Teaching Your Kids To Be Healthy Includes Giving Them Sweets

girl looking at cakeWe all want our kids to live long, healthy lives. And there are lots of all natural and organic food out there to help us do just that. But teaching our kids when it’s okay to have junk food is part of our bringing enjoyment to that long life we want for them. While part of our job as parents is to be concerned for our children’s health, we also have the equally important task of teaching them how to navigate the real world. And the real world has soda. Also cake.

Obviously, if your child has an allergy or medical condition that makes certain foods unsafe, there’s no question that they need to be taught to look for and avoid them. But for children without a compelling medical reason, there’s nothing wrong with having soda, chips or other junk food on occasion. I came across a post on Babble.com written by a mom who refuses to let her children drink soda ever because she believes it lacks nutritional value and may contribute to early puberty. Joanna Mazewski writes:

 We live in an age where we should know better than to feed our kids a meal stripped of any valuable supplements as opposed to a diet of wholesome foods and plant-based fruits and vegetables.

While I agree that feeding children a largely healthy diet is important, I don’t believe that never giving them treats is a parent ‘knowing better’. Teaching our kids that entire categories of food are off the table completely isn’t being a good parent. It’s actually lazy. It’s much easier to issue a blanket “No” in regard to all junk foods rather than take the time to teach children how to enjoy less healthy foods in moderation. Anyone can police a child’s diet to make sure they don’t have any sugar, but it takes patience and perseverance to teach your child how to read a nutritional label, how to recognize what a serving size looks like, or even how to know when they feel too full or the difference between hunger and boredom.

If you never ever allow your children to indulge, sure, maybe if you are really lucky your kids will continue on this righteous path of clean eating and live a long, healthy life, going to the grave without ever knowing the wonder that is the McDonald’s Shamrock Shake. But an all or nothing approach to a child’s diet could also backfire. As best you could have a child who crams every “forbidden” food into his mouth with abandon the moment he’s out from under your thumb, at worst you could have a child who develops an unhealthy relationship with food as an adult. I wasn’t denied sweets completely as a kid, but there were times in my prepubescent chubby years where my mother would try to help me lose weight and I speak from experience that when you present certain foods as “bad”, that’s exactly how your child may feel if they ever have them.

We don’t harness an all or nothing approach in other aspects of children’s lives. We allow them to watch television in moderation, even though it’s just for entertainment. We let them run around and yell at the park even though there’s the chance they could fall down and get hurt. We recognize that to fully enjoy life, kids need to experience things for no reason other than the fact that it brings them pleasure, and junk food is just an extension of that.

The bottom line is we all wants best for our kids. And sometimes, what’s best is a cupcake.

(image:: Oksana Kuzmina/shutterstock.com)

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