How can she chose to feed her kids this rubbish!

[Livjames1]

Hi this is regarding my SiL. She is a single parent to five children (who is in no way struggling financially) and she chooses to feed them processed junk at every meal and it's really starting to grind on me.

I myself have three children, including one who's autistic and is a fussy eater yet I still manage to provide them a healthy balanced diet. My SiL feeds her kids processed chicken nuggets, pizza and chips, meatballs out of a can, chicken curry out of a can and ready meals from supermarkets basics range! She does this purely out of laziness as she Just can't be arsed to cook and I can't help feel that she's out of order for letting her children eat these types of foods on a regular basis!

She often comes to my house after school when I'm serving up tea for my three, I will ofcourse offer to serve up some for her kids too but she refuses point blank saying that they will not eat it, and on a few occasions has told me that she doesn't understand how any child will happily eat these kinds of foods and that children shouldn't be "forced" to eat healthy foods if they don't want to, oh and that her kids have survived without vegetables and fruit and it "hasn't done them any harm".

I just can't believe her, she is having digs at me for actually feeding my children a healthy diet yet refuses to see how harmful her own children's diets are. She more or less accuses me of forcing healthy food down my children's necks and instead I should just allow them to help themselves to "goodies" whenever they like, she seriously is starting to piss me off, rant over!

And yy to hidden illiteracy.

Where I live it is reckoned that adult illiteracy is just shy of 50%. There have been many attempts to tackle the poor health which comes with extreme poverty including recipes actually delivered through our doors. But if you struggle to read then cooking from scratch could be pretty daunting.

I am not saying that is the issue with sil in question but it goes a long way to explaining wider health issues

There are roughly 20 other foods that she will tolerate (plain pasta, cheese, burger patties, white bread, fish fingers, chicken nuggets...). It is almost a sort of eating disorder.
An extremely limited diet like that actually is considered an eating disorder. When I was a child my mum always (as in every single night) made healthy home-cooked food, despite being a working single mother, and there were still only a handful of thing I would eat. Including almost no vegetables.
I'm better as an adult, but there's still a lot of things I can't eat.

Italics fail

Incidentally, my daughter grew up eating a generally crap diet, due to various issues including occasionally debilitating depression, yet she was in the 90%+ for height as a young child, and as an adult is 5'7". For whatever that's worth.

Similarities here with my SIL and BIL, who also have 5 very underweight malnourished kids. Diet consists of salt, sugar and colourings/flavourings.
SIL works all the time and BIL is the main carer. He "hates vegetables" and is a moron who does things like give the kids a whole bag of sweets each at a rugby game when one or two would suffice. Kids had coca-cola from the time they were babies. Just dumb stuff.

So, OP, YANBU. But try to think about what your SIL is judging you on.

I would judge her too OP.
There's a woman I see everything morning when I'm on the bus to work, she's taking her 3 kids to school and is heavily pregnant. All the kids are under 8. Every morning they have a huge grab bag of chilli Doritos and a can of coke each. At 8am. I judge her, and I think most people would!

It's not ok for op to be judgey about her sils poor food choices, but it is ok for her sil to judge her?! How very mumsnet.

Op you are right and most people in real life would judge this. It's not necessary to feed children like this every day and it costs very little to buy a bag of apples or a tin of value peas to get some vitsmins in.

Nixon omg.... that's shocking. I'm a competant cook. I happen to love fruit and veg. I can also inhale a Hardee's cheeseburger in 3 seconds flat. And I've never turned down a Chinese meal. But fizzy pop? I think it's the devils food. I can't believe any grown adult drinks the stuff, let alone gives it it a child at any time of day, let alone 8 in the morning

y uncle died from factors relating to an incredibly poor diet (as an adult)
so I've become a lot more worried about this stuff. you always get people saying oh it doesn't matter if your child refuses decent food. well it does.
ps this wasn't a diet that involved takeaway pizza once a week and sugar in coffee. his diet was seriously bad. but still, I didn't realise you could die that way, and quite young

Massive leap to the kids being malnourished! My DCs are both very small. On the NHS Kids BMI thing they are on the underweight side of the normal range. They eat very healthily but are small, as are most of our families.

Whisk Once upon a time, I would have judged. Then I grew up, had kids of my own, found my empathy switch and stopped being a twat. Would suggest others try the same

That's so true for me too! I used to judge all sorts. Then I had my own and my god it changed my perspective.

For example I always judged the "heartless" parents who sent DC to school without breakfast. Now I have a DS who will not eat breakfast before school no matter what's on offer, he simply doesn't want to eat that early. Things like that make me always stop myself from judging others - you just don't know why people do what they do.

OP you are very judgy of her and do come across as superior - it sounds like her criticisms of you could be her lashing out because she feels so judged and criticised by you.

It may be that she doesn't know how or doesn't think she has time to cook. Learning to cook can be really hard - I was lost when I tried to learn from books and the internet, I just couldn't do it. Ironically it was the baby food manufacturer, cow & gate, who taught me to cook. They were the first recipes I could follow, fully understand (I mean who knows what sauté the whatever means if you have no cooking knowledge?) and end up with a successful, fully edible product at the end. Also it takes time to learn to cook quickly - it used to take me an age to cook anything, no matter how simple and quick it was supposed to be.

Op-why did you post this? None of this is going to change how your sil feeds her family.

But why, just because your child doesn't want to eat breakfast doesn't mean that every child going to school hungry has refused to eat. By all means don't be a judgy person, but child neglect does happen.