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Family Health Blog: Food and Confidence
After a long day of feeding my own and other people's children yesterday, I asked my husband whether he can remember feeling as a child that there were all sorts of things he could not eat. I had spent the day watching my children's friends (each from a different family) pulling lettuce, tomato and cheese out of their sandwiches (and leaving their sandwiches looking like demolition sites), scraping away the carrots and picking apart their home-made hamburgers to check that there was nothing peculiar in them. There was no question that the stewed red cabbage was banned from their plates.
My husband replied that he could certainly remember feeling traumatized when pölsa (animal innards) was served up at school. In those days you weren't allowed to skip what was on your plate. In fact, he could remember stuffing it into his pocket and throwing it away as soon as he found a convenient bush or a friendly dog. His conclusion was that it was important for kids to be able to choose what they liked to eat.
Of course, I agreed but, I reflected that my husband has the world's healthiest appetite and there are very few things that he won't eat. He is also very clear about his own choices and is difficult to sway. So, being able to skip whatever you want when a child probably has no clear linkage to developing a strong sense of choice and feeling free around food.
In fact, through all of my dealings with young children, I have noticed that not encouraging them to try a wide variety of foods repeatedly on most days limits them when it comes to eating. After 5 years of reading English stories to Swedish school children (ages 3-11) in which I provided home-made refreshments and running English Summer Camp on my island, I have come to grips with the fact that, as a parent, you get back what you put in at meals. That means, if you try to anticipate what your child will eat and only serve that, for example, pasta with ketchup every night, then your child will believe that it cannot eat anything other than pasta and ketchup.
Tired parents coming home from work often find that meal time is a terrible stress with the kids. To make everything easier the usual meatballs are thrown into the pan. That is OK every now and then but over the long haul it damages a child's confidence when it comes to food and eating.
Evelyn, my sister on the American side of the Atlantic, raised the confidence issue in one of our discussions about this subject. She pointed out that instilling confidence is simultaneously about getting kids to understand that their bodies are under their own jurisdiction and that their choices will have results, at the same time as it is about letting them know when they are going outside reason and drawing them back inside the lines.
My own children? They have their own food quirks like all of us do. However, they do run down to me every day, and trying to catch a whiff of what is in my pots, ask excitedly what is for dinner. My retriever, Lucy, drools at the stove. Everyone can choose, but they've all got the basic confidence to try it.
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