With my wife and me increasingly interested in starting a family soon, my antennae are up for articles on childrearing. Particularly those that deal with food.
The latest, from the Wall Street Journal, has lodged itself in my head. The article details a father’s experience with young children who come home excited after hearing about McDonald’s Happy Meals for the first time. Combine food with toys, and you have a powerful way to lure children to your fast food restaurant.
The article’s author and his wife had raised the kids away from fast food as a conscious choice about health and diet. His wife’s initial reaction was to tell the kids McDonald’s is “poison” and that they should stay away at all costs. His own reaction was only slightly less brash: bribing the kids to eat vegetables instead.
But psychiatrists, whom the author consulted while writing the article, advise against both approaches. Singling out “forbidden foods” may only make the kids’ desire for those foods stronger – and their repulsion for the healthier alternatives foist upon them more powerful as well. And bribery only reduces a child’s appetite for the foods they’re bribed to eat.
So, what to do? There are a couple approaches even the psychiatrists agree with. One is to educate your kids about marketing: cartoons may make foods appealing to them, but often it means merely that there’s more money in those foods for the companies that manufacture them, making it worthwhile for them to spend the money creating those cartoons and making them omnipresent. It certainly doesn’t mean those foods are the ones they should be eating. In fact, the cartoons kids love most often signal heavily processed, profitable and unhealthy foods. The foods that are good for them rarely have mascots.
Of course, a marketing lesson may seem a weak motivator to deter kids from unhealthy foods. Perhaps more influential would be a second line of attack psychiatrists advocate: repeatedly offering healthy options, with the understanding that kids may reject them the first several time they try them, then finally decide they like them. Why this happens I don’t know, but apparently it happens.
So if you’re trying to keep your kids away from the vast array of disastrously unhealthy foods society repeatedly thrusts in our face, the best approach may not be to fight it directly. Instead, try talking candidly to your kids about why McDonald’s meals include toys, and keep healthier foods in front of them at least as often as they’re exposed to those unhealthy foods. After a while, they just may catch on.