The Food Our Children Eat: How to Get Children to Like Good Food. Joanna Blythman

‘children’s foods’ which can be served earlier. These tend to rely on ready-prepared processed foods, the freezer and the microwave, and lack the ‘feel-good’ qualities of freshly prepared real food that might lead the child by the nose to eat what’s on the plate.

      For the child, food becomes routine and dull and eating it is pretty unrewarding. Because there is no special ritual around serving it – such as setting the table, or the gathering together of everyone in the house – the meal is indistinguishable, from a child’s point of view, from casual snacks. So it’s very easy for the child to view it as just more ‘take it or leave it’ food. It may even simply come over as an annoying distraction from other more involving activities such as playing, doing homework or fighting with siblings. The net effect is that the child eats unsatisfactorily: quickly and without pleasure.

      For the adult, the whole interaction becomes more and more problematic and emotionally highly charged, as she or he reaches the conclusion that this is not just a picky eater but a child who eats hardly anything. That makes the prospect of ever integrating the child into more adult eating patterns even more bleak, and the apparent impossibility of doing so becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Guilt and frustration build up in equal measure in the adult, until the only ‘escape’ is a retreat into cynicism of the ‘all kids eat junk and that is just normal’ variety.

      If we want children to eat well, staggered eating is a total block to achieving that goal. So once we get beyond the baby and toddler stage, when they are too tired at the end of the day to wait up to eat, it is important to try to hold on to some notion of communal eating and family mealtimes. We may not be able to do that at every meal, or even every other meal, but every bit helps.

      Yes, women do work and people arrive home later than in the past, but it is still possible to establish the principle that children and adults mainly share the same food. In the long term, if we want children to like good food, eating together is the easiest way to achieve that, saving us fights, frustration and guilt. For ideas about making this work in practice, see Eating Together and Why It Matters (pages 74–7).

       SWEETS AS FOOD

      Children have been eating sugary and chocolaty sweets for as long as any of us can remember. A love of sweet snacks in all forms is a regular feature of childhood.

      Many adults remember with great fondness the thrill of having money to spend in the sweet shop and the lure of everything from penny caramels to sherbet flying saucers.

      However, the way we think about sweets has changed. We used to think of them as a different category of edible – a treat, perhaps, a bit of frivolous window-dressing after the main business of eating had been concluded. Very few people would have considered them to be a substitute for a child’s mainstream nutrition. Nowadays, however, sweets are increasingly considered the main event. It is not uncommon, for example, for children to be given a chocolaty candy bar in their lunch boxes, often as an alternative to a pudding such as yogurt or fresh fruit. In 1998 when the caterer Gardner Merchant surveyed children’s eating habits, it found that 39 per cent of children brought a chocolate bar to school in their lunch box.

      It seems that sweet confectionery is increasingly being given to children as a staple part of their diet. We no longer expect them to fill up on ‘proper’ food, offering sweets as an add-on, but often rely on confectionery as food itself. The survey mentioned above also found that one in four children substituted sweets, crisps and savoury snacks for their traditional hot evening meal.

      This shift in thinking has a lot to do with the power of advertising, particularly on television. Sweets are ruthlessly hyped to children through advertising which makes them desire them. Once they taste sweets, they do like them because the hefty serving of sugar, salt, and fat they offer can be irresistible, encouraging a palate that seeks that instant fix in other foods. Judged against this craving, real, natural, unprocessed foods just don’t taste right and, unlike the commercial might of the confectionery industry, they don’t have any powerful interests promoting them.

      Most people know that, eaten in significant quantity, sweets and chocolate confectionery are bad for children’s health. If parents don’t intervene, the sheer weight of commercial pressure on children to eat confectionery is so strong that they will end up eating much more than the relatively harmless quantity of ‘add-on’ sweets we often associate with our own childhood.

      The dilemma for worried parents is how to discourage consumption of sugary confectionery without appearing to ban or proscribe it, especially because it is such a big component of the ubiquitous children’s diet. However, despite the pressure on children to want confectionery – and to replace other more wholesome foods with it – they can be influenced to restrict or severely limit consumption of their own volition.

      How can parents achieve this?

      We need to start approaching the problem not in a futile ‘Sweets are bad, you aren’t allowed them’ way but as part of an overall strategy towards eating, outlined in detail elsewhere in this book, that will encourage children to select food that is nutritious and good for them. The objective – a surprisingly achievable goal – is to produce children who will happily eat their Clementine or yogurt when the rest of the class is munching away on fatty-sugary sweets.

      Parents can achieve this by using the general approach outlined in Part Two, Breaking the Mould at Home, which is aimed at producing children who, of their own accord, will enjoy a wide range of food and select a diet that is broadly wholesome and good for them. Part Three, The Gentle Art of Persuasion, is a troubleshooting section to help parents who find it hard to make the approach in Part Two stick. Part Seven, Nitty-gritty Ideas and Recipes for Inspiration, lists wholesome foods that can be offered in specific situations as an alternative to confectionery and other junk food. Finally, for a strategy that tackles the vexed question of sweets head-on, see pages 91–5, Sweets, Treats and Bans.

       CRISP CRAZY

      Just as sweets have become a significant part of many children’s diet, so consumption of crisps and crunchy, puffy ‘extruded snacks’ amongst children has grown to unprecedented levels.

      Children eat crisps on the way to school, at breaktime, for lunch, for afternoon snack, instead of tea or at supper. No school playground, high street or urban green space is free from discarded crisp packets blowing in the wind. Many children will eat at least a packet each day.

      When the caterer Gardner Merchant surveyed children’s eating habits in 1998, it found that 20 per cent of schoolchildren bought crisps or savoury (extruded) snacks on their way home from school each day. Crisps and savoury snacks were also the most common item in a packed lunch box: 57 per cent of children ate them for packed lunch while the more traditional meat or cheese sandwich trailed at 38 and 37 per cent respectively. Such habits are regarded as normal.

      Ironically, crisps seem to have taken on a misleadingly ‘healthy’ profile amongst some parents and children. They are commonly seen as a healthier option than sweets because they are savoury and are made from potatoes or corn – both wholesome starchy foods. For many children who won’t accept other savoury food such as a sandwich, filled roll or salad, crisps are routinely offered as an acceptable alternative. But the reality is that although potatoes – and, to a lesser extent, corn – are a wholesome food that children can be encouraged to eat in some quantity, crisps, and even more so extruded snacks, are not.

      Here’s why:

      • They are fatty:

      100 grams of boiled potato contain only 0.1 milligrams of fat. 100 grams of regular crisps contain 37.6 milligrams of fat. 100 grams of ‘low-fat’ crisps contain 21.5 grams of fat. ‘Low-fat’ crisps are a contradiction in terms: crisps and extruded snacks are always fatty foods.

      • They are salty:

      100 grams of boiled