The Food Our Children Eat: How to Get Children to Like Good Food

The ‘concerned and worried but’ parent

‘I’m worried that the kids eat such a limited and unhealthy diet but I let them get into bad habits years ago and now they are a lost cause.’

It’s true that it is harder to wean children on to good eating habits when they already have bad ones but it is perfectly possible. All the strategies mentioned in Part Two, Breaking the Mould at Home, can work with older children provided they are introduced gradually. Pages 61–6, Getting the Message Across, suggest tactics (bad-mouthing junk, cashing in on concern over appearance) that work, especially with older children.

‘I am relying on childcarers to feed my child on weekdays. It’s hard to control what the children eat.’

This is not an insurmountable problem. Read What You Can Expect from Childcarers, pages 169–75.

‘I’d like the children to eat better but when I try, I find it hard to keep it up.’

Like anything else you really want to do, encouraging children to have good, wide-ranging eating habits does require some staying power and commitment. Parts Two and Three outline various ways to overcome common pitfalls and hurdles.

‘Even if my children eat well at home, I meet a brick wall at school/nursery where junk is accepted as normal.’

The food that children eat at home is going to be the most formative type they get and you can largely control that. Don’t worry too much about what goes on outside the house but read Part Five, Influencing What Children Eat When You’re Not There, for solutions in outside situations.

‘How can I make my kids eat well without making both them and myself stand out as weird and awkward?’

Explain to children from an early age why they eat some food and not others so that they understand and feel confident about that. Prepare them diplomatically for situations outside the house where they will be making a different choice from other children in the group. Part Five, Influencing What Children Eat When You’re Not There, suggests how you can do that.

‘If I take a tough line on junk and restrict it, won’t that make them react and go the wrong way?’

There’s so much commercial pressure on children to eat junk that if you don’t take a stand they will almost certainly conform to that pressure. Children need to hear an overt ‘real-food’ message. However, it is important not to get involved with ‘banning’ foods or appearing to deprive children of treats. Part Two, Breaking the Mould at Home, Part Three, The Gentle Art of Persuasion, and pages 91–5, Sweets, Treats and Bans, all explain how to get that balance.

‘No matter how hard I try, my children reject food and I can’t stand the fights any more.’

Head-on confrontations are a no-no. Perhaps you’re going about it in the wrong way. Read Part Three, The Gentle Art of Persuasion.

The philosophical parent

‘Children are picky eaters naturally, it’s to be expected.’

A self-fulfilling prophecy that has been promoted by the food industry, which makes a mint out of selling children junk. Children in most parts of the world eat what adults eat. It’s mainly in the UK and North America that children are considered to need a different diet. If you keep on presenting them with real food they will learn to like it. If you stereotype them as picky eaters, then that is what they will become.

‘Better the kids eat junk than nothing at all.’

This is very short-term thinking. The more you offer children junk, the less likely they’ll be to accept real food in the long term. Part Three, The Gentle Art of Persuasion, suggests how to encourage children to eat something decent without having head-on fights. Children won’t starve; they will eventually eat something worthwhile if you adopt the approach outlined in Part Two, Breaking the Mould at Home.

‘It’s okay to eat junk as long as they exercise.’

Children can burn up a lot of energy and work off an unhealthy diet to a certain extent, but however fit and active they might appear, they are being deprived of vital nutrients if they live on junk. Children brought up on junk will very likely turn into adults who may be less physically active. These unbalanced eating habits will catch up with them in later life. They need to learn wide-ranging and wholesome eating patterns which will see them through into a ripe old age.

‘Surely in moderation junk is okay?’

In theory, if a child eats well generally then the odd packet of sweets or crisps is not a problem. But it is very easy for the proportion of junk to creep up so that it is actually much more significant in their total diet than parents realise. And how do you draw the line between moderate amounts of junk and too much? A better approach is to say that, in general, children aren’t given junk foods except on the very odd occasion and that they are always offered an attractive alternative. For ideas read Part Eight, Nitty-Gritty Ideas and Recipes for Inspiration.

The parent who accepts junk food

‘I’m not worried. The kids will learn to like better food as adults. After all, I did.’

It is theoretically possible that a child will spontaneously find a love of good food as an adult but it is much more likely that he or she will simply become an adult who lives on junk. It’s true that parents generally eat more adventurously than their children, but adults with sophisticated tastes may have forgotten that their diet as children, though limited, was nowhere near as limited as the modern child’s, and that they ate with adults, not apart.

‘Good food is wasted on children.’

Another self-fulfilling prophecy. Children learn to like what they are given. If they are given only junk, then this is what they will learn to like and expect. If you follow this approach to its logical extreme, you will only ever feed your children on processed junk. Is that what you really want? Besides, it’s vital that children learn to like real food if they are to be properly nourished – so rather than being wasted on them it’s a priority that they have it.

‘I don’t have time to feed my kids on anything but processed children’s foods, and communal eating doesn’t ft in with our lifestyle.’

