Simplicity Parenting (22 page)

I think of Doritos, and so many other snack foods, as “big-hit” flavors. (Clearly I’m not alone; they’re even promoted as such!) Such big-hit flavors (usually additives and stimulants) set up an addictive cycle. As we grow accustomed to in-your-face flavors, we crave more, we need more to deliver the bigger and bolder “hits,” or physiological reactions we’ve come to expect. Children’s little systems can be hijacked, recalibrated by the hyperactivity-inducing effects of food additives, sugar, and caffeine. Such foods are the enemies of rhythm. You can’t flow through speed-crash-and-burn.

The first step, then, in simplifying your children’s food is to wean them off these highly processed snack foods that have little or no nutritional value. You can make a dramatic cold-turkey stop, or you can ease off them. Based on what I’ve seen and heard from numerous families, it takes about a month to clean your child’s palate of such big-hit flavors. This surprised me—I thought it would take longer—but a month seems to be the average. When backing off extreme tastes, offer bold textures but healthier choices. A banana won’t be a good substitute for Doritos, but crunchy baked vegetable chips will work in a pinch and get their food choices moving in a better direction

To wean your family off sugary sodas, create your own “soda fountain” at home with seltzer water and juices. The bubbles will help your
kids transition off sodas. You can even begin with really sweet concoctions … then back off the sugar. The sodas you are weaning them off are going in the opposite direction: 7UP has more than tripled its amount of sugar in the past twenty years; the average can of commercial soda contains the equivalent of ten teaspoons of sugar.
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Back off the sugary sodas and the caffeine. As the sugar is reduced, what flavors begin to appeal to them? You can make it clear that these are not strictly “alternatives” to more highly processed snacks; these are now what’s available at home. The detox process goes only in one direction: toward increasingly real (as opposed to processed) foods, with increasingly simpler and more natural ingredients.

The younger your children, the easier it will be to simplify food. But you can change course when your children are older; it can be done. Don’t let a difficult few weeks stop you from establishing a new direction. The grumbling will be short-term; the benefits (and you’ll notice them quickly) will last. You have to embody this kind of change, fully commit to it. Do not present it as “an experiment” or an “interesting learning experience.”

If your children are teenagers, let them know that these changes are here to stay. There will be eye rolling, and yes, grumbling will echo through the halls. And no doubt you’ll be approached with a very persuasive argument. It will go something like this: “But that’s ridiculous,
everyone
drinks tons of this stuff! Janet drinks triple what I do! And the candy? Are you
kidding
me? Bob’s parents have
boxes
of it, and they
give
it to us! You can even get it at school!” Listen to all of it; don’t interrupt. Let them assure you that the very things you’ve eliminated at home are actually present (accepted, offered, and enjoyed) every single other place on earth. You can then say, calmly and with reassurance, that given that these things are so widely available, the fact that they will no longer be available at home should not present much of a sacrifice.

You can’t control what your teenage son or daughter eats (or does) every minute of the day. But you can be firm and clear about what happens at home. And don’t forget: Over time, with rhythms and predictability. “what happens at home” naturally evolves. It becomes accepted, anticipated, and depended on.

When children—especially young children—have too many choices before they develop good judgment, they can easily be derailed: by marketing, their own desires, and by their developing wills. It’s entirely normal for a kid to be drawn to a sweet confection that’s bright pink and shoots flavor sparks when stirred into their cereal. (I made that
up, but it will no doubt be on the market within the year.) It’s also normal for a young child to want to exert control when and where they can. But as their parents, do we want these understandable tendencies and a legion of advertisers to co-opt our kids’ health? Or their lifelong relationships to food?

Surely you know kids who’ve negotiated or stonewalled their way into a very narrow alley of food preferences. I call them strictly “red and white food” kids. Bread, pasta, sweets, and the occasional red sauce. By vacillating between carbohydrates and sugars they move back and forth between comfort and vigilance: a common reaction to stress. Stress also makes kids reject newness, so they remain stuck in the alley as it gets narrower. Here’s more bad news: Such power issues around food will almost certainly spill out to other areas. But there is good news.

Through more than twenty years of helping parents simplify I’ve come to a curious realization. I didn’t understand it for the first couple of years, but parents continued to mention that as they simplified, their kids became less and less picky about food. The pattern was consistent. Whether parents just simplified food, or simplified more extensively, by increasing the sense of rhythm and regularity in their children’s lives, control issues around food substantially lessened or disappeared. Why? Because as kids begin to feel less overwhelmed, as their lives become more predictable and less out of control, they feel less of a need to exert control over food. Simplification has broad effects.

Food should be a source of nourishment for children, not entitlement, entertainment, or empowerment. If you concede your authority around food to young children, they can adopt habits that may affect them throughout life. You actually limit their options by giving them too many choices, too young. We know that a person’s food preferences are formed over the first few years of life. We also know that this process is primarily social: Kids try and learn to enjoy foods—whether spicy, bland, nutritious, or processed—that they see others enjoying.
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By simplifying food at home you give young children time to try a wide variety of healthy foods and to develop a well-rounded set of preferences.

