That the diet...Friday cat post plus kid saying the funniest thing
By alice on May 16, 2008
My cat
This was the other week, but I just decided to post it today:
Daughter: The headmaster was walking round the corridors, and he saw us hanging around and asked what we’d seen in the news lately. So I said, Umm, cannabis has been upgraded from a Class C drug to a Class A drug… ?
Me: Why didn’t you say something about Boris being the new mayor of London?
Daughter: I was going to say that, but I couldn’t remember his name and he was bound to ask me, so I thought that would sound even worse.
how to handle your “fussy eater” child
By alice on May 16, 2008
I said before that my daughter is an amazing eater, and she is- knowledgeable and thoughtful about health issues, with a love of the best quality of everything and a healthy enjoyment of expensive chocolate, plus she is a great and talented cook herself.
My son, on the other hand, takes after me. Not in all ways- I was addicted to various junk items as a child, and his diet consists of real foods and is very healthy- but in one significant respect: “fussy eating”, or, as I prefer to describe it, a sort of learning difficulty regarding food, whereby one’s acquisition of new tastes is significantly slower than the average, often accompanied by potentially disabling anxiety about trying things out.
My own diet has gradually expanded through my life, to the point where I now make no distinction at all between my own preferences and the preferences nearly everyone seems to have, other than the fact that I have difficulty trying new foods- which makes me a totally rubbish dinner party guest, unfortunately. Other people can much more easily test unfamiliar tastes; I have to go through a long slow process of gradually acquiring new flavours and textures in my palette*. So if you want to eat with me, restaurants or my home are better.
Now, when I was a child, this sort of thing was totally unheard of, and caused a whole lot of problems. These days it is more widespread, and is being discussed more often. I will not bother arguing here about moral fibre, starving people into submission etc, because that approach is wrong and inhumane, and no way to parent successfully on any issue, which humans these days ought to realise. Luckily, I survived, became a very healthy adult with a balanced diet and a love of good quality food, and nobody tried starving, locking me up or force feeding me at any point in the proceedings. If I could go back and say “Sucks to you!” I would, because “How will you ever get a boyfriend if you can’t eat out in a restaurant?” never came true- pshaw!- and people should really be more thoughtful before making up the hundred sorts of nonsense that are still routinely spouted at children for no apparent rhyme or reason whatsoever.
Anyway- this is what my son’s diet consisted of when he was smaller: toast (wholemeal, with butter), pancakes (white flour, eggs, milk, cooked in butter), UK chips (potatoes and oil), chocolate (whatever’s in that), grapes, apple juice, Walker’s cheese and onion crisps. His meals were basically rotations of that lot, and attempts to encourage him to try different food at the dinner table failed. However, he seemed healthy and energetic enough on this lot, and it does cover all the important food groups, especially with vitamins and special formulas secretly mixed into the pancakes.
These days things are quite a bit better, although I’m not going to go into anymore detailed analysis because it would be boring. However, there are certain very definite rules that have to be followed when you have a child with this learning difficulty (purely descriptively, the ability to expand your eating is a kind of learning which some of us are unusually slow at). So here they are:
1. Do have reasonable rules the child can co-operate with: don’t create pressure or use force.
Reasonable rules are things that make sense which you get everyone to co-operate willingly with. (If you don’t know how to do that, watch “Supernanny” a few times. I’m not going to go into discipline issues here, whole other ball game.) A reasonable rule might be to test drive a new food once a day/ week, and test driving might be defined as chewing a piece or even just sniffing to begin with, depending on how fearful and reluctant the child feels. The main thing is to find some sort of routine you can all feel positive about.
2. Create a positive tasting atmosphere
Praising your child for trying a new food is not always a good idea. Sometimes they don’t want a big deal made out of an achievement they know full well to be quite limited in universal terms (so what- everyone else ate eggs already). What you do want is a sense that test driving foods is a pleasing thing to do: because it gives us new enjoyments, because it supports out health, and because it widens our horizons- for the latter, overcoming nerves is an achievement to be encouraged. Some children may have more sensitive tastebuds than others, and this may be connected to extremely limited childhood eating patterns, so it’s important to show them that one person’s easy is another person’s challenge (a good lesson at other times too).
