1.) Eat well yourself. If your relationship with food needs some work, there is nothing that will have a greater single impact on your kids’ health for the rest of their lives than for you to eat well and feel good yourself right now. (Need help with that? Hire a health counselor!) The “do what I say and not what I do” line your parents gave you never worked when YOU were a kid and it won’t work now. Kids listen to your actions, not your words. Furthermore, the Center for Disease Control has said that children born in the year 2000 are predicted to be the first generation to die at a younger age than their parents (that’s us) and its because of what we feed them. At least we started out eating real food. Kids now eat pure crap. (And BTW never underestimate how easily they pick up on Oreos on your breath and wrappers in your car. A double standard blows your cred.)

2) Get them involved. Even if you live in an urban area, you can visit a farmer’s market or artisinal food makers. For those of us in Maine, there are tons of local farms that sell all sorts of produce, cheese and animals products and they often have open-farm days. Get to a farm! Join a CSA! Kids will eat snap peas off the vine even if they usually eschew veggies on their plates. When they pick the food and help you prepare it, they are way more likely to eat it.

3) Look behind the curtain with them. Make your trip to the grocery store into a field trip. Take a look at “kid food” packaging with them and ask questions like “What are they trying to say with this health claim? Do you think it’s true?” Talk about how kids didn’t have separate food when you were a kid, and the (false) idea that kids “should” have separate “kid food” is one of the factors that is making kids sick these days. Read labels with them and talk about what you’re looking for. Tell them about “neuromarketing” and the lengths to which food manufacturers will go in order to sell their products (like putting toddlers into fMRI machines to see when the brand loyalty section of their brain lights up!) Studies show that children often can’t distinguish between regular information and “persuasive communication.” (pdf) So exploring that concept with your children can help cultivate an attitude of discernment that can serve them well. Why? Because marketing itself in a factor in declining children’s health.

4) Wrap it up and Dip it. Look, my 4 year old son is not inordinately drawn to vegetables. But it’s amazing to me what he will put away when it’s wrapped in a tortilla, a romaine lettuce leaf or a piece of nori. There’s something fun and challenging about eating a little packet of something. Case in point: the other day he had turkey for lunch. I wrapped it in a corn tortilla (warmed up in butter) and wrapped some raw cabbage in there with the turkey and the ketchup. The key was popping this roll into toaster thongs so that it would stay closed. If we have tortillas or pizza, I blanch some kale and liberally spread it onto the food.  He definitely eats more greens this way than when they are sitting alone on his plate, which they are almost every night. He also eats way more carrots when there’s a bean dip or hummus to drag it through. And when I imitate the gopher in Winnie the Pooh saying “summer squash” and mowing down a whole vegetable, my son will mow down a green bean or two to catch up with me. (Another reminder of the power of media.)

5) Expect them to eat it. Of course we eat our greens. It’s part of our meal, our farmer grew it, it helps us grow strong and anyway, if you’re not going to eat yours, can I have them? There is something powerful about the nonchalant expectation that we eat bright, fresh food and we eat it all together at the table with no media. We don’t read at the table, the radio is off and we don’t even answer the phone during dinner. Of course this is how we do it.

6) Watch what they Overhear. I used to express my frustration about how few vegetables would make it past my son’s lips, but I tried a little experiment and I think it’s working. When I’m talking about my son to someone else, I talk about how much he loves vegetables. If he’s inclined to reinforce a stereotype of himself, let’s have it be that one. All too soon, boys get the message from society that vegetables and salads are not “boy foods.” Of course that’s bollocks, so whenever I hear someone express astonishment that a boy likes a vegetable, I become an obnoxious contrarion. Of course he likes vegetables! They make you feel good!

7) They change on a dime. Man, can they squawk. Right in your ear. Right when you have the least amount of patience. They are all sound and fury, though. In three days they can forget they even had that preference. We project onto them our many layers of emotional attachment, psychological association and recalcitrance, but in the end, that is all ours. Kids can change fast. Way faster than we can.

Let them go hungry. You wouldn’t let them have ice cream for breakfast (one hopes!) Why give into their demands at dinner time? They don’t want to eat what you made? That’s fine. No Prob. They are strong enough to skip dinner. The question is; Are you? The mommy fear that they will waste away before morning, so they should have something, is formidable, I admit. But good mommies don’t give in. Our food supply, if you recall number 1 above, will kill them early!
The tastes that they develop now will most likely affect what diseases they get in middle age! Our job is to help them navigate this world, and avoid the many perils that can harm them. Food is one of them.

To conclude, I can’t say my son has a stellar diet. He could eat more vegetables. He loves  refined carbs. I’m not saying I’ve discovered any magic formula, but I feel pretty good about the context I have created in our foodscape. When my son is eating on the crummy side of his spectrum, he’s eating refined, not necesarily nutrient-dense stuff, like baked potatoes and rice tortillas. He’s not getting much (if any) industrial commodity food and it’s normal. Significantly, it’s also connected to our community and to our history as human beings. The food we eat, our ancestors ate, and although this might not be an important idea to my son right now, I do believe that he can feel it on some level. I  believe what Mark Hyman, MD says;  that “food is information” and his cells understand the information they are receiving.

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