Another benefit of breaking out of the “red and white food alley” is this: When we expand our food horizons we expand in other ways, too. I’ve yet to meet a child who is broadening their food preferences who isn’t also making intellectual or emotional leaps. Food is fundamental, and our relationship to it is a watermark of our relationship to life.

One other point before we answer the age-old question “What’s for dinner?” I’ve passed this tip along for years now, so I have firm confirmation that it works. If you want your child to try a new food (or food group), you need to have them try it at least eight times. We tend to give up too soon, setting up a detour around all forms and varieties of lettuce, say, or beans, after just one frowny-face reaction. What I’ve noticed is that you start with a very small quantity (let’s use broccoli as an example) and offer it with butter and salt. You’ll want to offer it again—at least seven more times, however you want to prepare it—while decreasing and then eliminating the salt. The flavor comes through as the salt decreases. The process is gradual enough to almost—almost—guarantee acceptance: eight tries, and they have a food for life.

Simplifying Dinner

I’ve suggested that you move toward fewer options and simpler flavors by sorting out “big-hit” processed foods. My next suggestion is designed to simplify the family dinner. It will make “What’s for dinner?” easier to answer—perhaps even an obsolete question in your house. What’s for dinner? That’s easy: What day of the week is it?

Family dinners get much simpler when they’re predictable: Monday pasta night, Tuesday rice night, Wednesday soup, and so on. By suggesting this system, do I have Mom or Dad (or whoever cooks) in mind? Well, yes, regular meals make preparation easier. But I recommend the practice mainly because it is so deeply grounding and affirming for kids.

Hopefully, by now you accept the idea that rhythm secures life for children; it forms a foundation for their growth. In the wash of life, the comings and goings, sleep and wakefulness, work and play, car pools and more car pools, the evening meal is a red dot with a large arrow pointing to it: You Are Here. It is a pivotal opportunity to establish rhythms that will ripple out and be felt—in other parts of the day, in our kids’ behavior, and in our connection as a family.

We are here. This is now. The first argument for regular meals on regular nights is that it helps family dinners actually happen. Instead of marshaling tremendous energy, inspiration, ingredients, and creativity
every evening, certain decisions are already made. There can be variation within each night’s staple; pasta night could include a range of possibilities. But you are not staging a new Broadway production, from concept to performance, every night.

You never make one meal anyway, right? When Bobby doesn’t like crunchy. Sara is allergic to green foods, and Maryanne has gone vegan. One mom told me that she felt like she was spinning plates to get dinner on the table, furiously running to keep six concoctions in the air. Once dinner was on the table, she was so exhausted that she could snap at the slightest comment that didn’t sit well.

For the cooks, the consistency of regular meals can forestall that moment when, leaning into the open but empty refrigerator, we throw up our hands and call the whole thing off. The regularity (and simplicity) extends back from the meal to the preparation, to the grocery store, and to the shopping list.

So, I’ve lost you, or you’re beginning to suspect some strange cultlike associations on my part. After all, isn’t variety the American way? Haven’t I seen how cookbooks are swallowing all the other sections in the bookstore? How could I possibly suggest tying you down to such a routine, to such boring regularity?

Variation is possible with this system, as I mentioned. This Wednesday night’s soup might be quite different from next week’s, depending on what’s available. But there’s a larger point here, one that relates to all daily life rhythms. The description of them may seem routine, but the experience of them is usually not. There are so many currents in day-today life, so many modifications, permutations, and variations on the wave, that rhythms tend to act as buoys, not anchors.

Also, rhythms make stepping out of them a real treat. “I know it’s soup night, but we’re going out for dinner!” A sense of rhythm sets a steady beat, but allows for wonderful high notes. Children react to such unexpected pleasures with genuine appreciation. Occasional high notes are welcome against a steady rhythm. Very different from this are the tones of continual escalation. That song, by another name, is entitlement.

Many years ago I heard from a mom who had adopted this suggestion, and simplified it further. One weekend she made a couple of big trays of lasagna and a big pot of soup, freezing several dinners at once. She figured that 20 percent extra resourcing (her word for shopping and prep work) had yielded an 80 percent higher dinner yield. By profession, this woman was (I am not kidding) an efficiency expert. At first I
found this level of organization a bit scary, but she’s absolutely right. It can be wonderful, after a particularly busy day, to be able to have dinner already prepared. We went out and bought an old secondhand freezer so that we could do the same. When there is more time around a meal, there is a greater sense of ease all around.

Chances are there will be a less-than-popular night in the lineup. That’s okay. Wednesday night is soup night, and your kids will eat it. If they don’t, chances are also good that they won’t suffer irreparable damage. Soup day will come and go. They may start worrying about it on Monday, they may skip their soup dinner once or twice with a great show of disdain, but before long the objections will be forgotten; slurping will punctuate the conversation. Consistency also teaches us that some things do not change, though we may wish they would. Not everything bends to our personal preferences.

If this seems extreme, it’s because we’re no longer used to thinking of dinner as a group event. All that is missing is the flashing neon “Diner” sign over our homes as each person in the family eats what, when, and where they want. The kids eat (something, usually either red or white) in front of the TV, Mom makes a salad, and Dad grabs food on the way home to eat later, reading the paper. There are no rules, no need to change in any way for anyone else. No sense that there may be something to gain from coming together.