Food Culture and What It Means to be "Child-Friendly"

I just came back from India—(The trip of a lifetime!)—and the kids there eat…Indian Food.

Imagine, nary a hot dog or chicken nugget in sight.

Actually, there were chicken nuggets in the hotels, and I'm told that imported "child-friendly" food is (unfortunately) becoming popular as a status symbol among a certain set, but still, my point is...

All over the world kids are eating ethnic food. 

Stuff we think of as foreign, exotic and decidedly not “child-friendly.”  Stuff we think it’s rare for kids to like. This falls into the “duh” category of social observation.

Of course, Indian kids don’t call it ethnic food. To them its just food.  But if all those kids can eat Indian food why can’t ours? Or, why can’t our kids at least eat lentil soup? Spinach salad? Chicken Fricassee?

So many American kids don’t even eat a regular “American” diet. They eat a modified version that represents the worst of the worst: hot dogs, pizza, and lots and lots of pasta (mostly plain, sometimes cheesy, but never very interesting).

What's the deal?

Food preferences are culturally determined.

(Another obvious social observation that won’t win me a Sociologist of the Year award anytime soon.)

Culture influences taste preferences because eating is really a matter of math: Kids learn to like the foods they’re exposed to the most.  In India, that’s Indian food.  Here, well…

Just as importantly, picky eating is a problem of plenty. It’s hard not to give in to kids when you can give them what they want, when there are so many available choices.

• I’m not saying that you’re to blame if you have a picky eater; some kids come out of the womb that way.  But catering to your kid's demands produces more of the problem.  Read You Can't Feed Your Way Out of a Picky-Eating Problem.

• I’m also not saying that Indian parents never have a problem trying to feed a picky eater. (I have enough Indian clients here in the States to know that isn’t so.)  Indian parents, though, don’t resolve their picky eater problems the same way we do because they can’t: American style “child-friendly” food isn’t everywhere and, even if it were, eating it isn’t culturally accepted.

The idea that kids need “child-friendly” foods is a marketing ploy. 

Kids can, and should, eat pretty much anything adults eat, with only a few exceptions. (Read more about that here.)  You only have to look around the world to see plenty of proof that kids don’t need a stack of special foods.

In India, cultural constraints determine what children can eat. Parents and their children know the limits, and as a result, kids eat within those bounds.

Here in the U.S. however, our cultural expectation is that children will eat like crap. Perhaps that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s certainly true that here in the U.S. we don’t expect kids to like healthy foods.  No one is surprised, then, when they don’t.

What’s more, our ambivalence about feeding kids healthy foods—we know they should eat more vegetables but think it’s developmentally appropriate when they rebel—induces parents to create a malleable, penetrable, flexible, weak and wobbly eating structure.

Most parents start out strong—“Fruits and vegetables all the time”—and weaken as their kids wear them down.  No one starts out intending to feed their toddler the pizza-pasta-nugget and hot dog diet. It just happens.  Because it can.  (You only have to check out the grocery store to see the kinds of foods marketed towards infants, and the kinds marketed towards toddlers to see what I mean.)

You don’t need to move across the world to solve a picky-eating problem. You just have to establish a foreign culture at home.

Forget about feeding the American way, and start seriously rethinking what, when and why you offer the foods that you do. Then, tinker with the structure to get it right.

• You’ll never teach your kids to eat a variety of foods by feeding them a repetitive, monotonous diet. Read Breakfast: The Most Important Meal of the Day.  

• And you’ll never teach your kids to like vegetables by feeding them a diet dominated by items that bear no resemblance to vegetables (crackers, bagels, pasta, hot dogs, chocolate milk…) Read Why Toddlers Don't Eat Vegetables and Early Vegetable Variety:The French Advantage

The key to turning out kids who eat right is  to be firm about the food, but flexible with how your interact with your child.  For help setting up a successful feeding structure, read:

• The BIG Fix: What To Do When Feeding Strategies Fail.
• House Building 101.
• 10 Ways Improving Your Kids' Snacking Will Improve YOUR Life.

