Smug fruit shoot feeders - don't you ever worry about 20 years down the line?

[welliemum]

Lots of people here talk about feeding their dcs crap food as a badge of honour - it's a weird kind of street cred.

"My kinds eat junk food - so shoot me, ha ha"
[subtext: I am a laid-back cool person and people who fuss about junk food are so up their own bums it's unbelievable]

But.... there's a big worry out there about obesity, about additives in food, about the way bad eating habits often have their beginnings in childhood...... and the concerns are likely to get stronger with time.

Don't you ever worry that 20 years from now when times have moved on, one of your dcs will read your light hearted comments and actually feel a bit that you seemed so proud of feeding them crap?

Whereas what I'd hope for with mine is to be able to say, "Well, you did sometimes eat rubbish at parties and I wasn't all that happy about it, but I let you because I didn't want you to feel left out. I didn't stress about it too much because I knew you ate well the rest of the time."

[subtext: I was never a perfect parent but I did my best to find the balance between feeding you well and not being obsessional about food].

welliemum, I am a little bit bemused - there always seem to be stacks of mumsnetters who ban their kids from eating junk food of any sort - there is certainly a very vocal minority who do.

Anyway, if I am going to start worrying about what posts on mumsnet are going to rise up and bite me on the bum in future years, it will probably be all my posts about DS1 and DS3 in special needs and not anything about blimmin' fruit shoots.

Good posts, Scummy.

The 'badges of honour' are just ways of making a stance about personal choices because the posters know they will get jumped on from a great height by other MNers.
There will always be differences of opinions, but this topic seems to be one where some people feel it is acceptable to deeply criticise the personal choices of others without a thought for the impact of their comments.
A balanced and unobsessive approach to feeding your child seems to be a sensible way to go.
Others may think differently - that is up to them.

Yes seat belts... everyone jumping around in the car and lying on the parcel shelf...it would be gross neglect nowadays.

My parents were told they were being ridiculously overprotective because they owned a child car seat.

Scummy, you may well be right - but there's a chance that the super-hardline healthy ones who're currently being pilloried here actually will turn out to have been right all along.

I don't think it's a big chance, obviously - or I would be one of them - but it's not impossible.

welliemum - and how will we know who's been "right all along" anyhow? Even if you never let a morsel of junk pass your DC's lips, there is still a myriad of other stuff that can go wrong. Genes will play a large part in determining how healthy our children are in middle and old age. My mother had to have a triple heart bypass a couple of years ago, despite having no risk factors other than heredity for heart disease.

I think that any extremes in diet are bad.

Children with allergies are a different matter but parents at parties who snatch Wotsits away from their child and thrust (brought from home) millet cake at them instead do damage to their childs emerging social skills, IMO.

Everything in moderation.

filthymindedvixen

Yes, the ones who were braying about having done no revision are now making a point of saying about how their children eat junk. The girly swots are nowadays doggedly insisting that it's important for children to eat well.

Meanwhile, in reality, there's probably not a heck of a lot of difference between the camps in what they actually do.

Except that the first group are still cool. and the secind group aren't and never will be.

Humph.

Bubble99 - I had friends like that, too. Mum totally obsessed by 'Health Foods' about 30 years before it bacame mainstream.

The Mum died of alcoholism when she was 66. What does that tell you?

People can eat as much 'healthy' food as they like... there are plenty of other ways to poison themselves.

Well, wickedwaterwitch is a dogged no-junker.

And she's well cool.

MrsPG - I know, we're not going to suddenly find the answers at the back of the book. There'll always be unknowns.

But I would expect that in the next few years nutrition is going to be much better understood than it is now, especially in the way early life environment influences later disease risk.

In terms of attitudes in society generally, I'd expect that people will pay a lot of attention to what children eat and probably will be a lot less lenient about poor quality food.

it could be the opposite of course - they may discover that we're all much more resilient than we thought and can eat pretty much anything in childhood without affecting our health, but I think that's less likely.

WWW is the exception that proves the rule, of course!

Well I work hard to make sure dd eats well, but certainly allow her treats (chocolate/biscuits/cake - the latter usually home-made) as well.

Really try not to give her anything processed and cook mostly from scratch, for both of us really!

However, as a child I used to eat a fair amount of kiddie crap (as we called it). Fish fingers, chips, cheesy pancakes and not much fruit. I have had to make real efforts to improve my diet but I don't resent my parents for the less than perfect diet I had. I do sometimes wish that they had been a little more insistant that we ate well. Not that we just ate kiddie crap but we did get more processed food than I eat now.

welliemum - I suspect you're right. For example, despite the fact that I give my children 'healthy' food, I was happily allowing ds2 to have Shreddies for breakfast... until I noticed that there is 0.6 grammes of salt in a serving!

This is what I find so difficult. My dd has branflakes, I just looked at the pack and there is 0.55g in a serving, although she doesn't have a full bowl. I mean, is that terrible?? Are they now off the menu?

Actually I do think badly of my parents and relatives forcing us to sit in a car passively smoking.

Call me bitter and twisted, but I remember how horrible it was and how uncomfortable, and the information was available that it was unhealthy.

But don't you think that it is always 'cool' to let things go a bit. It would be much cooler for me to let my kids read nothing but comics, listen to Radio 1 and watch TV all the time, than encourage them to read more challenging stuff, discuss 'issues' and listen to classical music. Food isn't too much of an issue for me - they get mostly home-made sensible food but that's just because that's how I was brought up - but what goes into their brains is. That isn't particularly cool either.

0.55g of salt that is

I just think they were bloody selfish and I can't imagine forcing my children to sit through something so unpleasant, sometimes for a couple of hours at a time. Call me self-righteous, but honestly, I sometimes think, how could they have been so selfish and inconsiderate towards little children? How could they?

BTW do you think that'smug' should be a banned word on MN? It can be depended upon to annoy everyone sooner or later.

I think it only annoys smug people!

Good/adequate diet is just one (quite small) part of a massive whole though, imo. And that's why I sometimes pillory proselytising hardliners of the "she is a bad mother because her child had a haribo sweet" variety. I think a healthy diet is important and great but not the be all and end all of good parenting. One of my best friends at primary had a mother who was massively lentilly. I still have bad memories of forcing down undercooked brown rice (and saying thank you because I was a polite kid, believe it or not!). I think that (had she cooked the rice for a little longer) she was way ahead of her time in terms of nutritional knowledge and she was right to feed her children what she thought to be healthy. It did impact slightly on other children's views of them- in one terrible row with my mate I reached for the worst insult I could find and came up with " I hate your mum's brown rice and I'm never going to come to your house ever again!" But nevertheless it was a GOOD thing, on the whole. However, none of her kids have had an easy life, imo, for a myriad of reasons that have nothing to do with the foods that they were fed but do include the way problems with parental expectations and emotional congruence. Being good parents does not boil down to just feeding your child well, imo.

www is fond of wotsits tho.

rogue "the way" in there

Yes, "cool" is often about not trying too hard, or caring too much (or appearing to anyway).

Which isn't really an ideal sort of attitude to display about your children, and it's odd to see people who clearly care about parenting issues a lot, striving to appear not to.

Scummy Mummy - sounds just like my friend whose Mum died of alcoholism. My friend has always had 'issues' despite her 'healthy' upbringing.

Where do you see that, wellie? I honestly don't see the same thing.