To not understand why some parents make such poor food choices for their kids?

[Quit4me]

I was standing behind a mum with 2 children in a queue the other day. One child was a baby laying almost flat in a pram aged about 3 months. The other was around 6. The baby was really sweet smiling out of the pram which is what drew my attention to them. Then she grizzled and the mum said ‘whopps sorry I took away the milk buttons didn’t I. She was feeding her (the baby) milkybar buttons. Quite a lot of them.
I then noticed that that the mum was overweight, the nan who was also with them was overweight and most sadly the 6 year old was very overweight /obese.
Why would any mum be feeding their 3 month old chocolate? Obviously the whole family and little girl could have had a medical condition but Barring that why don’t parents see that feeding them sugar and too many processed foods early on is creating so many health problems for their children?
It makes me actually quite angry and sad for the children and I cringe seeing it.
Yes I know it’s none of my business directly, but this is everyone’s business because it’s a huge problem for the UK and is going to increase multi fold in the coming years.

This will horrify you op growing up in the 70"s our DG had a sweet tin the horror of .We used to raid it none of us diabetic and still have our teeth and all fine , not obese .Curious though how do you know the age for a fact.You saw what half hr out of a mum"s day,called her fat and judged her parenting .How do you know she does it daily .Then i would be yeap that is not good too much but you don"t know do you ?

You saw what half hr out of a mum"s day,called her fat and judged her parenting .How do you know she does it daily

I'm guessing the obese 6 year old gives us a fairly big clue

**Frequentflier

Given that we have been in a pandemic for a year now, I think parents of small children should be given a lot of latitude. Not ideal food, but honestly, she might be at the end of her tether, like a lot of people**

No being in a pandemic dies not mean we excuse bad parenting or start feeding children badly. maybe we are all a bit busier juggling work and schooling but basics like nutrition should not slip.

Sigh. My own kids at that age were fed lentils, okra and spinach. ( I am not kidding). But I struggle to care so much what other people feed their babies that I start a thread.

DS didn’t like chocolate until he was about ten. Hated the stuff (strange child).

I’m all for letting children try a bit of everything - but I don’t like to see small children in a pram tucking into a grab bag of crisps (so much salt!)

I mainlined sugar as a child but we were mostly skinny minnies in the 70s weren’t we? Maybe we smacked less and were more active.

Smacked less. I’m sure there was more smacking back then.

Snacked. Geez my autocorrect...

Yes we snacked less but were smacked more

@FoxyTheFox

But stew is cheap to make, as it cottage pie, vegetable curry, 3 bean chilli can all be made under £5 and fill you up.

They take longer to cook though and there is a link between food poverty and fuel poverty. Lack of skills and knowledge also comes into it. If you know how to cook frozen pizza and chips but don't know how to cook vegetable chilli then you'll cook frozen pizza and chips, not everyone has the wherewithal to know how to find or follow a recipe, believe it or not but there are people living such chaotic lives that it is a hindrance to their day to day function. There are also access issues. As discussed upthread, people in food poverty are more likely to only have access to corner shops/mini-marts for the bulk of their shopping where prices are higher and range is limited so they might know full well how to make a three bean chilli but that's no good if the shop doesn't stock the ingredients. Over one million people in the UK live in a food desert, if a big name supermarket isn't in convenient reach then you can't take advantage of the cheaper prices (I know my nearest one is a £6.90 adult return fare away plus £3.45 return per child). Online shopping requires a bank card and a minimum spend of £40, not much help if your budget is less than that.

"But why can't they just do/make this" doesn't address the underlying issues.

Great post @FoxyTheFox

I’ve just been reading a thread about how people add sugar to bolognese so I’m not sure that cooking from scratch is the answer

A teaspoon of sugar added to homemade tomato sauce to balance out the flavour and reduce the acidity of the tomatoes is hardly the cause of a rise in obesity levels. Perspective and all that.

It’s just unnecessary added sugar is all, and just sort of signalled to me that people aren’t necessarily thinking about what’s healthy when they’re cooking. I imagine the main issue with cooking from scratch is portion sizes - it’s very easy to cook too much and just serve and eat it all anyway and doing so regularly will cause weight gain.

It's not unnecessary though, it's needed to balance the recipe out rather than just sugar for sugar's sake.

As for portion size, 500ml of homemade tomato sauce - tomatoes, sugar, salt, balsamic, basil - (which is enough to serve 4-6 people depending on age/appetite/portion size) would be less than 170 calories, not even 10% of a daily recommendation of 2000 calories. To go over 2000 calories you'd need to eat almost 6 times that amount, pretty much three litres of sauce. You'd be sick before you finished it or soon enough afterwards. Even if you added an entire 500g bag of white pasta to the original 500ml of sauce, that's still only 650 calories and most people would struggle to eat all of it without getting full and/or being sick. If they somehow did that's still a total of 820 calories and less than half of the recommended 2000 a day.

So again, a teaspoon of sugar in homemade pasta sauce is not the problem.

Well, I make it without sugar and it tastes nice so it can’t be that essential! Like I said, it’s more about the wider process of how people think about what they are preparing. I have heard so many people say they don’t know how much pasta/rice to make and always get it wrong. I’ve seen memes saying the same thing so I’m assuming it’s a widespread issue. I weigh it out dry so we cook the right amount and I’m always surprised that doesn’t seem to occur to people. Kitchen scales can be bought for less than £10, so not prohibitively expensive for most people.

Well, you’re obviously right that it’s not healthy but equally they could probably find something to judge about your own poor parenting choice or anyone else’s on here. Maybe you don’t read to your children or you swear in front of them or let them stay up late so they are constantly tired at school or let them have way too much screen time or barely spend any time with them or don’t get them to exercise enough. Some of those things create problems for the state to deal with so it’s not just obesity. People make poor parenting decisions in all kinds of ways but obesity is just a very visible one so easy to call out.