3. Go slow
When tasting food, slowness is a good thing- we should savour deliciousness, not gulp it all down in one mouthful. A relaxed routine starts with sniffing, then moves on to smelling a bit more, then a very small taste, then a small mouthful, a bigger one, and finally swallowing the food. It’s important that the child feels relaxed at every stage. Reluctance is less of a problem than stress or tension, which will interfere with the whole experience. Children can actually vomit after eating things they were pressured into eating, which is not going to move things forward.
4. If the atmosphere gets tense, stop and try again tomorrow
Tension can come from the parent as well as the child. Few things stress parents out more than being scared that their kids are going to starve to death, even though this is pretty unlikely. The last thing you want is a cycle where everyone’s stress levels are going up, with you poor child in the centre feeling responsible. Keep it relaxed and calm, but if you fail, call it a day for the time being and reset the atmosphere more positively (which, again, means relaxed) tomorrow or next week.
5. Create a sense of achievement
I came up with the brilliant idea today of a chart of food my son likes, with a new picture for each new item added to his repertoire. Not sure how this will go yet, but immediately another possible advantage was clear: the rest of the family can also feel affirmed from this kind of chart. It shows that you are working together, making progress and don’t need any bossy grandparents to come in and tear it all up. As the chart expands, you will have a lot of good memories associated with it, and your confidence will increase. Encouraging good eating is a family achievement. In fact, if your child doesn’t like this sort of attention, the chart can be used to remind everyone else about what he enjoys, and make you all feel more confident.
It’s really important to be confident in your progress as a parent with something like this, because it is such an unusual amount of hard work in a specific area, which makes us feel vulnerable; anyone else can say it’s all your fault because of (insert random reason), and you can’t prove them wrong. But you have to live with it, not them. So forget naysayers and feel good about what you are doing.
6. Avoid repeating failures by being a bit creative
If something went down really badly yesterday, don’t reintroduce it in exactly the same form today. Try again in two weeks, when all is forgotten. Maybe with a different shape/ flavour/ colour. If the name of something has a bad association, try modifying the name. Everyone knows a child who refused to eat marmalade but loved “orange jam”. (This is NOT “lying”- it’s creative use of language. Kids don’t expect words to be mathematically accurate any more than us other sane humans. The point is the idea, not the words.)
7. 0 to 60 in two days is an unreasonable expectation. Like far too many modern parenting ambitions.
Your child has difficulty acquiring new tastes and probably doesn’t feel good or motivated about the issue. This is not something you are going to find a miracle overnight cure for. It isn’t a discipline issue, it’s about what goes inside her body. Get real. You will probably be working on this for years. It won’t kill you. Be glad she doesn’t have something far more challenging. Long, slow progress should be your goal, and once you get into your stride and start seeing results, you will feel really good about that.
Meanwhile, feel free to educate the rest of the adults in your child’s life about what is and is not a reasonable expectation for them. Encourage grandparents to buy lots of oranges if oranges are your child’s new food item. Don’t let people think it is OK to stick a bowl of Irish stew in front of your child and insist they eat.
VERY IMPORTANT: Your child is in charge of his own body, and you do not want him to think otherwise, for a second. This is why slow food learners present a unique challenge. You cannot turn your child’s food consumption into a moral obligation. Forcing children by emotional or other pressure to eat food against their will is a very dangerous thing to do.
8. Some children prefer trying new tastes on their own
Telling them you left something on a tray in their room then leaving them to it is surprisingly effective. These children actually do want to try new foods, and often get bored with their limited diets, but they may experience stage fright at the new experience, and it is much easier to go onstage when the audience is empty. Like other “go slow” ideas, leaving things lying around works because it lets the child make progress at their own pace. Please don’t believe they really deeply desire never to eat more than three foods for their whole life; the issue is difficulty and nerves, not conviction- but you can certainly set them against eating more by approaching from that negative angle.
(My son started eating apples by complete surprise. He announced on the phone one day that he had eaten an apple, but when I asked around, nobody in the family had actually offered him one. It turned out that he had gone home from a school ceremony armed with an apple candleholder made in a craft session. The decision to try it as food came upon him quite spontaneously. You will understand just how exciting this event was for the family if you have experienced a child with this sort of eating!)
