothing but pasta-pesto for years on end, I doubt anything bad will happen, but it’s flipping boring for all concerned.

Having said that, children will eventually just eat whatever they come across most often. Both my children eat toast with quite bitter marmalade because that’s what we eat, and if you look the other way for a few seconds, Kitty will drain your coffee. Because coffee is what is lying about the house, that’s what she drinks.

Giles used to make Kitty a beef stew when she was old enough to chew. He would cook batches of it on the weekend and freeze it in little pots. He stopped cooking it for her when she was about eighteen months old – I can’t remember why – and she hadn’t had it for a good year or so when I presented it to her again at dinner time. She sat down and ate it without saying, ‘What’s this?’ or poking it about, as she would with most new things. She knew what it was, remembering it somehow with a deep and animalistic part of her brain, and knew it was okay to eat.

Another thing that pretty much all children will do is become crazed sugar addicts. My view on this is that sugar is just a fact and it is part of a varied diet. My husband’s view is that refined sugar – cakes, biscuits, sweeties, chocolate – is completely pointless, and your diet, health, teeth, digestion – everything! – would be better without it.

I find it hard to construct an argument against this. He is right! It’s simply that I love sugar and my husband doesn’t. I just love, love, love a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive. I love a cheeky slice of cake. I love a fridge-cold Kit-Kat. And my challenge is to eat sugar in moderation, which is very hard.

The world is full of sugar – cheap and intoxicating. I have had to learn how to consume it in sensible quantities, by being exposed to it and adjusting my intake. I feel the same way about Kitty. She probably has, daily, a couple of chocolate biscuits of one sort or another – one or two with her lunch and one after her dinner. Occasionally she has an ice-cream for pudding. When she calls for a biscuit she is usually just hungry, so I always offer toast, cheese, apple, raisins, a banana – anything! – as an alternative, which she usually takes.

So on the days when she eats fourteen Kit-Kats in a row, or a piece of cake the size of her head, or an entire bag of Haribo or three Chupa Chups, it doesn’t matter.

When I was pregnant with Sam and living in a sort of twilight hell of nausea and exhaustion, my childcare of Kitty consisted of her watching television and me passing her chocolate biscuits. For six months that’s what we did. Seriously. No-one believes me when I say Kitty watched TV for six months solid, but she did.

For lunch she had pesto pasta and for dinner she had chicken nuggets and chips. We were mired in an appalling diet. As soon as Sam was born and I had my wits about me again, I worked at turning things around. I could get off the sofa, and I could make different things for Kitty’s tea without having to lie down on the kitchen floor every thirty-eight seconds. I had the strength to say no to repeated requests for chocolate. (We also cut down on the telly, though Kitty had ended up watching so much that she’s subsequently become self-regulating. She will often say, ‘I’ve had enough telly now,’ switch it off and go and do something else. I don’t mean to sound smug about this – this result wasn’t achieved without letting her watch a probably damaging amount of TV, but that’s aversion therapy for you … cruel to be kind.)

My point is that you can always bring it back from the brink; it’s easier than it seems. You can get trapped in a white-carb-and-telly tailspin, no matter how bloody posh and cultured you think you are, but if you want to, you can claw your way out, one day at a time.

The trick to turning a bad diet around is to cut down on the junk slowly and replace it with something else. Rather than saying, ‘No, you can’t have a biscuit,’ say, ‘I haven’t got any biscuits, but I’ve got raisins/rice crackers.’ It helps if you get rid of all the junk in your house. It makes it easier not to cave in.

And if you don’t want to, if you’re not bothered that your kids watch telly all the time and eat nothing but chips, then fuck it. They’re your kids. They’ll probably end up Prime Minister.

But there’s one thing that it is very hard to turn around, and that is the problem of eating at other people’s houses.

In my experience, children under five years and often older really, really don’t like doing this, unless it is a house they know very well and have eaten there before. I’ve decided, based on no scientific evidence at all, that children have acute senses of smell and taste and while someone else’s house might smell to us anodyne and harmless, to a small child the smell of someone else’s house is overpowering and bizarre. They might as well be on another planet. (It’s why kids bloody love McDonald's. It’s always the same.)