Dear Mark Bittman,
I am a fan. I’ve read so much of your work that I’m practically a stalker. So, Mark, forgive me when I say that the advice you gave parents on how to raise a good eater in this past Sunday’s New York Times was useless.
"Parents should purge their cabinets and shopping lists of junk, and they should set and enforce rules on what their children are allowed to eat. I can be even more specific: Teach your kids to snack on carrots and celery and fruit and hummus and guacamole — things made from fruits and vegetables and beans and grains. Offer these things all the time. Make sure breakfast and lunch are made up of items you would eat when you’re feeling good about your diet. Make a real dinner from scratch as often as you can. Worry less about labels like “G.M.O.” and “organic” and “local” and more about whether the food you’re giving your children is real."
I know you meant well. And here’s the strange part, your advice is actually right. It’s useless, though, because you gave the part of the advice that everyone already knows.
(You must have missed my post I Understand Why Parents Feed their Children Unhealthy Foods. Parents don’t feed their kids junk because they don’t know better. They do it because feeding kids unhealthy food works for them.)
Here’s the problem: only parents who are just starting out in the feeding game and who have willing, complaint, and relatively adventurous eaters can benefit from your advice.
Advice like yours, Mark, makes successful parents feel superior. It sends the message that it’s easy. “Just don’t keep chips in the house.” “Serve carrots frequently.”
Unfortunately, advice like yours also makes struggling parents feel incompetent and defeated. These parents end up thinking that picky eaters can’t be changed. And so they end up catering to their kids’ eating preferences. These parents fail to set good boundaries and to teach good lessons. Eventually, Mark, these parents give up, and their kids’ eating problems become entrenched.
Like Bettina Ellias Siegel, the brilliant mind behind the blog, The Lunch Tray, I ask: What would have happened if you had had a third child? Bettina says, “Maybe that child, too, would have tucked into salt-grilled mackerel with gusto-or maybe he or she would have made [you and your] wife nuts by refusing to eat anything but bananas and buttered pasta.” Read the rest of Bettina's post.
It’s time for the experts to stop telling parents what their children ought to eat, and to start telling parents how to get kids to eat the food that is served.
And we have to go beyond the well-meaning, but relatively ineffective advice that so often gets passed around:
- Model healthy eating habits!
- Cook with your kids!
- Shop with your kids!
- Grow a garden with your kids!
- Offer fruits and vegetables all the time!
As Bettina points out, every child is different. But here’s where Bettina and I part ways. Just because your child isn’t born an adventurous eater, it doesn't mean you have to just wait it out.
All children can be taught to eat right. The problem is twofold. First, techniques like, “model healthy eating habits,” are too passive. Second, every drop of positive change produced by cooking together on Sunday night, for instance, is easily overwhelmed by the bucket of negative consequences that come from:
- Serving kids a steady stream of child-friendly foods
- Begging, bartering, cajoling kids to eat two more bites
- Using dessert to “win” the veggie war
Three habits translate nutrition into behavior:
- Proportion--eating healthy food the most frequently
- Variety--eating different foods from meal-to-meal and from day-to-day, even if those aren’t always (or ever) new foods
- Moderation--eating when you’re hungry, not when you’re full, and certainly not because you’re bored, sad or lonely
These three habits lead to good nutrition, to becoming an adventurous eater, and to the right lifelong eating habits. Moreover, they help parents figure out what to do when kids won’t play along:
- Teaching proportion doesn’t mean ditching all the junk food and having a showdown with a reluctant eater over the broccoli you’re serving for dinner. It means thinking about how taste preferences are formed, how to move kids towards healthier foods, and teaching them how to manage the junk they’ll be facing for the rest of their lives.
- Teaching variety means thinking about how to “grow a good taster.” This starts by creating a safe, pressure-free environment where kids can explore the sensory properties of food (taste, texture, aroma, appearance, temperature and sound) well before they’re expected to eat anything new.
- Teaching moderation means being painfully aware that many of the most common parents tactics like “Eat two more bites” disconnects children from their own hunger and satiety. It means letting children learn to gauge how much they need to eat, knowing they’ll sometimes get it wrong. And it means finding ways to keep eating free from emotional baggage (or at least as much as possible).
None of these lessons lends itself to a good sound byte so it makes sense that experts whittle their advice down to what can be said simply. But really, if we want to help parents, it's time to give them the kind of advice they truly need.
~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~
© 2014 Dina Rose, PhD, is the author of the book, It’s Not About the Broccoli: Three Habits to Teach Your Kids for a Lifetime of Healthy Eating (Perigee Books). She also writes the blog It's Not About Nutrition.