Begging your kids to eat doesn’t make a a shred of difference | Emma Brockes

Now shaming, bribing and guilt are off the table, parents must resort to increasingly implausible dinnertime tactics

When I was a child, it was received parental wisdom that the way you got a kid to eat was either to threaten them – “no pudding until you clear your plate” – or shame them with the reminder that there were starving people in the world. (Actually, I realise, my mother did neither of these things, but went for the third, discredited approach – emotional blackmail: “One more mouthful, just for me.”)

I don’t know if any of this worked, but, along with so many other rules about parenting, in the last 20 years it has been subject to thorough reassessment. Now, if you have a truculent eater, you are advised by paediatricians in the US not to go on about it. You are definitely not supposed to guilt them into eating, or raise the spectre of those less fortunate than them, or do anything at all to suggest that food, in the context of personal consumption, has a moral value and that your child’s relationship with it is indexed to your own emotional response.

'What’s in Madison’s lunch box?' I’ll ask my daughters slyly when they get back from preschool

Related: Here’s the real recipe for healthy eating: a big fat serving of education | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Continue reading... February 22, 2018 at 06:59PM