The most important thing to remember is that children imitate us...not what we wish we were, not what we want people to think we are, but what we really are. They model DEEP. While not the only solution, actually joyfully living whatever lifestyle and values we wish our children to embrace is the single most important action we can take. Nothing works worse than a drinker telling his kids not to smoke dope. Or an obese parent lecturing against carbs, or criticizing a kid for not exercising. The apple rarely falls far from the tree.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Thursday, March 18, 2010
How Do We Help Kids Eat Healthy Foods?
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10 comments:
And on that note, I'm shutting the computer off for the morning.
This. It's amazing how many parents think that "Do as I say, not as I do" has any hope of working. :/
Angie
Small example: I was baby-sitting a 5 year old, and accidentally knocked a thumbtack from a poster into her bed.
And while it's entirely reasonable to want to make sure the thumbtack is out of the bed, it was unnerving to see the kid tighten up the same way I did when I was worried about the thumbtack.
That just got covered here too: http://www.boston.com/community/moms/blogs/child_caring/2010/03/picky_eating_in.html
My guess is also to introduce a wide variety of foods in infancy, then stop trying to introduce new foods during toddlerhood and just feed them all the healthy foods you already introduced, then go back to introducing new foods.
Why? Toddlerhood is when their instincts tell them to stop putting unfamiliar things in their mouths, but before they're old enough to reason that an unfamiliar thing served as food by trustworthy adults is still safe to put in their mouths.
It was a good way for young mammals to survive their first steps out of the nest/den/cave/tent/etc. instead of mouthing just anything like they did as infants, poisoning themselves on the wrong mushrooms or whatever, and dying too young to become our ancestors. Guess who inherited those instincts?
"Nothing works worse than a drinker telling his kids not to smoke dope."
Wouldn't a drinker telling his or her kids not to drink work worse than that?
Lots of drinkers don't smoke dope themselves, and I wouldn't be surprised if some dope smokers don't drink alcohol either.
As for other drug-drug mismatches, how about a tobacco smoker telling people to not smoke marijuana or vice versa? In one way that's not hypocritical at all, in another way it's amusingly ironic to see smokers get on *each others'* case about secondhand smoke and all that without us nonsmokers being a faction in the argument for once.
"Or an obese parent lecturing against carbs, or criticizing a kid for not exercising."
Unless maybe the obese parent avoids carbs himself in an effort to lose weight via the Atkins diet (and that leads to all sorts of other topics), or exercises herself in an effort to shed the weight she gained obeying very-old-fashioned in-laws' advice about pregnancy while having that kid, or something?
Assuming Anon@3pm isn't a troll, I'll point out the inherent hypocrisy of someone who indulges in intoxicants saying, "Don't indulge in intoxicants." It doesn't really matter whether it's the exact same drug used. And Steve said a parent who is obese, implying a steady-state, not a parent who's in the process of losing fat.
There doesn't need to be an exact one-to-one correspondence; kids are smart enough to smell hypocrisy in their parents several miles away.
Angie
"Assuming Anon@3pm isn't a troll, I'll point out the inherent hypocrisy of someone who indulges in intoxicants saying, 'Don't indulge in intoxicants.' It doesn't really matter whether it's the exact same drug used."
Yeah, it's hypocritical either way, but it's even more hypocritical if is the exact same drug used.
"And Steve said a parent who is obese, implying a steady-state, not a parent who's in the process of losing fat."
"is obese" merely implies obesity.
Someone who has an obese BMI at the moment is obese even if he or she is in the process of losing fat, and will be obese until his or her BMI drops below the threshold to overweight-but-not-obese levels.
Anon -- you can split semantic hairs all you want, but the bottom line is that it's still hypocrisy and the kids are still going to see it and they're still going to ignore whatever advice a parent in that position gives them.
Angie
"but the bottom line is that it's still hypocrisy and the kids are still going to see it and they're still going to ignore whatever advice a parent in that position gives them."
I agree!
I saw really much worthwhile data above!
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