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People have specific hungers. Our bodies tell us if we need a specific nutrient. Like with pregnant women - they are "manufacturing" an entire human being. There are all sorts of things that baby is made up of. If you don't eat those things, how will the baby be made properly???
Same with growing children. They are growing and need specific foods and will crave those foods. Like many kids crave macaroni and cheese. Why?
I say give them the food they crave. (I DON'T mean ice cream, cookies, soda pop, fast food restaurants, and junk food.)
Also when sick, give them what they want.
And a good thing to take them to a buffet every once an awhile. You can tell them to stay away from the deserts. But otherwise they have a large selection of foods - salad, vegetables, fish, chicken, beef, pasta, etc.
Yes but what a powerful opportunity parents have to shape & form the minds of fresh children. If children are taught that chips simply aren't something we eat because there are so many better things to eat, then that will be their paradigm.
Other people might eat chips & sugary foods, and look how comparatively unwell they are.
Except that they might not be unhealthy at all. The kid who is never absent from school, almost never sees a doctor, very rarely on antibiotics, might eat junk food now and then, while the one eating no junk has a constant runny nose, gets sick pretty often and is absent from school 3 or 4 days every year.
Yes but what a powerful opportunity parents have to shape & form the minds of fresh children. If children are taught that chips simply aren't something we eat because there are so many better things to eat, then that will be their paradigm.
Other people might eat chips & sugary foods, and look how comparatively unwell they are.
You're going to set your children up for eating disorders. They'll binge on the junk whenever they have access to it, and they will have access to it because they aren't with you 100% of the time. The whole point of raising children is to prepare them for adulthood when you can no longer make decisions for them. You're not teaching them how to make healthy choices if their only choices are healthy. Make sure you understand what is healthy. Salt and sugar are important electrolytes. Your children won't be healthy if they never ever have some salt and sugar in their diets.
So I'm curious if anyone has had to deal with this issue from the perspective of allergies. My son is still a young toddler so it has not become much of an issue. But he has extensive enough allergies that we can't really expose him to much junk food if we wanted to because so much of it has things that he can't eat.
Hopefully he will outgrow some of these allergies. But I'm really curious what is going to happen when he gets old enough to realize that his friends all love to eat things that he can't have. Right now he is young enough that he doesn't seem to notice much and happily likes a lot of the food we give him.
Yes but what a powerful opportunity parents have to shape & form the minds of fresh children. If children are taught that chips simply aren't something we eat because there are so many better things to eat, then that will be their paradigm.
Other people might eat chips & sugary foods, and look how comparatively unwell they are.
Not sure if I understood you correctly here. I notice that a lot of stuff which children want to eat are the things that parents eat. For example, if my child sees me eating healthy stuff most of the time, she tends to lean towards what I am eating.
If she sees me eating chips and cakes all the time for snacks (instead of fruits/ juices etc), she will want to eat them.
There isn't consensus about the cause of allergies. Some believe they are caused by too much exposure to antigens too early in life. Others think the opposite.
So I'm curious if anyone has had to deal with this issue from the perspective of allergies. My son is still a young toddler so it has not become much of an issue. But he has extensive enough allergies that we can't really expose him to much junk food if we wanted to because so much of it has things that he can't eat.
Hopefully he will outgrow some of these allergies. But I'm really curious what is going to happen when he gets old enough to realize that his friends all love to eat things that he can't have. Right now he is young enough that he doesn't seem to notice much and happily likes a lot of the food we give him.
Allergies are different. He's not going to develop eating disorders. Why? Because he'll go into anaphylaxis shock. This is his reality. It's a very sound reason to not eat something. He will be able to understand why his friends can and he can't.
This way there is no over focus or conversation about healthy and junk and no need for rules about food.
What's wrong with having conversations about healthy and junk food and teaching kids how to make their own smart eating choices later??
We don't completely restrict junk 100% but we certainly limit it, and we talk about how you need to eat certain foods to be healthy and grow, while other foods are something you can only have once in a while, otherwise you can get sick. That's preschooler level, as they get older you can explain more scientifically and hope it'll get ingrained to where they'll learn moderation.
Also there's nothing wrong with simply not eating certain foods if indeed the whole family doesn't eat it - for us that includes things like Macdonalds (but we'll occasionally grab good-quality burgers and fries at a restaurant, personally I think McD is gross and doesn't even taste good); artificially-flavored and colored crap like candy, soda, neon-orange cheetos, colorful cereals, things like that. Anything fake and full of chemicals. This is stuff we don't eat, although I won't freak out if he has it at a party or something although lately I haven't even been seeing any of that served at parties, only organic-natural type snacks. Personally I make a clear distinction between that type of junk and simply foods that are sugary or not very nutritious - quality chocolate, baked goods, all-natural ice cream. The latter are things we'll indulge in occasionally, like a couple of times a week for dessert, an ice cream outing, etc. Nothing wrong with that as long as they know it's something to have in moderation and not in unlimited quantities and/or as substitute to healthy foods.
I also agree to an extent that up to a certain age, parents certainly have some influence on shaping a child's tastes. Case in point, I avoided sugary-salty-junky things with my son completely until about 2-2.5, he was perfectly happy munching on fruit while adults were having cake because he's never tasted it! Unfortunately by that point the well-meaning relatives, especially MIL, were all freaking out at the poor baby who never gets to have anything tasty and he's gradually started getting small tastes of cake, ice cream etc. Well guess what - the first several times he's tasted it, he'd have a teaspoon and then not want anymore, saying it's too sweet! I was so happy. Sadly going from there, with holidays-parties-christmas-easter-halloween and all that, after having these treats several times, he's gotten over it being too sweet and has developed a taste for it. He still doesn't like overly salty stuff because we've never eaten much of it. Maybe if we'd kept him away from the sugar for a while longer, he'd end up being one of those people without much of a sweet tooth. Believe it or not, there are people who naturally are drawn to healthier foods and dislike sweets.
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