9. Make mealtimes a friendly happy event
It doesn’t have to be a big deal if you have a general rule that your slow eater tries one new thing from the dinner table each day (just make an effort to offer food appropriate to his eating level- see below). As eating can be such an important social ritual, and the dinner table offers such simple opportunities for expanding children’s horizons, it seems daft not to make the most of that. If your child really enjoys being there, he will be more motivated to continue his eating journey right through his life.
10. Offer the appropriate level of tasting challenge for your child
My experience of people like this is that there are certain quite specific taste areas that are easier than others, and that progress nearly always needs to follow a logical path. Start at the top, work down slowly, and modify according to your experiences with your own child:
a. sweet carbs: milk, mashed bananas, sweet babyfoods
b. bread-y carbs, with butter, spread, sweet stuff like honey, etc
c. cereals, then cereals with milk
d. fruit- peeled and sliced, juices
e. mild tasting salad-type raw vegetables
f. mild tasting meat in small pieces (chicken breast, sausages)
If you can get through a wide range of that lot, you have the bones with which to start combining them, for instance in chicken and tomato casserole.
Keep in mind please that if your child eats plenty of fruit and vegetables with some protein from dairy, wholegrains and/or meat, their diet is probably better than that of most adults.
Right at the top end of difficulty for these eaters is food which combines a wide range of flavours and ingredients, including cooked vegetables, with a strong savoury smell. For some reason this kind of food seems almost impossible to eat (speaking from personal experience here- I now enjoy my own fish pies and beef stew, but show me a vegetable curry and I will probably run away fast).
(NB If I ever turn this into a book or something, yes I will research the nutritional aspects of this section a whole lot more, and devote at least several chapters to the special issue of fussy eaters and nutrients- my nutritional knowledge is mostly on the common sense level so far. Extra suggestions welcome meanwhile!)
Coming next: how to handle your lazy eater child, and how to tell the difference between lazy eating and the “fussy eating” learning difficulty. They are often confused.
* I can’t seem to find the right spelling/ etymology of that word- any ideas?
Tags: noneare you taking enough holidays?
By alice on May 16, 2008
I’m a big fan of Tim Ferris’ in The Four Hour Work Week, which are much more in line with the way I like to do things than the last productivity book I tried, David Allen’s Getting Things Done. So I’m not too surprised to score impressively highly on Tim’s Lifestyle Quotient Quiz, on his blog.
But his ideas are quite a lot about work/ life separation, a different approach than the one I prefer, which JP Rangaswami blogged about here- treating your whole life as a holiday. Taking a positive, gratitude-based approach to everything you do definitely improves the quality of all your experiences, and that’s a big part of life as holiday. Another part is to use that energy and drive to get you to a place that includes a lot of interest and fulfilment in your work. But life is never perfect, because if it was your life-muscles would go out of condition, and you would feel rubbish whatever happens- so the other part of life-as-holiday is dealing with stuff that might not be tons of fun, but your happiness depends on it anyway:
While I’m on holiday, there are a number of things I have to get done. And it is important that I get them done as efficiently as I can, so that I can enjoy “the rest of my holiday”. (JP)
I see these things as slightly annoying obstacles which I really want to get out of the way, because “have to” never works for me.
But anyway, Tim’s quiz is a very simple calculation comparing the amount of time you work (presumably in the paid sense) with the amount of time you spend on (actual) holiday. The idea is that you want to work as little as possible (hence the book title), while having enough funds to travel the world and do other stuff you really want to do. So I don’t think my score on the quiz really means very much, because my current goal is to work more and go on holiday more- cranking things up, and improving quality and effectiveness all round.
There are only 2 questions- let me know if you do the quiz, and what you think of the results.