For more information about interacting with your child read:

• The Goldilocks Approach.
• Curbing Your Kid's Craving for Control.
• The Easy Way to Solve Your Toddler's Decision to Suddenly Refuse Certain Foods.

If you want your kids to eat differently you have to feed them differently.

Or hope for some kind of divine intervention! Otherwise, I'm sorry to say, you'll simply keep reinforcing the habits your kids already have.

 ~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

Fruits and Vegetables at Every Meal and Every Snack -- Every Darned Day

One of the most effective strategies you can use to radically shape how your toddler eat is this:

Serve a fruit or a vegetable at every meal and every snack every day.

 Of course, you’ll never attain that goal, but it doesn’t matter.  Just by setting the intention you will drastically increase your toddler’s consumption of fruit and vegs.

You could also strive to serve a fruit AND a vegetable at every meal and every snack every day.

That would be even better.

If you have a child who barely touches a fruit (forget about the vegetables), you’re probably laughing at me right now.

That’s OK. I can take it.  And I’ll get to you guys in a moment. 

For the rest of you, those parents among us whose kids haven’t totally fallen off the deep end yet, think about this: Most parents feed their infants a fruit-and-vegetable-dominated diet.

In other words, I am not really suggesting anything too radical.  I’m merely proposing that as your infants turn into toddlers that you keep up the good work.

Yes, I know that it is a lot easier to feed infants fruits and vegetables than it can be to convince a trepidatious toddler to open up at the sight of spinach, but stick with me here.

One reason infants are so accommodating in the Fruits-and-Vegetable department is that they don’t know any better.

It’s not just that most infants haven’t yet been introduced to all the wonders of the world—sweets, treats and chicken nuggets—that makes them so accommodating.  It’s that eating fruits and vegetables is their custom, their routine, their norm. Fruits and vegetables are their primary go-to-foods.

Most parents I know, inadvertently move their toddlers away from this way of eating by relying on rusks, cookies, puffs, crackers, and other toddler stuff more than they actually need to.

10 reasons to serve fruits and vegetables at every meal and snack every darned day.

1) Kids can’t eat what isn’t being served.  Every time you don’t serve a fruit and vegetable is another time when your child won’t eat a fruit or vegetable.

2) Eating is a matter of math: The more frequently you expose your kids to fruits and vegetables the more normal these foods will seem.

3) Putting fruits and vegetables into your feeding structure stops most of the conflict: When it comes to eating everyone will know exactly what to expect.

4) Fruits and vegetables will displace some of the other snack stuff you normally serve thereby upgrading your toddler’s diet.

5) By changing the ratio of fruits and vegetables to other tasty items you’ll point your kid’s taste buds in the right direction.

6) Fruits and vegetables will become a go-to food, not an once-a-day opportunity to fight.

7) You’ll introduce more fruit and vegetable variety because peas, broccoli and string beans will only take you so far.

8) You’ll be content to serve smaller portions: A few bites really add up.

9) Your previously sane self will return becuase you will no longer have to be the food police.

10) It’s the right habit.

Read 10 Ways Improving Your Kids’ Snacking Will Improve YOUR Life.

To you naysayers out there—“That will never work with my kid.”—I say this:

Do it anyway.  (Waiting for your children to grow into eating more fruits and vegetables is like waiting for Godot. It might never happen.)

Here's a four-point plan to get you started.

1) Set your sights on small steps. 

• Serve extremely small portions. Read When Less is More.
• Ask your child to take extremely small tastes. Read Nix the Negativity.
• Never ask your child to eat even one more bite. Read The Happy Bite and A New Approach to Teaching Tots to Try New Foods.

2) Talk to your children about your strategy.

• Say “Fruit and/or vegetable at every meal” more times than you would like to, and remember to tell your child why. ("We eat healthier foods more often than other foods.")
• Give your child choices within the structure. Read Curbing Your Kid’s Craving for Control.