Fine, but can you live with the fact that your children will end up living on an imbalanced diet which will not provide the nutrients they need? It isn’t necessarily any more time-consuming to give them real food in any case.

‘It’s normal for children to eat junk. They nearly all do and they aren’t dead yet.’

This phenomenon is widespread only in the UK and North America. Children in other countries still overwhelmingly eat real food. A large body of scientific research now suggests that a diet high in fat, protein, salt and sugar and deficient in fruit and vegetables (the typical ‘children’s diet’) is implicated in health problems that attack us in adult life – cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc.

THE ROT BEGINS WITH THOSE LITTLE JARS (#ulink_e41054bf-b6e5-5b9b-91b7-37f4fc052b02)

When we try to trace the origins of how children’s diet became the junk-food ghetto that it is today, the trail starts with the modern idea that their food should somehow be separate from the general food supply. This mindset kicks in with baby food.

Baby-food manufacturers assure parents that their products are ‘specially formulated for your baby’, but such foods would be more accurately described as ‘specially formulated to con parents into believing that they can’t feed children by themselves’. This hidden agenda, of course, is never made explicit.

Nowadays, manufacturers realise that they must pay lip service to the idea that their baby foods are not intended to replace home-prepared food and that they are just a safe, handy convenience for the ‘busy mum’. But by clever labelling, which first raises anxieties then appears to allay them, they implicitly perpetuate the false idea that parents somehow lack the nutritional knowledge to prepare baby food themselves. They undermine our confidence about feeding our babies on variations of the household food supply that we ourselves eat, even though this was, after all, the common-sense and highly practical way that parents fed their children until quite recently.

How does this work?

We start to make decisions about how our children will eat from day one. The first issue is whether to breastfeed or use formula milk in a bottle. On this one there is widespread agreement: try to breastfeed if you can but, failing that, it’s fine to fall back on formula milk.

When breastfeeding goes well, it is simple, natural and rewarding. There are no worries about sterilising teats and bottles, no tricky temperature judging, no need to work your way through the formula milks on sale to find the one your baby accepts.

When breastfeeding doesn’t work out, the routine preparation of formula and all that it entails can seem like light relief after sore nipples, frustration and a dissatisfied baby. Parents who actively choose formula milk or who just end up using it know that this milk has been specially formulated to be as similar to breast milk as possible. We have been told that it is not good enough simply to give our offspring any old milk, be that cow’s, goat’s, sheep’s or even soya, because in its standard form it has not been adapted for the sensitive digestive systems of human infants.

Such advice is, of course, sensible and accurate. If we can’t feed babies on nature’s intended breast milk, we must rely on commercial companies, their scientists and nutritionists, to devise formulas that give them all they need to grow and won’t upset them or spark off allergies. It’s a complicated business and we must leave it in the hands of the experts.

But thereafter, if we want our children to grow up to be adults who eat well – adults with wide-ranging tastes who enjoy food and self-select nutritious food – we need to draw a line under the food industry’s scientific ‘advice’. From the time that we introduce the first weaning foods, usually in that critical and often challenging time when our baby is four to six months old, we do not need to rely routinely on commercial baby foods any more than we need to employ a food taster to check that our food hasn’t been poisoned. Instead, we need to view all those little jars and packets with a healthy cynicism.

Why? Like formula milk, many weaning foods give the impression that there is something special about them, that they are foods devised by knowledgeable nutritionists and doctors. Obviously, manufacturers have a direct interest in fostering this impression. In 1998 the British baby-food market was worth almost £164,000 million, and it is growing each year. So food manufacturers make a lot of money supplying parents with foods they think they cannot make themselves.

But unlike formula milk, which is a carefully devised product, commercial baby foods are nothing special. Though there are a few high-quality exceptions, most commercial baby foods represent nothing more than bulk-bought ingredients that have been heavily processed.

So when we buy ‘baby apple’ for example, naive and lacking in confidence as many parents are, we may fondly think that the apples therein are somehow superior to apples that we might use ourselves. Just because the jar contains apples for babies, it seems safer and more trustworthy than any apple equivalent we might prepare ourselves. The very existence of baby-food apples may even make us feel, quite wrongly, that we are not capable of producing our own version.

Yet the reality is that, with the exception of organic brands, most commercial baby-food apples are sourced in bulk from the general supply of apples destined for processing. Far from being the pick of the crop, they might just as well be turning up in a commercial apple pie or a ready-made apple sauce. The poor little baby consumers didn’t get any special deal here.

This example highlights the main shortcomings of most commercial brands of baby foods, which are:

• The raw ingredients are nothing special; they are sourced from undistinguished bulk ingredients destined for processing.

• These ingredients will be processed on an industrial scale to extend their shelf life. This destroys much of the natural goodness in them and makes it necessary to introduce additives, such as synthetic vitamins, that would not be necessary in home-made versions.