Tags: noneUtopia, Texas
By alice on May 15, 2008
Yes it exists, and where else could it be than Texas? Here’s the official sign:
I’m not doing this out of bourgeoise tomfoolery. I really really like places like this. It is often hard for foreigners to understand (and frankly, those wishing to spout anti-Texan bigotry are just not trying*) why people in small towns in Texas genuinely regard their home as a kind of heaven on earth. Surely there is a joke here, even if it is accidental and directed at the poor ignorant losers who actually enjoy living in the middle of nowhere, a long way from any big concert venues, possibly never even having seen a Renaissance art gallery or a Chanel shoe shop? Clearly a mobile home in the middle of some hilly near-desert where most of the summer is hotter than 90 degrees cannot be any fun at all, even if it were possible to buy organic asparagus or get a decent manicure here?
Yes, I think you are catching my drift: there is more to life than everything you can get in a city, even if some of us seem to need that “civilisation” stuff nearly as much as air or water (and I count myself among these, Austin being the smallest city in which I have ever felt at home, despite being a passionate empty-countryside-roadtrip person)
Both air and water are no doubt available at the Utopia General Store.
In case anyone was wondering whether broccoli is the only food in the ideal future world.
And of course, you can worship here in Paradise too. I guess that means the tricky question of God’s own religious affiliation is now solved… hmmm….
Here is the lesson of Utopia, Texas: sometimes, open countryside is more beautiful and peaceful than anything else, and for some people capable of appreciating that, a living and an old-fashioned way of life are the only other things needed to make this earth feel like a paradise.
It’s not so much the house you live in as the nature all around it.
* I hope there is no need to point out here that “bigotry” and “thoughtful reasoned criticism” are not the same thing, or that generalising negatively about millions of people who live in the same state (Texas is bigger than France, and has as much sense of national identity) is more accurately termed “racism” than “moral debate”.
Tags: noneeating properly: hard work for some of us, but not rocket science
By alice on May 14, 2008
I care about obesity as much as I care about alcoholism or child abuse, which is a very great deal. Anything that ruins the lives of humans does my head in, and these problems are ones we can actually work on, even if earthquakes are beyond us. And today, this insane article inspires me to out myself as a person who believes that obesity is the result of eating too much, through addiction to fattening types of food.
Wouldn’t it be great if the next generation could be grown with an inescapable urge to eat fresh green salads and fish rich in omega 3, instead of having inescapable urges for chocolate and ready-meals? Just from not being brought up drinking milk from the wrong sort of bottle?
A trio of studies shows that exposure early in life to ‘gender-bending chemicals’ used widely in plastics, pans and water pipes leads to fatness in adulthood.
I don’t usually totally reject scientific studies as potential sources of information, but junk science definitely exists, as do irrational and stupid scientific studies based on idiotic preconceptions. It used to be said with frequency that you can prove almost anything with statistics (you don’t hear that so much now so many of us have lost faith in them entirely), and the same is becoming true in certain corners of the scientific industry. Also, this is is a Daily Mail report.
But seriously, the desperate search for reasons other than addictive eating and the social/ cultural/ psychological stuff behind that, for solutions to obesity is getting curioser and curioser by the day. For instance, the idea that gastric surgery “cures” obesity, in the way that surgery can remove a cancer: actually, eating a lot less cures obesity, and having your stomach reduced physically forces you to eat less. There is a big logical difference, which too often gets blurred.
We don’t read articles wondering if baby bottles cause heroin addiction- what is it with obesity, that people are so crazy to uncover something, anything other than addictive overeating to explain it? Once you are hooked on destructive chemical combinations, for any reason, it no longer matters what precise early trauma or suboptimal environmental condition started the whole sorry ball rolling in the first place. The trick is stopping then gradually reversing things.
It’s a long-term job requiring ongoing effort. I recently had to evolve my own diet on realising it was making me ill, and am very aware of the complexity and demandingness involved in getting all those nutritional components balanced the right way. Raging hunger and cravings aren’t combatted with hard-core willpower, the trick is to find a more sustainable nutritional way of feeling healthy and fulfilled.
Food addiction is as serious and far more widespread than heroin addiction. But food addicts function in normal society and bring their own children up to be food addicts too. This is not a personal moral judgement on any overweight persons: I’d like the zeitgeist to change and help people more effectively. The hard work of changing your chemistry is easier than the harder work of living as a serious addict- as ever, its the denial and the emotions behind it that stump people, not the job itself.
Tags: noneSigns, Texas
By alice on May 13, 2008
Taken on a recent road trip out to the Hill Country. More tomorrow.
