As the twig is bent…

…So the oak will grow, eh?

Speaking of the Make It from Scratch Carnival, as we were in the last post, this week’s edition is hosted by Feels Like Home, whose “Grace’s Kitchen” feature addresses issues of children’s nutrition. This week she begins a discussion of how to fit a toddler’s diet into the present USDA guidelines for the recommended 1,000 calories a day.

Thinking through your little one’s diet this carefully is the best favor you can do for your child. My mother, following the advice that was current in her time, kept few sweets in the house and did not serve desserts, but her refrigerator was always full of washed and prepared fruits and veggies, and her snack cupboard was stocked with things like nuts and other nutritious foods. She wasn’t wildly restrictive—I still ate the occasional piece of candy or bag of pretzels. But she quietly emphasized nutritious stuff to eat.

When I reached high school, my best friend’s mother would give her money to buy a sandwich, a drink, and a dessert. That’s what the kid bought, every day: an ice-cream sandwich, a can of pop, and a candy bar. One day she watched me eat the lunch my mother sent to school with me and asked, “Don’t you want some dessert?” When I said I had dessert—an apple—she visibly shuddered (!) and exclaimed, “You think an APPLE is sweet???”

She was already overweight. If she’s still living, she probably still struggles with the weight and health problems fostered by her childhood eating habits.

I think, however, that you can go overboard with insisting that not one bite of unhealthful food may ever pass your child’s lips. My best friend of young adulthood was one of those. The sole taste of sugary stuff her kids had during any given year was on their birthdays, when, in deference to the surrounding culture’s tradition, she would make them a birthday cake. This would be a heavy, soggy carrot cake. As soon as the party was over, the leftover cake went straight into the garbage (where, IMHO, it belonged…).

She was a wonderful cook and she did fix delicious meals at home. But she was such a lunatic about what her kids would absolutely positively not eat that they both went into full rebellion and, at every opportunity when they were away from home, scarfed down as much junk food as they could get their hands on. Interestingly, as toddlers both kids were prone to bouts of diarrhea. My son, who ate as healthful a diet as I could construct but was not forbiddensuch delicacies as pizza and the occasional Whopper, never once had an intestinal upset.

If there’s a point here, I think it’s that the middle road is best. Create a nutritional environment in your home that fosters healthy, whole foods with lots of fruits and vegetables. But don’t be afraid to let the kids have an occasional taste of what other people eat. Over the course of their lifetimes, they’ll come to prefer whatever you feed them routinely as their day-to-day sustenance.