3) Applaud small successes.  Each and every one of them.  Each and every time.

4) Read The BIG Fix: What To Do When Feeding Strategies Fail.

 ~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~ 

What Is In Your Lunch Box?

I'm experiencing a love/hate reaction to Parenting.com's new Healthy Lunch Maker.  Have you seen this calculator?  

You drag a sandwich, snack and a drink into a lunch box, press calculate and the program spits out the nutrition profile of whatever is in the box.

"All the nutrition facts you need to pack tasty, healthy lunches for your child. Count calories, fat, sodium and more."

Test out Parenting.com’s Healthy Lunch Maker

I love the calculator because it's so much fun. 

No matter how much I think nutrition information leads parents astray—Read Why Nobody Needs Nutrition Labels— I can't resist nutrition gadgets.  I describe my problem, and how much fun I had shopping this summer with the Fooducate App, in Why I Feed My Daugther Inferior Food.

Plug a PB&J sandwich on wheat, an apple and a small carton of low-fat milk into the Healthy Lunch Maker, push calculate:

• Total calories = 466
• Fat=12g
• Sodium=450 mg
• Protein=19g

Fantastic! I spent an hour one day trying out different lunchtime combos.  That is the love part. Now to the hate part...

I hate the calculator because it's impossible to know what the information means. 

Is 466 calories a lot or a little? What about 12 grams of fat? 

And even if you look at the % daily value based on your child's age, which the program conveniently lets you punch in, the information that 12 grams of fat is 22% of your 3 year old's daily fat needs will only take you so far.  

Unless you're going to calculate every meal and every snack (something I don't think anybody would ever do) knowing that lunch is going to deliver 45% of your toddler's sodium intake is meaningless.  Sure, 45% seems high, but what if the rest of the day turns out to be basically sodium-free? That puts 45% into a healthier perspective.

Now, let's imagine that you could put together a magic meal, one that made the grade on all the key ingredients.

What would you do?

• Would you serve this perfect meal to your child over and over? That would narrow, rather than expand, your toddler's palate.
• Would you shy away from foods that don't make the grade? Or feel guilty when your tot eats anything short of the gold standard? That would make the "bad" but desirable foods even more desirable?

So again, I ask, what would you do?

As far as I can tell, the only useful thing you can do with any nutrition calculator is bust some myths.

• A PB&J sandwich, apple and carton of low-fat milk delivers 19 grams of protein or 172% of your 3 year old's daily protein needs. 
• The PB&J alone delivers 11 grams of protein or 100% of your 3 year old's protein needs.

Who knew?

What I take away from this is that most people worry more than they need to about protein intake. Indeed, if your 3 year old pounds down one small carton of milk, he'll take in 8 grams of protein, 72% of his daily needs.

There are other problems with using this, or any other, calculator. 

• It sticks to traditional lunch items (for obvious reasons) but doesn't let you put soup or salad into the box!
• You don't know how much of any one ingredient is calculated in the sandwhich. You might be heavier on the peanut butter or lighter on the jelly and then your numbers would all be off.
• You'll need another calculator to estimate what your toddler actually takes in: Do three bites constitute half a sandwich, a quarter, less?
• The % daily values are estimates based on a range of needs (with a point picked for mathematical reasons). On any given day your child might need more or less food based on activity level and growth patterns.

Instead of thinking primarily about nutrition, start focusing on your child's eating habits instead.

Read 10 Habits MORE Important Than Vegetable Eating.  Then, teach your tot to:

• Eat different foods on different days. Read House Building 101.
• Accept a wide range of tastes and texture. Read Training Tiny Taste Buds.
• Consume fresh, natural foods more often that processed and packaged one. Have Your Cake and Eat it Too!
• Use food for hunger and not for emotional reasons. Read Using Sweets to Soothe the Soul.

The nutrition part of the picture will fall into place—perfectly. I promise.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~