Tags: nonetweets
By alice on May 12, 2008
Here are some tweets I found yesterday while checking out people who live in my home town. Aren’t they lovely?
It doesn’t matter which bay I pull into at Sonic, I end up in the only one with a broken card reader.
I have a new plan: One rose bush with each paycheck. It’s complete genius.
Mother’s day with my mother, and my mother-in-law who doesn’t know she’s my mother-in-law.
I’m people watching at the mall. i fear for humanity.
Twitter is so fun. You don’t have to do it every five minutes, or even every day, but it really is a new and different way of sharing the world and your own view of things, and enjoying other people. Do think about joining up (and following me of course).
It can seem odd talking to strangers at first, when your real-life friends aren’t on Twitter and you have yet to meet more people properly who are. But Twitter is microblogging, not an old-style chat room (although it can be used that kind of way) and that’s how it feels when you start blogging, too. Just say something you mean, and enjoy the short thoughts, inspirations and mundane details of the people you decide to follow- searching for bloggers and writers you enjoy reading in a bigger format is the way to start. Follow people saying real stuff, not the ones who are just advertising.
Tags: nonenot mother’s day
By alice on May 12, 2008
Here’s a heartbreaking article about a British state boarding school for children (aged 6 to 12) who are unable to live with their families due to being extremely emotionally disturbed as a result of being mistreated and abused. What they all need is someone who will stand by them, look after them and love them without disappearing. The good news is, they aren’t being abused any more, and 84% of them eventually either go back to their families or find long-term foster parents. The bad news is the rest of the article, and it’s a long one.
Some of us don’t have mothers, or don’t have mothers who do the kind of things normal mothers are supposed to do. It is very, very difficult getting used to that and going through life as a person who literally did not get “brought up” at all, because you have to find other people and situations to learn from, without the kind of trusted direction that parents are designed to give; either the trust takes a long time to build up, or it is sporadic, or everything just feels like guesswork. But the place you start from is feeling unloved by your own parent/s, which as we can see from the children above, is basically identical to having no self-esteem at all. It’s a place of worthlessness, close to annihilation.
Don’t have anything much else to say about that. I just wish there were more solutions.
Tags: noneTable Talk
By alice on May 11, 2008
This was Jackie’s idea, and a very good one too- so good, I’m actually going to tag people for the first time ever! Read on:
What’s your favourite table?
My own. Although I haven’t actually had a proper dinner party for about a decade, which is terrible. In those days, the raggedy bunch of oddballs who called themselves my friends and I would gather in my Camberwell flat for steak with wine and cream sauce and potato gratin with more cream and cheese, followed by banoffee pie with extra cream. Between courses, we smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank extra wine, and at the end there were tarot card readings and singing sessions from the English Hymnal (for fun, not religious purposes). If musicians were present, in 4 part harmony (which in my view is the most fun you can have as a musician).
It all seemed more normal at the time.
What would you have for your last supper?
If I knew it was my last supper, there is no way I could eat. Although I might be tempted to down a few margaritas.
What’s your poison?
Read the rest of this entry »
from the Sundays: should you take your kids to a music festival?
By alice on May 11, 2008
Well, how insane are you feeling?
You can’t really enjoy anything with kids unless the kids are enjoying it first, and this article is quite right about the sort of activity tent the very young find enjoyable at an outdoor music festival- specialist kidstuff:
On entering, you were given a passport — “because it was a parallel world”, Curtis explains — that you could have stamped only once you’d completed certain tasks. One involved learning lines of poetry; another entailed going to find Gretel (aka Curtis, who spent the whole festival acting in character) and asking her to tell the story of how she escaped from the witch.
In other words, there is approximately no overlap at all between what a sane child and a sane adult would want to do at one of these events, which means that taking young kids is going to be extremely hard work indeed. I don’t think that’s immoral, but it is extraordinary how many parents are perpetually amazed when their unrealistic expectations fall flat. Kids don’t like techno music, drugs or walking across twenty miles of mud to the nearest portaloo!
(Actually, mine enjoyed the one festival they went to, with their dad. The organic hand-made recyclably-packaged french fry stall helped a lot.)
Tags: none
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